My time as an Olympian

Apparently people in the UK perceive their thirties as being the most stressful decade of their lives: they are possibly juggling small children and a career and doing neither job as well as they thought they would.

The average person in their twenties is having too great a time racking up STDs, liver disease and mental health problems for their futures to be worried about their overall life achievements, still convinced that they can do anything they choose, as soon as they have finished their kebab.

In your thirties, the chickens start peeping over the hedge and then coming home to roost.  This is the time when people realise that unless they radically change things, they are never going to be a millionaire (unless super-inflation takes a hand), they've probably kissed goodbye to ever having a six-pack and their girlfriend / boyfriend isn't likely to win Miss / Mr World and there is no point in dumping them to go and find a stallion / fox that is truly worthy, until they themselves have got rid of their paunch and cleared up their little problem down below.

Apparently it's the forties when we finally accept who we are and know our own limitations and what we are good at and what we really can't be bothered to change.

Which is why I finally get to my point - I used to presume I would be an Olympian. I loved anything energetic - running, football, throwing, whatever. In my twenties, I deferred my fourteen hour a day training schedule, preferring to concentrate on talking and lager. In my thirties, I clung to the stories about people who only took up marathon running in their fifities and still won everything, thinking that would still be OK.

Now I'm 42, I am technically at one with myself, and as I shuffle between the kettle and the sofa, hooking out the occasional grey pube as I go, I can watch those Olympians with no regret whatsoever, knowing in my heart that there was never going to be a place in my life for 5a.m starts or being on the river by 6. And anyway, I have three children: they are lucky enough to have my genes - they can bloody do it...





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"Got to 'ave a little bit, dear" - SPLODGE...

I’ve been following school-dinner blogger, Martha Payne, with interest and enjoyment as her hideous photos of clods that claim to be sausages, and hooves that are technically burgers, embarrass her school authority into change (and I don’t think any parent would be pushing those particular burgers through the bars to protest at their children being fed healthier options).

          We’re very lucky in Powys; we have a good cook in our school who has a three-week rotating menu of normal proper food. The kids are chuffed to bits when they get mini-grill, but are content to scoff the shepherd’s pie in order to get the properly-made pud after it. So in being alright Jack, I can watch and snigger from afar.

          It’s always perplexed me that parents, grandparents or school authorities can offer kids any food that they wouldn’t touch with a barge-pole themselves. At an old friend’s house, the grandma would cook fantastic fresh wholesome food for her off-spring, but would indulgently feed smiley faces and chicken arse-holes to the grandchildren.

          I felt that Jamie Oliver missed a trick when he didn’t feed a slab of fried luncheon-meat and a handful of sweet-corn drenched in brine to the Board when he was asking them for change, followed by a strawberry milk.

          I was lucky: I loved my school dinners. Whilst everyone around me was moaning about pink custard, and liver and bacon, I was scoffing it down. My mum tended to cook things that hardened as they went off the boil (including soup and gravy), and so speed was the eating aim in our house. Therefore to savour a cottage pie that stayed a cottage pie, and then to have it followed by ginger cake and green custard was bliss.  

          There is one thing that Martha might savour about her dinners – she has officially earned the ability to moan about them with her mates when sitting round a table in a dirty pub in years to come: conversations that just left me feeling as empty as the ones I listen to now when people talk about ironing.

Follow Martha at http://neverseconds.blogspot.co.uk/

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Fifty Shades of Purple

Fifty Shades of Purple …

On Friday night I went out – and that should be subject enough for a blog on its own – and the conversation around the (admittedly all female) table for a while was Fifty Shades of Grey, the book that has swept the country, selling ten million copies.

Three of the five other women had read at least one of the series and were waiting for the other sticky copies to be passed around town.  To me, it was reminiscent of being 14 and being handed Lace, which fell open in twenty-five different places.

Apparently Kindle has made it possible to sit in a public place and read about willies, and with a bit of front, one can make comments about Mr Darcy and passers-by will be impressed by the reader’s cleverness.

