Another issue with never going to Denmark!

As I mentioned last month, Léon hasn't been to Denmark since he was two (because Thomas's parents usually meet us here or in their Tuscan home since they retired.) Last month I realized Léon had started to believe Danish was one of the dialects of Italy.

Today I noticed another issue. Any non-Dane who visits Denmark a lot notices their obsession with flags. They have them in their gardens, on their wrapping paper, birthday cards, and stuck to little cocktail sticks so you can stick them in cakes or whatever takes your fancy. Thomas's cousin even had dummies for his babies with flags on. The equivalent of ASDA sells 10 metre tall flag poles for your garden flag and they don't just fly them on special occasions, they have them up all year round. Therefore, anyone who spends more than ten minutes in Denmark knows the Danish flag!

Today I saw wrapping paper that was red with a big white cross on it. Oh look Léon, I said, That looks just like a flag, doesn't it? Do you remember which flag looks like that? I was 100% sure he'd instantly reply Denmark - he speaks Danish half the day after all! His reply... It's the birthday cake flag, mummy!

All five at one

After stitching all of my kids together at the age of two last night so I could compare hair growth, one of my flickr friends suggested it was a cute way to imagine what quintuplets might have been like! I got the idea to do a comparison photo once a year around Amaia's birthday. That way I will be able to see at which ages my kids have looked most or least similar. Obviously at the moment, if I want to compare all five, I will need to stop at age one and age two comparison shots, but it gives me a lot of scope for future fun.

Orange peeler

Thomas is a big kitchen gadget person. A few years ago I was struggling to find something he didn't have when I came across an orange peeler at about 80p. I don't know about him, but I just love it. As the only person with long nails in my house, and with so many kids, I used to spend all winter being handed oranges to peel. Inevitably everything I subsequently ate tasted of orange because of the peel under my nails. Now, thanks to my favourite kitchen gadget, I have no such worries. No family should be without one!

Hair would be good

By the age of two Marcel and Léon had had many haircuts. Had they not, they'd have had hair half way down their backs on their second birthdays. Their hair was thick, luxurious and fast-growing. A hairdresser actually commented once while cutting Léon's hair that it felt like the hair of a man and not a baby! Charlotte's hair was slower-growing than the boys' at first but today is at least three times the thickness of my own. Anna had thinner hair but she too had it past her shoulders by her second birthday. So what is going on with Amaia? I am beginning to wonder if I had run out of hair genes before she was conceived. Not only is she still almost bald, her temples are so thin, I can't even grasp the fluff there. Every morning Anna brings me various accessories to put in her hair. My heart sinks minutes later when the little copycat turns up holding the same hair clips or scrunchies and I am unable to attach them. I sometimes wonder if Amaia's start in primary school will need to be deferred, not because of maturity but because of baldness! Marcel was born with more hair than Amaia has managed to grow in two years!

 I hope she's just a slow starter!

London English

I thought I blogged this at the time, but apparently I forgot... Given I don't want you missing out on the most outrageous typo I have come across to date (when you are in my business, you can't help but proof-read everything you see when you are out and about and in the twenty or more years I have been mentally correcting the local restaurant's misplaced apostrophes, this stands in a league of its own, I'm sure you'll agree!) I found it in an ethnic supermarket in a run-down area not far from Greenwich a couple of years ago. Marcel was speechless when I pointed it out to him! I'm so pleased I had my camera on me as I was on my way into London sightseeing with the kids!

Come to think of it, maybe that's what went wrong with last night's satay sauce... I used coconut milk instead of this variety!

Enjoy!

Satay sauce

Thomas made a wonderful satay sauce last month using his Thai Beautiful cookbook. Tonight he was working late, so I thought I'd surprise him by rustling up the same. How hard could it be given it only contained a few ingredients: peanuts, red Thai curry paste, fish sauce, coconut milk and sugar? Mix together and simmer for fifteen minutes - piece of cake and a perfect send off on our post-Xmas diet (starting tomorrow). His sauce had been so good that I kept the leftovers in the fridge for days just to dip a finger in whenever I passed by, and I'm not generally a snacker!

So I followed the instructions and instead of a slightly oily, divine dipping sauce, managed to create a vaguely fusty-tasting, solid mass of nutty wallpaper paste that was so thick and so awful I ended up throwing it out!

Of course I am now regretting that decision, having since remembered we intended to work on repairing the post-Bawbag fence tomorrow and the satay sauce would potentially have made wonderful fence-post cement.

I have learnt a valuable lesson - just because Thomas makes cooking look easy, it doesn't mean it is easy. So the moral of the story is definitely - leave the cooking to him in future!

Why so headstrong?

Little girls are so much more determined, headstrong and stubborn than little boys in my experience. Apart from my nephew(!), I have never met a little boy who would question what you wanted to dress him in (before about 8), what seat he should use in the car and so on.

Yesterday Amaia turned two, (not six, two). Today I took her out to the car. Currently she uses the chair Léon is pictured in here (at one month short of three). I put her down, she made her body rigid, screamed, twisted, flailed and generally looked vaguely similar to the Tasmanian devil of the old cartoons, until I calmed her down enough to be able to ask what was wrong with her. She pointed at Anna's seat (one of those age 1-6 seats).

I tried again to get her into her seat but there was no way to physically sit her down. I put her down for a minute to catch my breath after the battle. She leapt into Anna's seat and sat smugly quiet. I guess all that birthday fuss has made her believe she had moved up an age bracket, somehow.

10 mins old

Two years ago my big baby was born. At nearly a whole kilo heavier than any of my other kids, I expected Amaia to be a huge girl but she's grown up to be a strangely dainty little thing and there are no longer any signs she was nearly a ten pounder (4.5kg).

