Wedding anniversary whiteout

Here's a photo of me with all my kids (then) on my wedding day, nine years ago today. No, I don't know what Marcel is doing to Léon either and I'm not even sure I want to know!

Although we'd been living together for a number of years, we had not got round to marrying before then (something to do with my ex-husband refusing all attempts at divorcing him, but that's another story!)

Today Thomas is having to work from home, rather than Edinburgh where he should be, because of this major snow lock-down in Scotland (and much of Europe). I was postulating over lunch that had our wedding been today rather than then, it would not have happened. Glasgow has shut all its schools and museums so I expect the registry office is also shut. We'd have got some cool photos, mind you!

During this conversation, Anna pipes up: 'Do you still have the dresses Charlotte and I wore at the wedding?' I think I saw them in the wardrobe recently, so I say I do and she immediately asks if she can have them for her kids to wear at her wedding! Charlotte then tries to gently point out that it isn't really the norm to have your kids at your wedding in this country and Anna, sweet and naive, looks terribly upset and asks why people would consider not even inviting their own kids to their wedding 'Surely they don't just leave them at home?' she sobbed! You've got to laugh! Charlotte finally spelt it out to her 'Most people live together, then get engaged, then get married, then have kids'. 

Anna's reply? 'Well, that's just weird!'

Amaia's reply? 'I still think you were selfish getting married before you had me. That makes me the only one of your kids who you didn't invite to your wedding!' 

Funny! I think we have some rather unorthodox kids in this family.

Robin Hood

Today our Primary 6s performed their show: 'Hoodwinked' for their friends and relatives. Congratulations to you all, you were really great! 🎼😀 #Hoodwinked @EastRenCouncil @XpressiveArtsES pic.twitter.com/IpvxEbUTtj

— Kirkhill Primary (@KirkhillPS) February 22, 2018

Dishwasher issues

Is it just us? We go through a minimum of three of these bloody things every year. They are minimum £8.50 a pop and no sooner are they delivered than holes appear on the bottom and knives fall through and block the rotor. I know most families don't run their dishwasher twice a day but there are lots of us. I mean we don't even use it for pots, they need to be done by hand! Anyway, I am utterly sick of forking out for them when I know they are flimsy and useless but I can't find an alternative at any price. I'm seriously considering making one out of rust-proof metal - I bet I could make a small fortune on them!

Can you 3D-print them using some space-proof material or similar? Any idea?

Anna's show - the trailer!

Coming this Thursday - 22nd February... #Hoodwinked @XpressiveArtsES @EastRenCouncil pic.twitter.com/RsQ49uV3DD

— Kirkhill Primary (@KirkhillPS) February 19, 2018

Doughb'

When Léon was about five or six months old, Charlotte invented the nickname 'Pudge(man) for him. Well, he was kind of pudgy back then - unfortunately he didn't shake off the name till he was about eight and people were always puzzled why the skinniest member of the family went by 'Pudge'.

For about three years he got to be Léon, but now she's come up with a new name for him. It started out as 'Doughball' because he was forever doing the daftest things, to her mind anyway. He was so consistent in his Doughballness, that she started shortening it to Doughb', which seems to be his current nickname.

On Thursday Charlotte had her Adv Higher Spanish prelim. You get disqualified from an exam if you are found to have a mobile phone on you, but as she keeps all her Spanish notes on her phone, she wanted it before the exam started, so leaving it at home was out. As S6s don't qualify for lockers at their school (fewer subjects, less need than the lower school), her original plan was to borrow Léon's locker key for the day, put her phone in there for the duration and then retrieve it, but of course 'Doughb' has managed, some time in the last fortnight, to misplace his locker key (with his PE kit inside!) so plan A was out.

