For those who won't be sending Christmas cards this year...

In the true vein of Christmas, I have decided not to send Christmas cards*, but instead to write a simple blog and pretend to give the money that I would have confessed to spending on cards and stamps to charity.

Therefore in the vein of these cop-outs, I need also to tell you that the children are doing fantastically at school. They have all been selected to represent their country at maths and have so many friends that they are unable to remember all their names.

Huw and I are still wonderfully in love and have spent most of the year smiling at each other.

 

We all receive the occasional one of these and of course we never believe them. I am proposing that if anyone tells you that they aren’t sending cards because they are giving the money to charity, you ask to see a receipt, or the little certificate on their office wall. Or ask that if they had given you a card, what would it have had on the front? If it was a robin on skis, know that their donation is only worth £7.50 anyway...

*Actually, I am still intending to send them, but just haven't gotten round to it yet.


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Being Police Commissioner versus Working in Jewsons

I had thought long and hard about voting in the Police Commissioner elections on Thursday. Like most people, it seems, I knew very little about the elections. I’d seen nothing about them and hadn’t a clue who was standing in them. The night before, I searched on-line and found a little tiny weeny bit about the two candidates standing in my region.

Their manifestos claimed aims of reducing crime (I wish someone had thought of that one years ago) and making better uses of budgets – like cutting 3 Bobbies on the Beat and sticking a Commissioner in in their place. I think the website had mixed up their manifestos with some that some Year 7 students had knocked up in a Society lesson.

I recognised the two names and so decided to sleep on it as to whom I would vote for and find a little bit more out the next day.

It came to me in the middle of the night that I had possibly spoken twice to the bloke’s brother* many years before and he had been quite nice, so that was positive. Then someone reminded me the next morning about the other candidate – “She’s the one who wouldn’t eat burgers…” and so my mind was made up for me.

I did vote and at 9.20 a.m. was only the second person in.

I decided to ask around and see what other people thought of the elections. “Nah – not heard anything about them,” seemed a common theme. Two people had spoiled their papers in protest (until I told them in my capacity of a former Poll Clerk, there was no point in doing this: their spoiled papers would not be counted as anything, and therefore their protest was a pointless exercise).

My favourite comment regarding the elections was from the woman who wished she had stood herself. “I’ve got quite a big family and I used to work in Jewsons, so I reckon I’d have won,” she said, miffed that she’d missed an opportunity of raking in £100K a year. And after seeing the majority of the winning candidate, I think she could have been right…

               

*I’ve since found out that he doesn’t have any brothers, so it must have been someone else’s brother.

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Communal living and eating other people's Alpen

Having just spent a few days at a family reunion, it dawned on me how much easier it can be to be in a small group with each person doing their fair share and the work just flying off the desk.  My siblings and I had all taken a day each to cook the main meal and had brought the breakfasts that we would choose to eat, but we also shared and shared alike in a way that we would never have dreamed possible when we were brawling children, fighting to exhaustion because one of the others had won the larger “half” of the cheese sandwich. By the end of the holiday, I was nigh a communist, thinking that I should take my rabble and go and join a commune somewhere and grow cabbages.

So on the way home, I was mulling over the merits – would it really be more productive to be in a commune? Would we all really work hard and fairly towards the common good – or was four days all that could really be managed before it would start to breakdown?

But as I drove along, I began to see the cracks – I had dined out on delicious Alpen and chocolate croissants, but had only brought Co-op-own rice crispies. I drank freely of my sister’s fine coffee, but had banked on my children just drinking water and so technically had no moral need to have brought squash or juice, despite them having slugged pints of the stuff.

          
It reminded me of a trip to Machynlleth’s Centre for Alternative Technology in the days when I was an ideological pup, full of nonsense and never really seated in reality. A dreamer of a friend and I wondered around the communal beds of luscious veg, admiring things we would find far too stringy in our own Sunday roasts. We wee’d in buckets and plotted how we could recreate the place in her garden full of dogshit and my back yard. As we sat on a roughly hewn bench and scoffed flapjacks, we decided this was the way to go.

But then we heard two women at the table next to us talking: they were obviously living and working at the centre, and they were bitching about another woman who wasn’t pulling her weight and had been found eating crisps the other day.

My friend and I returned home; I filled her kettle with too much water, drank her tea, ate her biscuits and then went back to my solitary pad having left my cup the floor and my plate on a shelf.

The conclusion about communal living has now been reached: it’s people like me that wreck communes. Me and people who eat bags of crisps.

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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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