I remember walking with her to my bed just after she was born looking at all the other tiny little babies in the ward who were older by hours or days but who looked a month younger! But I felt smugly proud I had defied all the scare stories I had been given about how I would need an emergency caesarean because she would become wedged in my pelvis. I stuck to my guns and had her naturally, and drug-free in just three hours, while the medical staff ran about in a panic about how to help deliver her!

She is our special little Bopster.

Self confidence

So we drive to nursery after a break of two weeks and a day. As Thomas parks, Anna comes out with: Come on, hurry up, let me out! I need to get in, my teacher has missed me! I ask how she knows her teacher has missed her and full four-year-old logic clicks in: Well she can't have missed herself, because she's been with herself all along, therefore she must have missed me!

It isn't quite Descartes, is it?

Birthdays

I've been thinking a lot about birthdays over the last year. As a mum of five, you have to attend more than your fair share of birthdays. I think I have now reached a quota where I am able to analyse the absurdity, on the whole, of the current UK birthday party norm.

It seems to me that from about age four up, the average middle-class 2.4 children-type, feels obliged to invite their child's entire class along to a party venue - softplay, laser party, townhall with Coco the clown and face painters, disco, golf/football party - the list is endless - seen them all (many times over), got the the T-shirt... got a whole pile of them!

How many of those parents ever stop long enough to ask themselves how much is a reasonable expense to make their child's birthday memorable? Will spending £10 a head (or more) to let each of their classmates run wild in a softplay for two hours make them happier than for example asking your child to choose two or three special friends to run around the same play area? Suddenly your bill is £200 lighter and your child feels more special, not less, because he is having a special time, rather than attending the same venue as he's attended every other second week this year with his entire class! I recently attended a venue that charges £12 a head. On arrival I found the child in question had had fifty children invited along - several classes, cousins, extended family etc At the end, as often is the case, party bags were handed out valuing, I would estimate £15 each! How can anyone believe it takes £1350 to make two hours of their child's birthday enjoyable?

Then there is the gift budget. If other parents are meant to spend at least £10 per gift (which definitely seems to be the case) then you are not only meant to set aside £250 (approx) for each of your children's birthday parties, but also £250 per child for presents for his or her classmates. I recently asked one of my kids for a suggestion as to what to buy as a present for a class party. I don't know, came the reply, I hardly know him and I've no idea what he's into! I am stunned at the stupidity of it all! I know it is pc to invite everyone, but it is mad!

I don't know about anyone else but my heart sinks when I receive the tenth invite in a month - what to buy, how to arrange my day and the rest of my kids round the drive to and from wherever. (Don't forget the petrol costs for going ten miles there, ten back home, ten there two hours later and ten back again!) I don't mean to sound ungrateful. I would be thrilled if someone chose my child as a guest, but to be ticked off as an unknown but necessary statistic irks me somewhat.

During a recession where budgets are getting tighter, I wish those who were struggling with this whole keeping-up-with-the-Jones nonsense would realize the pressure they are putting on others. I am self-employed with five kids so the whole thing is so beyond sanity, I don't even consider it, but some must be doing it despite their finances, not stopping to ask whether their child will be that much happier for it. How was the next child in the class ever meant to compete with Mr and Mrs £1350?

We have a family cake and get together on birthdays.We have special birthday breakfasts with presents and croissants and a train with candles. My kids don't seem devastated that no one has popped in to paint their face and give them a plastic bag of sweets. I'm sure they will remember their birthdays as happy occasions despite the lack of Coco. Occasionally I have a few friends round - they make a mess and a noise but they don't cost and the kid is happy! Sometimes I paint their faces (badly) and they feel happy and special.

So if I have been thinking about this for more than a year, why blog it today? The absurdity of it all was brought home to me tonight in all its glory. Anna was invited to a softplay party for her friend who was turning four. A private venue had been booked at £250 (for ninety minutes). I duly went out and got a present and card and drove her to the location stated on the invitation. The friend's mother was standing outside the venue in the cold and the rain with a large bin bag in her hand. Hi, she said, I don't know you but are you here for my daughter's party? I replied that we were. She handed Anna a present, that as usual must have cost the same amount as the one I had brought, while saying - I'm so sorry we're having to cancel, she woke up with chicken pox this morning but the venue won't refund at short notice so feel free to go in and play without us if you like! Paying £500 for your child not to have a fourth birthday party really takes the biscuit! I know it is more annoying to have four or five of their friends run round your own house but at least that way if they get chicken pox, you can simply put it back a week!

Tesco Clear & Confident

Anyone else had any issues with this Tesco shampoo? I bought it recently and when I wash my hair with it, it ends up looking just as greasy as before I got in the bath, if not worse! I've never had that problem with any other shampoo. Weird!

The biggest Bawbag

On December 7 2011 we received notice from the council that all schools were to close on the 8th because of a red alert weather warning. This was the first time in my life wind had shut schools. We woke up to find it was fairly blowy - we lost a fence, a few roof tiles and a pane from the greenhouse but all in all it was a little less windy than I had been led to believe. It didn't seem too windy to take the people carrier out.

On Jan 3 we received no warnings about the weather but I was woken at 6am by a much worse wind than the one the media had jokingly started calling Hurricane Bawbag. Slates were falling off the roof smashing all round my patio - going out without a hard hat was actually risky. We lost many more roof tiles second time round, possibly loosened by the first Bawbag, and the greenhouse was sent into orbit with a crash that made me think a car had come through the side wall of my house - we're going to be picking shards of glass out of the vegetable patch for the rest of eternity... I suppose we'll be able to grow pre-sliced carrots! And of course there's the tree issue up at mum and dad's.

I have to conclude that from a Newton Mearns perspective, the second Bawbag was definitely much worse than the first.