Strangely, she decided to trust him to look after it while she was in the exam hall. As they got out the car, I saw her zipping it into his inside blazer pocket, not trusting him to do it himself. The plan was set, on the way up to school she had ascertained that he had Mandarin when she finished, so if she went to the Mandarin class and asked to get her phone back, all would be well. Of course, Doughb' couldn't be trusted to have remembered his timetable correctly, could he? So when he suddenly realised mid-morning that he, in fact, had French, not Mandarin when her exam finished, he helpfully sent her a text to rearrange where she had to meet him to pick up her phone. Doughb'!!!!

Chuggies

Because I am never likely to own my own vintage Fiat 500, I have a Fiat 500 key ring on my Ipsilon (as in 'Lancia') keys (sad, I know). It's very sweet and only cost a fiver off eBay a few years ago. I figured it was as close as I'd ever get. This morning I asked Léon to grab the keys to go to school. Somehow he dropped them on the wooden floor and the little car snapped off the chain irreparably 😢

Being a sweet kid, he handed me his debit card and told me to buy a new one off eBay. First, I found this,

                          

which I was on the verge of ordering until suddenly this popped up! OMG - it never occurred to me in a million years that they sold real Chuggies on eBay!!! Anyone out there want to buy me a belated birthday present? please, please, please?!!

Product review

I don't usually bother reviewing products but our  latest food processor was so spectacularly bad, I thought I'd make sure everyone was warned off it.

When I got married to my first husband in 1991, we got a Moulinex food mixer as a gift and I used it all the time - it had many different sizes of grater, a shredder, and a knife that was great for 'liquidising' old bread into wonderful breadcrumbs. It was great! Being somewhat more of a chef than him, I got it in the divorce settlement. Phew!

It finally kicked the bucket last summer at the ripe old age of 26, not bad going for a £50 machine - £2 a year, if you like.

So we replaced it with a VonShef (left). It was in approximately the same price range. It had a good, even more powerful motor, so what could go wrong? Firstly, the grater discs had a space between the edge of the discs and the bowl so nothing grated, it just got clogged up with carrot mush every time we tried to make coleslaw. 😢

Having ruled out grating anything, ever, we resorted to doing that manually (for seven portions of things, this is a pain in the backside). Always trying to see the bright side, we decided at least the spinning knife attachment could be used to make our breadcrumbs (we always dry out all our old bread for breadcrumbs - why wouldn't you?) Wrong again, large chunks simply seemed to rotate uncut till you gave up and took the bread chunks out and chopped them, again by hand, into manageable chunks.

Pushing optimism further we attempted to attack a bag of carrots with the rotating knife last Saturday... The plastic safety clip, that you need to engage before the motor will start only went and snapped off! So after less than a dozen uses, it has been chucked in the garden, where I might plant a flower in it, as that would be a more apt use of it. 😠

So, if you're looking for a fifty-quid food processor that neither grates, crumbs nor shreds, I'd thoroughly recommend you buy yourself anything by VonShef! I, on the other hand, will not be buying anything by them ever again, just in case!

Parenting

There are certain experiences in life that you just don't get if you never have kids... profound things like receiving a coffee cup in the shape of a lama for your birthday! 😀

Into the bargain, it's actually impossible to drink out of because its head gets in the way!😐

Transparent

When I was growing up in Scotland, I learned to pronounce this word with an 'a' sound like in cat, but most people older than me seemed to pronounce it with the 'a' from cake, more like today's US pronunciation. Nowadays, the kids tend only to encounter my pronunciation, but older teachers do occasionally use the other. This morning I had to laugh as Léon and Anna were having a bitch about one such teacher who they'd both encountered in primary school. Hearing it with my (dare-I-admit-to-it?) 50 year-old ears, their understanding of the older pronunciation had never occurred to me but Léon summed it up this morning as 'Of course, it's transparent (like in cat), because transparent just sounds like your dad hangs about in a dress!' 😃

One flash

It was Wednesday just after lunch. I was sitting at my living room window, reading Twitter on my computer when the hailstones began to fall. 'Wow, they're big', I thought to myself. So I picked up my mobile from the arm of my chair and pressed record, so I could show Thomas, who was in Edinburgh, the storm when he got home.

