flossing the cat

This week, I’ve been mostly asking the question, “Does anyone know how this fucking thing works?” For instance: i) The open and close buttons in lifts. I mean. What the fuck? What's with the runes? I don’t know runes. I have never known runes. In short, I am utterly shit at runes and at any other kind of ancient alphabet system. So here's for a madcap hare-brained idea. Why not get someone to write  OPEN and CLOSE on the lift buttons, eh, eh ,  EH  ? That way there would be no risk of anyone wringing the living shit out of anyone else whilst trying to enter a lift. Ii) Also, what’s with those hot water catering urns you get at kids parties? Does anyone know how you get water out of those bastards? Anyone? Cuppa anyone? Mwa ha ha ha mwa ha ha ha ha!!  I know it looks like the water should come out of the little tap thing at the bottom, but the problem is that the little tap thing at the bottom NEVER has a functioning lever, so that all

Kids say the cutest things, don’t they? Only last week, my two-year-old daughter said, “Mami, has the moon got a mummy and daddy?” A few weeks earlier, my five year old son asked, “Do wasps eat cheese or people?” At other times, of course, they're total bastards.  Take last week, on the school run, when my seven-year-old daughter said, “My best friend Annie thinks you’re ugly.” “That’s not very nice is it?” I said, lamely. Now, everyone who knows me knows how much I hate the school run.  Doing the school run is the psychological equivalent of trekking hundreds of miles without food or water across enemy terrain, on your knees, whilst hallucinating. (Even Bear Grylls and Ranulph Fiennes go fucking MENTAL if anyone asks them to do the school run. It's true.) So, as you can imagine, the absolute last thing I need to hear – when I’m up against the limits of my endurance – is that I look like a hatful of arseholes. “It’s ok because Annie thinks her

Flies are total bastards. On the spectrum of bastardry, flies sit somewhere between President Assad of Syria, Michael Gove (a perfect example of a cunt), those low low fuckers at News Corp,  and Karren Brady. (Bring back Margaret!!)   But the absolute worst thing about flies is that they love my house. It’s almost as if there’s a gigantic neon-lit sign above my back door that says, “Hey, we’re shooting a remake of The Amityville Horror in THIS house. If you and your extended family of houseflies are looking for parts as extras, please do come on in, please, it's no bother”. In addition to the second neon-lit sign above my front door that says, "Now recruiting for the Fourth Plague of Egypt."  Which there isn't.  Oh, how I long for flies to become extinct. How I long for them to stop puking their guts up all over the banana cake or the brioche rolls I accidentally forgot to wrap in a million billion layers of super-thick anti-bacterial foil

Last week, my seven-year-old daughter seemed troubled. “Mummy, why are you the only mummy on the street with fur sticking out of your arms?” she said. She was looking at my armpits in a hurt, disgusted way, as if I had Tufty the Squirrel in a headlock. I was too knackered to explain to her that contrary to public opinion, all sexually mature women grow hair on their bodies, and that many of them have more hair growing from their armpits and minges than Sasquatch. I was also too knackered to explain to her that the pressure on women to shave, pluck, tweeze, wax, and zap every single hair on their body until they look like pre-pubescent girls is just sinister sexist bullshit dreamed up in the 1920s by those absolute motherfuckers at Gilllete. But the main reason I didn’t challenge her was that I’m sensitive enough to realise that to a small hairless child, a thousand colossal tufts of armpit hair probably looks like the kind of place where witches meet.   “I’ll shave it

I haven’t blogged in a while. These are the reasons: The Summer Holidays:   We’re all going on a summer holiday, tra la la la la la la tra la la … Oh, hang on a minute, what I actually meant to say was we’re NOT going on a summer holiday. Duh! Thing is, my partner is working 12-hour days for the duration of the summer holidays, so I’m staying right here, in the house, for six and a half weeks, with a gazillion children.   Yeah, don’t worry, I’ve got enough food in! Sure I’ll keep the windows open so that there’s enough air n’all! And best of all, my mum’s coming up for a couple of days so no worries! It’ll be nonstop fun I’m telling ya!! Lack of stimuli:   Hey, even if I did have a minute to write a blog in between all the crazy fun times, I wouldn’t know what to write. You see, during the summer holidays, the children operate Amish-style house rules that forbid me from consuming news or current affairs programmes, surfing the Internet, reading books, or exchanging views wi