I'm just glad the useless insurance company hadn't actually got round to authorising repairs yet as nothing new was damaged, but everything that was damaged first time round was made much worse by the second of the Bawbags.

Coffee from our new machine

For the first time ever today, I decided to make cappuccino in a transparent cup rather than a china one and now I am desperate for a whole set of glass coffee cups! It looks so cool! It reminded me of a trip about five years ago... As our first holiday, Thomas and I went on a long weekend to Latvia, where they had the cheapest and best coffee I had ever tasted. They added all sorts of wonderful, coloured flavourings to them which just made for a photographic delight!

Mini-photographers

Léon got an old Finepix of mine a few years back and is really interested in it. Then Anna asked for a camera for her fourth birthday and got one from her grandparents. Unfortunately it seems to work much better outdoors than in but we've had torrential rain almost constantly since her birthday - poor soul! Mind you, at the rate she's going through batteries, it is probably just as well!

It is nice to see they seem to have inherited my love of photography. I am sure I am going to have a lot in common with Léon and Anna when they grow up!

I cheese?

Could anything be cuter than Amaia's way of expressing things at the moment? Currently she has three photographic terms:

• Cheese! (please take a photo of me!)
• I cheese? (may I use your camera to take a photo of someone?)
• I see? (can I see the photo you just took, please?)

Charlotte is 12

I remember what I was up to 12 years ago now! Happy birthday darling girl! Mum loves you. xxx

Dad's latest scan

Dad had a scan on Anna's birthday (19/12/11). It was his first since the end of last spring. He had stopped one chemo regime in May and started a new one in July. Being moved from Hairmyres to the Beatson for a drug trial that was subsequently cancelled and then moved back, somehow resulted in his three month scan never materialising, so no one has had a look at his insides in about eight months.

These people love to wreck your Xmas - they did it last year and low and behold - they did it this year again... They call you in for a scan days before Xmas, then leave you biting your nails to the quick all holiday season, saying they'll get back to you at the end of the holidays. To make matters worse, the day after dad's scan, they cancelled his last chemo session, citing a hospital emergency. Personally, I figured no one would actually have had time to look at the results by then but, he assumed the worst - they didn't want to waste the last session on him having checked his results...

With Charlotte's birthday today, dad was told to come in for his results yesterday. He doesn't usually fare well on my kids' birthdays - having had his initial diagnosis on Léon's fifth birthday, and the last scan on Anna's (obviously I have too many kids!) Our hearts were in our mouths.

He woke up to his tree on the lawn and phoned to tell me about it. I figured that had to be a good omen - he'd wanted rid of it so long.

At lunchtime he phoned to say the results couldn't have been better! The tumour on his lungs had disappeared, as had the tumour on one of his kidneys. His other kidney and liver had shrunk since last May too and the original bowel one wasn't any worse! Why the hell couldn't the bastards have told him this three weeks ago! Not that I'm complaining really - it is definitely not what he seemed to be expecting - though as you can see from this photo (taken the week before Xmas) - he did look too well to me to be walking his final steps!

Go dad! This is the best news we could have heard today (other than them finding a miracle cure, of course).

More on apples

I'm not a big fruit fan. I know fruit is healthy, and it isn't that I'm anti-healthy eating - I eat more than my five a day in veg. I am a big veg fan, but I find fruit rather watery and tasteless. I happily eat a really juicy orange in season but apples in particular bore me after two or three bites. I've tried many varieties from the local supermarkets but they don't taste like I remember real apples tasting.

Recently Waitrose opened here. Not only can I manage and even enjoy a whole apple from there, but Amaia has taken to dragging through a stool and helping herself to three a day, so I can definitely recommend the quality of the apples there.

Eye-apples!

Amaia is creating her own vocabulary at an incredible rate at the moment. She gets the words for eyes and ears mixed up, often calling both eyes. All ball-shaped items from the size of a small marble to a football are apples.

In the last week she has become fascinated by earrings, so when I wear a pair that please her, she often comments Nice eye-apples!

Bawbag the second

About 30 years ago either the council or Scottish Power erected about thirty fast-growing conifer-type trees around the small electricity sub-station in front of my parents' south-facing garden. No one asked the residents around the triangle of grass if they wanted them, they were simply put there. No one was particularly upset about them at first but ten years on they had become thick and tall. Groups of kids would sit in the trees at night talking, keeping the residents of the three adjacent streets awake. Also the trees obscured all the sunlight from my parents' garden from 1pm to 7pm on a summer afternoon. They were a nuisance. They phoned the council and asked them to remove them. They were told their maintenance was the residents'  responsibility. A quote of over £3K was obtained to chop the tops off the trees and thin them down. The ten houses overlooking the trees felt somewhat aggrieved that they should pay. Dad and his neighbour, Steve, tried Scottish Power and his local MP to no avail. A fifteen year battle ensued but no one would budge.

Every summer dad, Steve and a few others went out with ladders and saws and chopped chunks of the trees but they were unmanageable. Their house was dark all day in winter and cold and shadowy all day in summer. They moved into my garden for sunbathing.

Dad never once said anything positive about the trees... well not until Bawbag last month. You know pet, he said, I think that tree might have protected us from the full assault of Bawbag!

6am today, and despite not receiving anything like last month's red alert warning, something much worse than Bawbag woke Newton Mearns up. I was shaken from my sleep by crashing and smashing at my house. At the other end of Crookfur, Dad was snoozing soundly and somehow managed to sleep through the event... so he got a seriously big shock when he drew his curtains to find the tallest and most annoying of the trees lying between his and Steve's garden. Steve was already in his garden dancing and taking photos!

On inspection, the lamp post outside his house was snapped in two and cables and wires from the substation were swaying in the wind. When I visited ten hours after the crash, the wires were still blowing in the wind! The roots were an impressive height off the ground. And I'm not quite sure how one is meant to use the footpath for now!