Within the first ten seconds after I started to film out my window, there was a flash and less than a second later the loudest thunder I have ever heard, including electric storms I've lived through in southern Europe. So shocked, you can see I nearly drop my phone(, while discussing religion with myself!) I continued to film for two more minutes but there was nothing. It was the most violent and the shortest electric storm of my life.

I stopped and pressed upload, but the Internet was down, which it definitely hadn't been less than two minutes earlier. I brought up the available connections, my two router extensions were listed but not the main house router that runs the whole thing... weird.

I went through to the router and no lights were on. Had the one flash blown up my router? I was seriously doubtful. I unplugged it and plugged it in again, nothing. I lifted my phone to ring Sky to report the fault, the phone was dead too. On inspection all my phones were also dead.

I got through to Sky on my mobile, they tested my lines, said they could do nothing and booked me an engineer for Friday. In the meantime, mum, who lives three streets away phoned to tell me neither of her TVs were working. Could one flash really do that?

The engineer arrived on Friday morning, exclaiming he was rushed off his feet as call-outs in my area had increased 10-fold in two days. In fact, he even had three more call-outs in my own street! I showed him the video on my phone (see above). The storm had actually hit my street!!! A house further up now had a tarpaulin on the roof where the one flash of lightning had blown a hole in their roof and unlike us they seemed fairly unconcerned, according to the engineer who had seen them, about the demise of their router. You see, the lightning had melted all the wiring in their house, inside their walls and sockets and of course had blown up everything that had been plugged in - their fridge, cooker, freezer, phones, TVs, computers, you name it. My house was just 100 metres from the strike. How scary is that?

So we're £120 down and Mum's engineer still hasn't been round so I fear her TVs may be fried but I'll update this once we hear.

Update: Final count at mum's was one satellite dish, two Sky receivers, one amplifier!

IBS

AKA irritable bowel syndrome...

I've been thinking a lot about IBS recently and researching it again. It's not because I'm hitting an age when I'm supposed to start talking incessantly about my bowels, but more because I never really do, talk about my bowels that is... Talking about your bowels doesn't tend to increase your friend numbers! The research is more to do with self-preservation.

No one who reads this blog is likely to have an inkling, given my reticence on the subject, that IBS plays a huge role in my life. I had my first run-in with it when I was still at uni in the 80s. All would be fine, then suddenly about once a month, I'd wake up bloated, in pain and unable to go to the loo. It would take a good two or three days of being extra careful before things would generally right themselves and I'd breathe a huge sigh of relief, well until the next time. And so that was the pattern I lived with through my twenties and thirties, some years worse than others, but on the whole bearable. Whenever things would get really bad, I'd be sent off for the usual, coelic and Crohn's testing, barium meal, endoscopy, colonoscopy, CAT scan or MRI and then I'd be told - 'Don't worry, it's just irritable bowel syndrome.'

Then it all changed. I contracted the worst bout of the winter vomiting virus in my life in the winter of 2012. I actually felt like my insides snapped. Sometimes I think they did. I woke up the next morning with my IBS playing up and assumed it'd all be back to normal in two or three days, it wasn't, and I'm still waiting... Every single day since winter 2012 has been marked by galloping indigestion, bloating (usually about 2 sizes over the course of a day), a feeling as if someone is sticking a red-hot poker right through the upper half of my stomach, lower back pain, muscle spasms in my intestine, an inability to go to the loo, exhaustion, need I go on? Interestingly, I recently discovered most sufferers can trace the beginning back to a viral/food poisoning episode.

The funny thing is - when you have these symptoms once a year, you take a sick day and lie in bed trying to get over them, but you can't do that when every day is a sick day, so I fully suspect those who suffer from IBS are probably amongst the workers who take the fewest sick days.