Being an author, the conversation obviously changed as to why I haven’t filled my books with soft porn and considering the sales, maybe I should rethink and get on with it. My reply was that I’d always felt that we don’t need to read the nitty gritty and that allusion is usually better than stating the bleeding obvious.  

I also had to add that when my turn comes to go on Have I Got News For You I couldn’t bear the thought of Ian Hislop reading out the grubby bits.

Plus my mum proof-reads my books and even for ten million sales, I couldn’t have her thinking that I’ve done all those things – it’s bad enough her thinking that I must have been taken over a car bonnet at a young farmer’s do whilst hanging on to a burger* (Chocolate Mousse and Two Spoons) or taken over someone’s holiday home and used it as my own ** (Eating Blackbirds).

I shall await my turn with interest.

*I haven’t. Honestly.  

** I did.

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Jubilee! Jubilee!

Jubilee, Jubilee!

I never used to be a Royalist, thinking that it was wrong for people to have publically bestowed / funded privileges above others simply by luck / bad luck (depending how you look at it) of their birth. But then I went to London…

Yes, I’d been to London before – I fed the pigeons aged about eight and had a fantastic ice cream. I think I went with a school trip to the war museum as a mid-teenager, and had a great time arsing about on the underground, but then I went as a grown-up.

I walked around the sights, and finally worked out how it all fitted together. I walked from Buckingham Palace, past the horse guards, along the river and to the Tower, and was completely blown away by it all. I finally realised how lucky we are in Britain to have such a fantastic heritage and I was willing to sacrifice a few million of my personal hard-earned taxes to pay for it.

I went to New Zealand not long after and was advised by an enthusiastic Kiwi that I simply had to go and see New Zealand’s oldest house. It had been built circa 1875 and was wrapped up in cotton wool, so important was it to the inhabitants. I brushed off the offer (a little brusquely in hind-sight now that I appreciate more how important it was for them) telling them that my own pad was about twenty-five years older and that the oldest house I’d been in was one in darkest Radnorshire that had parts (the wallpaper for certain) dating back to the 1400s.

So although I like to be scathing about many things requiring national enjoyment, I am going to embrace the Jubilee!  I am going to dress like the queen for the Dress Like the Queen Competition, I will have my photo taken next to her cardboard cut-out, I am going to scoff Victoria Sandwiches as if they are going out of fashion, and I will swig lager with a dash of gin just to get myself into character.

Most people would be jacked off with a job that they’d done for 60 years -try working in a local government planning department for that amount of time, for example.

So have a good Jubilee celebration all! Throw that wellie, tug that tug of war, bake that cake and have a fight round the back of the beer tent: it’s just what we Brits do best.

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Traffic Calming and Other Fallacies

Traffic Calming and other fallacies…

Since our village had the grand road-widening of the A470, the law of unintended consequences has been at work. Instead of east / west traffic going on the east / west road, it now travels on the south / north road which is quicker and then it zips off past our bloody house.

As a town planner by trade, I know that NIMBYism is a bad thing, but I am miffed that my kids are having to walk along a three foot pavement bordered by brambles on one side and massive lumber wagons going 50mph on the other. It just doesn’t allow for any errors: a moment’s lack of concentration as a one stops to admire a slug, and things could go horribly wrong.

However, the powers that be are on to it and have stuck a sign that flashes up “30” if you approach it faster than 30mph. Great, I thought. It’s too far within the 30mph limit and on the wrong side of the road as far as I’m concerned, but nevertheless, it’s a start. But after a few days, it was clear that something else seemed to be happening: cars seemed to be approaching even faster. Finally I twigged that it was the fun of blasting as far as the sign and making it beam its, “OY! 30, I said!”.After cars have triggered the light, then then start to slow down and I can just imagine the drivers chuckling to themselves and feeling all young and wreckless for those precious few seconds.

Sitting in our kitchen at night now is like sitting in a post-modern art gallery. The place is dressed like Tracy Emin’s teenage kitchen with rotten food tumbling out of a bin in the corner and dirty tea-towels on the floor, and at annoyingly irregular intervals, a bright light flashes, “30” across the walls.

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