Let's hope the tree wasn't my parents' only wind shield, given the winter we seem to be having.

As I was saying...

One Direction eat your heart out! a video by PhylB on Flickr.

on Friday... having a pre-teen indoctrinating her younger siblings can have fascinating results!

Music

When I was a child I was made to learn recorder at school - everyone was. We started in p3 (around six and a half) and had to sit exams in it up to the end of s2 (around 13 and a half). I hated it with a passion and had no aptitude for it at all but it meant I was obliged to learn to read music properly and I imagine, if I had had some talent, a teacher would have picked up on it.

Long before the recession hit, music had been more or less removed from the school curriculum. They still have 'music lessons' but Charlotte describes these as - a class of 25 kids sharing ten glockenspiels, they are taught the basic notes and asked to play a few on the glockenspiel before passing it on to the next child in line. There are no exams, and no one is getting enough tuition to develop an interest in music, if they are not sent by their parents to private music lessons.

Private music lessons are out of the reach of more and more parents as inflation rises, jobs become insecure and house prices fall. They are out of my reach. If one of my children has a special musical talent I will not find out about it and nothing will be done about it...

My grandmother was a pianist, my grandfather and both my parents learnt piano to exam level. Thomas's sister and brother-in-law are both professional musicians. Thomas has a well-known opera singer, violinist and composer in his family.

It's sad to think that many of this generation's talents will simply never be discovered and will spend their lives working in an office or similar, while singing in their kitchen while doing their dishes. We are making this world into a much less interesting place than it needs to be.

Recession positives

Every so often I try to find a positive angle to the recession - otherwise I fear we might go quite mad!

As I think back over the last two months, I can think of another positive to add to last year's list. As my parents did in my youth, I have started repairing things rather than binning them...

My dishwasher had not been cleaning properly for the last few months - I had tracked it down to a misalignment between the in-pipe and the sprayer on the top basket. Back in my non-self-employed days, I would not even have got that far, I'd simply have binned it and ordered a new one online. Dishwashers are only a few hundred quid... I was moaning about it to a friend over coffee one day and she complained in return that her dishwasher had also broken down the same week, but in her case it was the motor. We went through to fill our coffee cups when my friend noticed it was the same model! Her husband has been struggling through the recession, self-employed, so she thinks along the same wavelength. The following Sunday I was sitting in my dressing gown when the very same friend rang my doorbell. She was on her way to the dump with hers and she decided to see if her upper basket would perhaps align better if mine had been twisted. Ten minutes later I had a fully functioning dishwasher and a new best friend! It is just inconceivable that we'd have bothered trying that ten years ago. It is maybe time we all started to question what needs throwing out and what can be repaired.

Again last month my tumble dryer stopped closing. The door looked broken. I googled to see if I could get a spare door catch before binning it and ended up repairing it for £8!

I wonder if things had become too cheap in the 90s compared to what we perceived to be stable incomes and ever-rising house values to keep a sensible perspective?

GRAN

Jean Stirling, a photo by PhylB on Flickr.

New year always makes me think of my granny. Until I was about fourteen we always spent new year at my granny's flat and it always followed the same format.

From 6pm till just before midnight she became a manic demon. She got down on all fours scrubbing the floors with a tiny sponge, checking every corner for dirt. All hell would break loose if so much as a crisp wrapper remained in a bin her house as we approached midnight. She'd scream at us like an army sergeant major till she was safely into the next year. Superstitious to the point of insanity, my brother would be thrown out in all weather minutes before the bells with the last speck of dust in a bag while I remained in the kitchen baking the obligatory shortbread from her 'Lofty Peak' cook book. Burning it was not an option of course because it might then constitute rubbish and woe betide me if I should be the creator of pre-Bells rubbish!

One year poor Derek had the misfortune to be outside when the clock struck midnight... aged eight, short with dark reddish-brown hair, there was no way in hell he was getting to first-foot her so he was made to remain outside in the snow in his slippers until a kindly neighbour turned up with whisky and some more shortbread.

After the bells, we'd be allowed into her front room (a rare occurrence) where she'd play piano and we'd all sing till about four in the morning. I've no idea how the other three neighbours put up with the noise!

I guess if Anna had met her she might have called her Silly Mad Jean.

A DANISH PROBLEM

From tomorrow things are changing drastically for Danish ex-pats. One of the main problems is that no one has told the Danes! Basically from midnight consulates will be banned from issuing passports to ex-pats (or children of ex-pats when they are born abroad), only embassies will be allowed to issue all future passports (because of finger-printing equipment). Thomas found out completely randomly a month ago because his passport was due to run out just after the new year. He phoned the consulate (in Bishopbriggs) to make an appointment and they told him to hurry up because the only embassy in the whole of the UK is in London! If he'd found out three weeks later, he'd have been obliged to do the round trip to London (twice) to apply for and then pick up his (and, as it happens, the girls' passports). Obviously two return flights to London cost slightly more than two round trips to Bishopbriggs! Being up north in say Wick would of course be even worse but there are many countries with a reasonably high ex-pat Danish population where there is no embassy!

Take New Zealand. If Thomas and I lived there instead of here, he'd be obliged to go twice to Sydney to get a new passport. When Amaia was born he'd have been obliged to take her to Sydney to get her first passport... which begs the question - how would he have got her into Australia without a passport or visa to get her first passport?! Family passports aren't synchronized either so a person with two or three kids could end up having to fly back and forth every other year. For instance Amaia's current Danish passport runs out in 2013, Anna's in 2016, Amaia's replacement would run to 2018 and Thomas's would be up in 2021 - that is a fair number of plane trips to the embassy! Someone hasn't thought it through!