Anyway, I'm not looking for any miracle cures (unless anyone happens to have one) or sympathy. What I'm actually on to suggest is a change of name... You see irritable is just wrong - it's kind of like 'my baby's a little irritable today...' And that makes people think it is a minor inconvenience. If I had a pound for every doctor who has told me 'Don't worry, it's only IBS'... What sufferers actually need is a GP who happens to suffer from it! Irritable trivialises something that is actually quite difficult to live with. For starters, you can't wear clothes! That's a bit of a problem in a climate like Scotland. Anyone who thinks I tend to spend 85% of time in leggings because I think I have the figure for them, think again! Even the elastic in tights irritates my insides, so it's leggings all winter, dresses in the summer and pain whenever I have to dress formally for a business meeting. Then there's food - most self help books tell you to follow a low-FODMAP diet - ie eliminate these (see the lists with the reddish background) from your diet, ie eat as if you are a lactose intolerant coeliac sufferer who doesn't like spice, coffee or anything fried - that doesn't leave you with much scope! You also have to try to keep your stress levels low - it's not like my life has been in anyway stressful for the last decade, is it? (Did someone say Brexit?) It is physically and emotionally draining.


So without further ado, here's my list of suggestions:
Agonising bowel syndrome
Excruciating bowel syndrome
Red-hot poker bowel syndrome
Somebody's-tied-a-knot-in-your bowel syndrome
I'm-so-physically-exhausted-by-this bowel syndrome
Who-needs-to-poo-anyway bowel syndrome
You-can't-eat-what!? bowel syndrome
Can't-remember-what-normal-feels-like bowel syndrome
Will-this-ever-end bowel syndrome

Or in fact, maybe we could drop the word 'bowel' from it too, then sufferers might set up self-help groups instead of assuming the subject should be taboo!

I've never actually used this emoji before, but it seems kind of appropriate!

💩

Chuggy's back

Restored to his former glory - phew.

Poor Chuggy

So there I was (last week, before the snow!) minding my own business in the shopping centre car park, stopped in a long line of maybe eight stationary vehicles waiting for the front car in the line to turn into their chosen parking space when I saw a black Ford Fiesta backing out of its space cautiously. Charlotte was in the passenger seat and she turned to me and said 'I don't think they have seen us, mum!' I had come to the same conclusion at the same moment so tooted my horn to alert the driver that my Fiat (and the other eight cars he had seemingly failed to notice) were at his back. I expected he'd stop at that point but instead he pressed his accelerator fully down to the floor and flew at the side of my stopped Chuggy at a speed I had never seen a car reverse at!

Charlotte screamed, expecting the side of the car to crush her two legs. (It didn't, thank goodness). Léon, who was in the seat behind her, shouted 'Woah!', and Anna who was behind me burst into tears. I stepped out the car to see Methuselah himself step out of the Ford. He looked a bit like you'd imagine Basil Fawlty's grandfather might have looked; tall, grey, gangly, open-mouthed in shock. I was gobsmacked. 'What did you just do to my daughter?!' came involuntarily from my mouth before I calmed down enough to ask him his details. He looked surprised and managed 'I got mixed up between my pedals' before his wife ranted that he only had two given it was an automatic, so how had he managed to floor the accelerator trying to do an emergency stop!?

Anyway, he gave me his details, admitted all liability (in front of the witnesses) and trundled off (banished to the passenger seat) while I went about my shopping.

Chuggy's away now getting a new door and wing and I'm playing about with my free Nissan Juke hire car - I quite fancy trading the Ipsilon in for one of them, it's very nippy as well as feeling safe and heavy.

Interestingly, when I took my Chuggy to the coach builders for an assessment and a quote, the receptionist who was reading through my case told me that over the past decade she has seen a huge increase in the number of older pensioners in my area who run into other cars and then, because they are rather wealthy and they do not want the DVLA alerted to their little driving misdemeanours, come with the person they have hit and offer to pay their repairs and courtesy car cash so they do not need to go through their insurance. Basically they are paying to insure their car because it is illegal not to, but not reporting crashes so they don't lose their licences.