Anyway Thomas is so incensed he's started a Facebook group  to alert people to the change, and of course to try eventually to pressurize his government into a rethink. I'll keep you updated on the revolution!

ZOOPLA

I was trying to find an address online yesterday. I was aiming for 192.com or the likes but somehow stumbled upon Zoopla instead by mistake. It is quite interesting because they have a database (which is freely viewable) of house prices. I don't mean it is interesting because you can spy on how much your neighbour sold his house for (which of course you can!) but it is a good way of seeing how house prices around you are falling in the recession.

Take it with a small pinch of salt occasionally however - I did notice one flaw... When André and I got divorced I sold him my half of our house so the last selling price for his house is in at half of that of all his neighbours despite his house being extended unlike his neighbours'! This could cause a future potential buyer to worry unnecessarily what is wrong with it. But other than that it makes for interesting, and sometimes scary, reading.

BEECH?

So the Bawbag storm has blown away our fence. Given the amount of rain we seem to be getting, a new fence will probably rot away before the next hurricane blows it over. And we all know that the insurance won't cover a new one blowing away so I've been wondering about a large hedge instead. I really hate conifer hedges - they are so incredibly boring (and I'm allergic to them which doesn't help!) Of course they are functional (the previous owner did put one round the front garden) but tedious. I was wondering about a beech hedge. Beech hedges are lovely half the year but I really think they look awful in winter too. Most of all I need something to keep Amaia in, so maybe I don't have time for a hedge... I need to look into it over the holiday, I guess.

TEENAGER OVERLOAD

Charlotte has hit (pre-)teens big time - drooling over those little boys in One Direction and the likes! If that wasn't bad enough, she has discovered that her little sisters are just the right age to indoctrinate and even this week while she is away visiting her father, Anna won't be dragged away from looking at the Youtube video of their latest hit all dewy-eyed, singing along like a minipop-star with Amaia sitting beside her bopping away! I guess eight and ten years between daughters has its disadvantages as well as its advantages!

FAILED WELLINGTON

I always thought puff pastry was puff pastry but I am beginning to wonder if there is a difference between what we call puff up here in Scotland and what those south of the border call puff...

In the autumn Thomas decided to try to make Beef Wellington for the first time ever. He bought a chunk of beef and a roll of Jus-rol pastry in Tesco. It was a wonderful success. Even Marcel and Léon who are the least meaty of our kids loved it.

Thomas's parents and mine came to dinner a couple of weeks ago. I suggested the Beef Wellington would be a good choice as it had been so easy to make yet tasted as if you were in a restaurant. So I went up to ASDA and bought a chunk of beef and a roll of Bells pastry. The same steps were followed but as he turned the hot beef in the pastry it actually dissolved! It seems to me that the Scottish version of puff pastry is half butter, whereas the non-Scottish one is maybe 20% butter. Do we need our puff pastry to be more stretchy to fit across a traditional steak pie ashet?

In any case, whatever the reason, I'd warn against using Scottish puff on your Beef Wellington!

NOT JUST ROADS

The roads here in East Renfrewshire are in a bit of a state. Two have been resurfaced since last year's big freeze (Firwood and Capelrig), several have had the odd pothole filled and refilled. There are at least three that will become virtually impassable the first time we get frost this year (I'm thinking Fruin, Corrour and Rodger). One thing no one seems to be mentioning however is the state of the pavements and paths. When I was a child I used to cycle these paths. Eighteen months ago, when we decided to teach Léon how to cycle without stabilisers, we actually had to take him to the park because we couldn't find a path that was safe to cycle on, as a beginner. The at the back of Corran Ave is actually becoming so overgrown that it'll need mowing next summer! I'm not sure the look goes with the inflated house prices the local schools around here have brought!

WHY?

Why do little kids (in particular, though not in this case, boys) watch TV upside down? I've always wondered why they consistently do that up to about eight? It doesn't look better that way round, does it? Do cbeebies send subliminal messages coded upside down on the screen? Or do we just stop watching it that way up when we get too tall for the couch?

HOW MUCH?

How much do you have to spend to make your child's Xmas special?

Recently while shopping in Toys R Us a woman was buzzing around the aisle holding a large sheet of paper. In her basket she had three large toys each costing around £30-£35. The toys were aimed at a male child of maybe seven or eight. She was extremely organised, ordering around the man who was with her (presumably a husband or partner). Come on, hurry up - we've got the first three, it can't take that long! she ranted. Subdued, the man complained I don't see why we need so much. Completely unfazed, she explained that she had told their child he could choose ten things, so he would get the ten. Twenty minutes later, I passed them again and was more than surprised to see all ten of the presents were now in the trolley and the £30 one seemed to be the cheapest!

I have no doubt any one of mine would be excited if they were to receive everything they could ever imagine wanting, but is it really necessary? An hour after the child has unwrapped these ten gifts, he will have a favourite or two I imagine and the others will be forgotten or put to one side. This child, I guess, will probably also receive things from grandparents, siblings, aunts, uncles, family friends...

Yesterday I met an old friend of my mother. Léon was with me. She asked him what he was hoping to receive for Xmas. Léon actually didn't know how to answer the question. He looked quite surprised, as if he had never thought about it. She asked him again, he thought for a moment and then simply replied If I get a Harry Potter T-shirt I will be very happy! 

Léon wants love, affection, attention. He wants to feel safe and happy. He doesn't need £300 of plastic to achieve that.

ROYAL MAIL

What's going on with the Royal Mail parcel delivery service? Has the government run out of money to provide them with the little red vans they used to use? Three times in the last week a postman has come to my door with a parcel and the van parked at the end of my driveway has been sporting either an Arnold Clark or Northgate vehicle hire logo.