My elderly gentleman has gone through his insurance so will likely have to prove he's still trustworthy behind a wheel (I would say that if a pedestrian had been walking behind his car when he reversed, he'd easily have broken their pelvis or legs at the speed he hit me), but it is alarming to think the there are many unroadworthy drivers out there who are bypassing the system so they can keep their cars long beyond a point when they maybe should.

I fully realise that if you drive everywhere, losing that right is terrifying and isolating, but is it really as terrifying as potentially crushing someone's child against another car?

The 'Millennium bug'

It occurred to me the other day when I was mentioning Charlotte being a real 'millennium baby' that those of you who didn't have a baby that week might not have been fully aware of the ridiculous hoo-ha surrounding the millennium bug!

At my last antenatal visit before Charlotte's birth Y2K bug hysteria had reached a crescendo. The press was full of scare stories that all computer systems and all systems driven by computers were about to fail and we'd be plunged back into the dark ages! I wish I'd kept the actual hand-out I was given by the Queen Mother's hospital but I didn't realise years down the line that it might become a quirky and fun historical document. What I do remember of it is the following:

• Don't phone an ambulance to take you to hospital in labour as the system risked being down, use a taxi instead, or better still your own car
• Bring a torch in case the lighting system failed
• Bring a photocopy of your medical notes in case the hospital couldn't access them on their system
• Bring a sleeping bag in case the heating system failed
• Bring extra warm clothes and hats for the newborn
• Prepare your relatives for the possibility they might need to cook all your meals at home and bring them in to you
• Don't panic about complications as the one generator they had hired would be used to run theatre for emergency caesareans
• And finally, one that wasn't technology related: Be prepared to wait as there would no doubt be a rush given the huge number of millennium babies predicted across the world!

I was somewhat bemused and not overly worried given she was not my first baby. I went into labour at lunchtime on 3-1-2000, so they'd had fully two days plus to sort out any glitches. I made my own way to hospital (I lived five minutes away) at 8pm and it was dead. There were no other mums in labour that I could see, the lights were on, even the fairy lights on a tiny, scabby Xmas tree in the corner of the deserted ward seemed to be working. The radiators were hot, the fridges on and it was pretty much a repeat of my stay when I had had Marcel two years earlier! I was the only one in my ward as the great millennium rush hadn't materialised either. Definitely a bit of an anticlimax!

The baby photographer presented everyone born that week with one of these special frames!

The 'Millennium baby' has turned 18!

How old does that statement make you feel? Wasn't the millennium new year about five years ago?

I remember when Marcel turned 18 I did a collage of photos to see how he aged through the years. I will do the same below with Charlotte, to see how the last 18 years have changed her (or not)...

So here is her lifetime so far in 19 images:

Charlotte aged 8 weeks, 1, 2, 3 and 4 years (it's interesting to see her eyes didn't change from blue to green till she was 4!)

Charlotte aged 5, 6, 7, 8 and 9 years

Charlotte aged 10, 11, 12, 13 and 14 years

Charlotte aged 15, 16, 17 and 18 years

It has actually been an interesting exercise. If you had asked me an hour ago, without showing me any photos, I would have said that Charlotte has not changed at all since about 2009, because she has not significantly changed her hair since then, but when I look at the photos side by side, she has actually changed quite a bit.

It will be interesting to see what the next few years have in store for her as she moves on to university. Things are still up in the air as she hasn't fully decided what or where to study, but watch this space!

Last reflections before 2018

I am utterly dreading 2018. I wish there was some huge rock I could crawl under and hide for a year or even two. I can't understate the level of horror this new year fills me with.

Before us lies the biggest decision of our life, and also of our children's lives, and it is not something we can influence in any way. Over the next few months it will become clear whether we get to continue with the life we have built up here, in a house that is already 65% paid off, where the third of our kids is already in high school, where my two oldest have already reached university (yes, I know Charlotte hasn't started yet, but with 6 A Highers, I doubt she'll be getting straight rejections from UCAS this spring). I get to find out if my my husband can continue working as a consultant in areas of linguistics where he has built up a wealth of knowledge and a name for himself in Scotland. We get to find out if our company, which has been running for nine years, will make it to ten...

I am the problem, not the other six. The other six are free to come and go as they please across Europe, they will still be EU citizens at the end of 2019; I am the only one who has had their freedom to move voted away and so it is my clock that is ticking. If we want to stay together as a family and give the kids a future in a country that isn't considering skidding off the economic rails, I have to get out by March 2019 unless things take a dramatic turn for the better.

I stupidly assumed it would have been clear by now and the government's intentions would be obvious, but a more clueless government, I have not seen in my lifetime. As recently as last month May's government signed up to not creating a border in Ireland, not creating a border in the Irish sea while emphasising that they would indeed leave the internal market and customs union. I don't know if they are incompetent or just downright liars but the first two promises make the third and fourth impossible.

So as we move towards midnight, I won't find leaving 2017 behind particularly difficult. Every day we have woken up in the stressful limbo that only those of us in a mixed EU/UK marriage know. We don't think about Brexit on bad days, or when something big is in the headlines; we have lived and breathed it every minute of every tiring day since June 2016 and we are desperate to take back some control of our lives, rather than leaving everything to the whims of the right-wing press and the most incompetent Tory government every to head up Westminster.

Sadly, I can't say I have any faith that 2018 will be any better but at least at the end of next year I may have more of a clue about where our futures lie and whether my family gets to stay together or is forced apart in the short term at least.

Life's little pleasures

When all your kids are old enough to build their own snowmen, you can take the photos and drink Glühwein in the garden - class.

Funny eyes

Léon has a strange mix of blue, green, yellow and grey in his eyes. It is often hard to put your finger on what colour they are, and they simply often reflect his clothing... he has blue eyes when he is wearing a blue t-shirt, green, when he's wearing green, so for fun I decided to put a photo of him through the photoshop filter that removes all except a specific colour from a photo - I chose blue. Interestingly, it seems the bottom half of his eyes are predominantly blue, but the top two halves have come out in grey so they must be green or grey!

That hang-up again

I've mentioned it on occasion over the years - that hang-up of mine, namely being called Phyllis... I think in my most recent rant I was finally coming to accept that as I grew older, greyer and frumpier, I would maybe start to suit my Phyllisness, and come to be at ease with it, but I hadn't factored in a new issue that would strike me. It is one that has always been there, but that is only dawning on me now.

I was named Phyllis because I was born on 4/2/68 and my gran had died of cancer on 30/1/68. At her death my granny was exactly 50 years, six months and one day old. Next year on 5/8/18, I will turn 50 years, six months and one day old... and that chills me. Strange; I've never been a superstitious person, but as Phyllis Buchanan the 2nd, I feel ill at ease with it all the same. Will Phyllis Buchanan the 2nd be a luckier Phyllis? a longer-lived Phyllis? Will she break the curse of Phyllisness?

I have a sneaking suspicion the next eight months and sixteen days are going to take a long time to get through, and I may be a bit touchy, irritable and perhaps a tad over-sensitive... I may consider coming back out to play on August 6th (if I make it through till then), but in the meantime, bear with me as I question every ache or pain I suffer in a slightly hysterical manner. (I've got five kids! I'm needed on this planet!)

It really is no fun being a replacement person for a dead one...

Weather report, school-style

Last time p6 had an assembly for the parents something big was going on. There was a good deal of whispering and giggling for the best part of a week beforehand but they kept telling us that the project 6A had been working on about natural disasters was top-secret! When we were finally let in on the game, it was awfully cute! Here, thanks to the school twitter account, is Anna's class's natural disaster presentation!