GROWING UP

I was taking Léon, Anna and Amaia to bed on Sunday night. Anna was rather excited at the prospect of turning four the next day. I was lying beside Amaia giving her a hug in her bed when Anna let out a yell. I thought she'd got her leg stuck in the bars of her iron bedstead or something similar, the way she was behaving. What's up? I asked, worried. It's my leg, it really hurts! she replied and then completely believing her own over-active imagination, she added - I think I can feel myself growing!

SAAB

I was sad to see SAAB reach the end of the road today. I learned to drive in my dad's SAAB back in 1985. I remember I was so small behind the wheel at 17, I actually had to sit my driving test on a cushion! So I will always have a wee soft spot for SAABs. I was sure I had a photo of the one I learned in, but it turns out that although this is indeed the right car, you will be hard-pushed to admire it in all its beauty in this picture!

CONSISTENCY WOULD BE GOOD

I'm the first to moan about the primary school's (or is it perhaps the council's) mollycoddlying of children.

The poor wee buggers are closeted in classrooms all winter at the first hint of a snowflake because they are so afraid a parent will complain if their precious actually scrapes a knee slipping in the snow.

I often pick up sad-looking kids who've been desperate to get out all day just to have a snowball fight or build a snowman. Of course, the first thing they do when I get them home is just that.

Today, however, I did have to question their consistency. It snowed a few times last week. Walking had compacted it into ice and rain and freezing temperatures had been added into the mix. By this morning the entire playground was an ice rink.

Granted, a small 30cm path had been de-iced round the edge of the building and out to the gate, so the kids would be fine when they dragged them in early... Of course, they would take them in early... wouldn't they? Or would they let all 600 slip and slide round the playground and fall into icy puddles for the twenty minutes till the bell? It was like watching a bad attempt at Torvill and Dean. Whole chains of them were sliding backwards down the little embankment, generally landing with a bone-splitting thump on the black ice. I stood and watched ten minutes, by the end of which Léon was possibly the only little boy I hadn't seen fall into a puddle and soak his school trousers. They seemed to be having fun but today - unlike on the fluffy snowflake mornings, it was genuinely dangerous.

So are they making a new anti-health-and-safety stance which will consist of giving them the childhood we had, or did someone just cock up this morning?

I'm betting they'll be re-cotton-woolled tomorrow. :-(

CULTURAL AILMENTS

I read this article today and it almost made me laugh out loud. I'm not sure how aware people are that ailments are a cultural thing until you have live in a mixed culture family. I, of course, have the joy of having lived in two mixed culture families - first my French/German/Scottish one for twenty years and now my Danish/German/Scottish one for over five. Add to that that I have spent my whole working life with foreigners too (being in bilingual publishing), so I can so relate to this Italian woman.

The Italian story doesn't differ too much from my French experience. Even at 35°C, my former sister-in-law believed that opening two windows in her car simultaneously to create what I would consider a pleasant breeze might cause her kidney failure. With common summer temperatures in the high thirties, the same relative believed that walking barefoot on the tiled floor of her flat would cause all sort of dangerous goings-on to occur in her womb area, possibly resulting in the need for an emergency hysterectomy! She was completely serious. She had learnt from childhood that any draught could be near fatal, not realizing that while avoiding one at 3°C or 4°C on a cold December morning was advisable, a degree of pragmatism should come into it in July! I have often sat in her (and her mother's) house with the oven on, the outdoor temperature pushing 40°C and every one of them refusing categorically to open a window because of the danger! And when I would walk around the flat barefoot, and suffer no ill effects, they'd simply dismiss it with mutterings of 'What do you expect with her Nordic blood!' When the kids came along and survived open windows and cold floors, they too were deemed Nordic!

Medicine is another French necessity. Going to the doctor was an absolute must, even with the slightest cold, and because of the funny insurance system whereby medicines are paid for and refunded, you'd be prescribed a minimum of five items even for a cold - a nasal spray, an inhaler, some lemsip type thing, all sorts of antibiotics you didn't need and of course the cure-all suppository! A suppository is the standard for the likes of tonsillitis and so on.


My family members were also forever getting injections into their spines every time they had backache. That used to worry me. It seemed very OTT!


Like Italians, swimming after even looking sideways at a sandwich would, of course, cause you to drown so had to be avoided at all costs. I often had the pool to myself while my entire family sat looking at their watches after lunch. As I'd bounce about in the water with the kids, they'd shake their heads disapprovingly as if I should have my kids taken into care for the degree of irresponsibility I was showing!


Now Danes are a different kettle of fish. For example, all Danes I know own and treasure thermometers - usually anal ones and as soon as they or their child feels under the weather they need to know their temperature to the nearest tenth of a degree... Interestingly though, once they know it, they don't do anything about it! Calpol and baby nurofen are taboo words in Denmark. I had to haggle and negotiate to get paracetamol for Marcel once in a pharmacy in Aarhus when he was ten because he had an ear infection and a raging temperature. It isn't on the shelf in their supermarkets, it isn't even on the shelves in their pharmacies. Trying to buy a pack of kiddie disprol is like trying to buy cannabis over the counter here! And as for antibiotics, they seem to be taking the fear of over-prescribing them more seriously than anyone else on the planet. I am assured by all my family members that getting any antibiotics is more or less impossible! So in Denmark there are two degrees of illness: the first seems to be up to about 38°C where you do nothing, the second at higher than 38°C when you force your child to eat ice cream! :-)


I wonder what my foreign relatives, old and new, consider to be the idiosyncrasies of Scotland?

BARBAPAPA

As I mentioned a few months back, Barbapapa is big everywhere in Europe except here. As you can see, kids here seem to love them just as much as ever. I wonder who makes the marketing decisions for them over here? They are definitely losing the franchise a lot of revenue. (Possibly a close relative of our beloved Prime Minister?)

NAIVETY

There's a naive innocence in teenagers who aren't used to babies and their devious ways. On Friday last week Marcel invited two friends (who don't have young siblings) to stay over. They watched movies and played XBOX in the TV room till the wee small hours then disappeared up to Marcel's room to sleep. They left a full but open bag of M&Ms sitting on the couch, not realizing it'd be the last they'd ever see of it! Amaia got up two hours before them and discovered it all by herself. I think there were three left when the boys finally got up!

LUCKY TEACHER!

Léon came out of school jumping with excitement. His first tooth had come out. I asked him the story:

Well, I was in the dinner hall eating my lunch and it just fell out! he explained.
So what did you do? I asked
Well, I noticed my teacher was also sitting having her lunch so I just went over to her and gave her it!
Lucky teacher!

ROOF DAMAGE

I had discovered the missing fence. I had found the smashed greenhouse panes. The leaking dining room window, hall ceiling and wall had not escaped me during the course of last Thursday's Bawbag. Even the two missing roof caps at the apex of the front of the house had been noted down... but I couldn't see any major damage on my roof...

Then the bloke who lives across the road dropped by today to ask basically if we shouldn't be wearing hard hats every day coming in and out until it was fixed... Until what was fixed? You see from his top floor he has a much better view of our roof than we do. I walked as far as I could away from it to get a better angle.

Holy shit! Has someone been up there with a crowbar and a hammer?

I have now been back on to the insurance company sheepishly mentioning I have found a few more issues since we last spoke!

Oops... roof tiles bloody better be covered!

ANNA'S PRESCHOOL PHOTO

Anna had her preschool photo taken last month, just a few weeks before she got her glasses. I really like two specific bits of it.

When Anna is all grown up and I look at this photo of her at three, I will smile, remembering the fascination she had as a tiny child with nail varnish. Up till the day before this photo, Anna had always opted for a single shade, but on this day she insisted that every single nail had to be painted a different colour, so she could look extra-special! Her smile shows how proud she feels.

The other thing the photographer has managed to capture is Anna's odd eyes. I have been noticing since Anna's eyes changed from blue around nine months, that while her right eye is green, her left one is noticeably darker!

SHAKER MAKER

I got this Shaker Maker set for Xmas round around 1978. I hadn't thought about it in 30 years until I was on Miller's webpage last night looking for a present for my mum to buy Anna. They still make them! I can still remember the smell of the powder and the fun of painting my Florences, Dougals and Zebedees over and over! I can't wait to help Anna make some.

SPOT THE DIFFERENCE!

On the left - my greenhouse with its missing back wall and detached door - storm damage that is covered by home insurance. On the right - my fence which is not covered. But I have a cunning plan! I am going to install a wind turbine in my garden! Next time we have a mini-hurricane, the sparks from the exploding windmill might just set the fence debris alight! Remember fire damage is covered! How clever is that?

Facetious, me? Never! ;-)

NOW HERE'S A CLASSIC

We phoned up about all our storm damage and were told the fence was not covered for snapping in hurricane-force winds...

What exactly do you cover fences for? we asked.
Fire and theft! was their reply!
Now, I ask you - what is most likely to happen to a fence? Storm damage, fire or theft?
So I guess I'm away out to try to cobble together a new fence out of all the shattered pieces of wood strewn up my street.
Should any of you feel like stealing my fence once I have finished building it, feel free! ;-)

EITHER IT'S DANGEROUSLY WINDY, OR IT ISN'T!

All the schools in East Ren are closed (for the first time other than because of snow in all my parenting years). The Met office issued a 'red warning' of 90mph winds saying it was too dangerous to go out, so the council took the decision to close all schools. My fence (which has been in my garden at least five winters I know of without so much as a wobble) has blown over in the last hour, the crossbeams snapped and the posts uprooted so it truly does seem to be quite windy.

So I wonder what is going through the minds of the company that is currently installing cavity wall insulation all round Newton Mearns for the (very same) council? As I look out of Lots's bedroom window at the moment, I can see not one but two men currently up ladders (in this same wind) filling the walls of the house across the road.

So which is it East Ren? Too windy to open schools, or not windy enough to call off the insulation guys?

CONFUSION

Here is Léon in the country where he believes Danish is spoken! It doesn't look very Scandinavian, does it?

Léon hasn't been in Denmark since he was two and a half. (He is now six). When Brita retired as a minister at the end of 2008, they moved out of the manse that had been their home for forty years and now split their time between their beautiful, old Tuscan house and a small flat in Aarhus. That means of course that when they are in Denmark, they do not have enough space for us to visit, so as a family we visit them in Italy. It is such a shame they left the huge manse just a few years after Thomas and I got together, as it had so much space for us all and a wonderful garden!

Anyway, the upshot is of course that Léon is now beginning to think Danish is a language that you can only speak in Italy! Thomas only speaks Danish to the three wee ones, no English, so they know it can be spoken in Scotland, but are aware, as all bilingual kids are, after a mistake or two, that they can't get away with speaking it to many other random people here! In Italy though there is a lot of Danish spoken all day every day and many of the conversations around them are in Danish. Thomas's parents even have a new Danish next door neighbour with kids in Italy!

I became aware of this anomaly when Thomas started showing the kids Nissebanden as a TV advent calendar last week. It seems to be a story of a group of Danish-speaking elves who fly off to Greenland in a hot-air balloon - truly riveting ;-) I happened to walk in as they landed in Greenland. 'Where did they set out from?' I asked, feigning interest... 'Oh, they must have come from Italy', Léon piped up immediately, 'because they were speaking Danish to each other!'

I guess when you live in a family where a minimum of five languages are spoken in the home almost on a daily basis, nothing fazes you!

TYPES OF GLASSES

Since finding out she needed glasses, Anna has been observing the different types people use.

Yesterday she shared her findings with me:

You only wear glasses when you are reading Mummy, Pumpa (my dad) does the same. Granny, Léon and Farmor (Thomas's mum) wear their glasses all the time. Großvater (Thomas's dad) wears his for driving but not for reading. But Theodor (her Danish cousin who is 13) only needs his for sleeping!

You've got to laugh at the logic. Basically, Theodor has recently started wearing contacts during the day so Anna only ever sees him wearing his glasses at breakfast, so she assumes he only needs them for sleeping! Cute.

GLASSES - DAY 2

What a pain in the neck glasses are!

All day they have been slipping down Anna's nose and sitting on the end of it so out we went in the torrential rain, back to the opticians to have them adjusted. Too loose is not good in kids glasses. Fortunately, I have learned from the Léon experience. We no longer choose opticians by the range or price of specs on offer, but by proximity to our house and usual haunts (yes, we opted for the one next door to ASDA again) because the number of times you have to drop in for repairs and adjustments (especially between nursery chuck-out at 3.35pm and closing time) really make an optician in town too much hassle.

We are home now and they've stopped slipping. The opticians closed eight minutes ago. Anna's latest complaint: They are too tight behind my ears!

Ho hum, I guess it's back to ASDA again tomorrow.

ANNA'S NEW GLASSES

Anna picked up her new glasses at 5pm. She was absolutely thrilled... for the first hour. She had no complaints. Then she got home and was looking at the clock in the TV room. That's when the whining began. She couldn't focus on the numbers on the clock - all the numbers were black, fuzzy lumps. Distressed, because she could easily read the clock numbers without the specs, she started taking them off and on, claiming she needed to clean them.

Last year in September, when Léon first got glasses we had driven back and forward to the opticians at least twice in the first fortnight because they didn't seem to be the correct prescription, but what a difference a year of experience makes for the parent! We know now that a child who has always needed glasses but has never had them learns, with a struggle, to focus without them. When they first get glasses, it takes them a week to ten days to stop compensating. For the first wee while, they think that the glasses don't work. I swear I must have told Léon to look through his glasses, not over them a hundred times a day at first, until suddenly one morning he got up and was happier with them than without them.

I guess that fortnight or so for Anna has now begun.

ANOTHER SELACHIAN CHILD

Like his brother and sister before him, Léon seems to have inherited the shark gene - with a twist. Marcel and Charlotte's big teeth all grew in before the little ones fell out but by the time they were half through, the little ones were always very wobbly. Léon, as you can see, now has an adult tooth through but his baby teeth aren't wobbly in the slightest. He has a dental appointment next week anyway so we'll see what needs doing then.

One thing is sure though - unlike his little cousin, who got his big teeth through much earlier than Léon, when the fairy turns up at our house, she won't be carrying anything like £5 per tooth! Let's hope they don't confer!

MORE FUNCTIONAL LANGUAGE

Amaia often watches the older kids playing board games. Being competitive they tend to shout 'six' when throwing the dice, willing them to land on a six. Amaia, therefore, assumed from fairly small that a die was called a 'six'. She has gone more generic now, deciding 'six' in fact means anything cube-shaped. Consequently, when she's building with blocks, she is often to be found running around asking if anyone has found any more sixes! I guess this is another example of her functional language!

PENSIONS

So today was the big strike day in the public sector. My initial reaction a month ago when I heard about it was flippantly to wonder if I would be on strike if I worked in the public sector, given their projected pensions are much higher than I can expect, having always worked in the private sector. It's been exactly ten years now since private sector pensions closed their final salary schemes, moving the money into stocks and shares... and we all know what has happened to stocks and shares since then. They got away with it at the time because the average earners saw their house price increase year after year and contented themselves with the fact that although they would have no pension, a simple down-sizing of their property would solve the cashflow problem of their old age... but of course that is a fantasy bubble that has since burst, and I suspect has some further bursting to do!

Of course there will be a small percentage of private sector MDs with decent pensions, just as there will be top civil servants with decent pensions too but an average worker will get a pension that will not allow him to retire ever. Add to that the issue of redundancy - when people lose their jobs they have to choose between continuing to invest in under-performing pensions or paying their mortgage. However short-sighted it may seem, many people choose to pay their mortgage! A quick poll of my freelance friends today (many editorial staff and journalists work freelance these days, having either been let go by struggling publishers, or having resigned, like me, unable to pay childcare costs from my very average salary, thus figuring working from home was the only option) reveals that next to none of my friends (all in their 40s) are currently paying into a pension at all. I wonder how many of the rich Tories in charge of the country are aware of that?

So rather than lamenting the fact that the public sector workers didn't exactly rush out in their thousands ten years ago in support when this was happening to us, I think it needs to be said that the government and country doesn't need to rethink their plans for the public sector so much as rethink pensions in their entirety. Twenty years from now we are suddenly going to hit a point when there are no jobs for us 60-somethings but we have no pensions either. It's time to break down that old us and them divide and realize all of us, public and private alike, are facing an impossible retirement.

It isn't the rights of public sector workers we should be fighting for, but the rights of all workers on average salaries, regardless of their sector. We should all be out there today pointing out to the buffoons in charge that a major rethink is needed.

(Here's an interesting quote from Macwhirter:

Here's a statistic to think about. At present annuity rates (that's what you get when your savings are converted into a pension) to buy an index linked pension of £24,000 - roughly what a teacher gets - a 60 year old would need to have saved over £600,000. It is impossible for normal people to save anything like this. The average personal pension savings “pot” at retirement is currently £30,000, which will generate about a £1100 a year, most of which is lost because the pensioner loses entitlement to means tested pension credit. And remember, a third of British workers, round 8 million, have no pension at all.)