OK. Here’s the problem. Every time I come back from a holiday, the house stinks. The porch and hallway smell like The Elephant House in high summer. The rest of the house also smells like The Elephant House in high summer, except one of the elephants has VAG ROT, and all the other elephants have died. The situation has gotten so bad I dread coming back. “Please god let the cats not have shit everywhere”, I whisper to my partner on the journey home from our most recent holiday. “I don’t think I can take it.” “Just relax”, says my partner. `’If they have, I’ll clear it up straightaway.” My partner doesn’t know me. If he did, he wouldn’t bandy around inflammatory words like ‘relax’. Conversely, I know him well enough to know that the very first thing he will do on arriving home will be to scroll through the list of recorded programmes on the Sky Plus Planner. He would do this even if he needed to pick the zapper out of a buzzing, twitching heap of cat shit as big

Yesterday afternoon, I walked with my toddler and four-year-old son to the school. We walked in single file in the deliciously cool shadows of some cypress trees. My toddler was asleep in the buggy, fiercely clutching a dandelion clock, the spoils from an earlier battle with her brother. My son was wearing his beloved blue snowboots, from which he won’t be parted, in spite of the heat.    ‘Children get very tired walking”, he said. “Bumblebees get tired too, don’t they?” I passed him his new red water bottle. He drank with both hands clasped seriously around the bottle, his eyes closed, and although we were late for school, everything was absolutely perfect. Perfect, that is, until the driver of a massive fuck-off Eddie Stobart Heavy Goods Vehicle – which was already driving too close to the kerb – beeped his horn TWICE, long and hard. “Nigel, mate”, he shouted, waving to a guy on the other side of the street.  He beeped it again, this time for longer. The ground vibrat

Everyone knows that the world is divided into two kinds of people: Larks and Owls. Larks love the mornings. Every morning, at the ass crack of dawn, they pop out of bed like a bunch of smiley creepy jack-in-the-boxes, before going for a run around the village, or composing entire symphonies, or eating thousands of goji berries, or singing really chipper hymns of praise to the Sun Goddess, or whatever. Unlike me, larks don’t wake up every morning to a spectacular shit-pile of negative thoughts, which in my case, looks something like this:     At least when I’m in a nursing home I won’t have to do THIS   I’m so tired I must have got M.E.   Would it be possible or practical to install an oxygen cylinder in the bedroom?   If I don’t get up NOW, or at the very latest before the alarm clock says 7:28, something awful will happen.   I could probably gain an extra half hour’s sleep if I home educated.    I wish I was three.   Why is this bedroom so cold? and … Is there

Most days, collecting the post is a dismal event. There is the usual avalanche of shit from the Inland Revenue, a flyer or ten from Graham the local Tory candidate, and reminders from the DVLA/bank. Quite frankly, the postman may as well vomit through the letterbox. But this morning was different. This morning, the hallway was filled with a transcendent white light. I shielded my eyes. I approached with caution, like Moses in front of the Burning Bush. There it was ... On MY mat ... In MY house ... The White Company catalogue. Just to clarify, I have never bought anything from The White Company as I am not in the habit of paying £55 for a White T-shirt, or sleeping on crisp White 600-thread-count percale sheets. All I can think is that some kind, philanthropic soul from The White Company - intent on disseminating Happiness - hacked into NHS confidential records, traced the details of all those who have ever suffered from depression, and thought, “I know what would make these sad

Or. When Technology Turns Against You I can’t be bothered to introduce this lot. They are all vile. Captchas – OK. I know what you're thinking. What could be easier than typing out two little words on a spotty grey and white background in order to prove that you’re not a robot? Huh? Huh?   Huh?  Well, let me tell you. Smashing the atom. That’s what. Or, sequencing the entire human genome. Or, unravelling the mysteries of the universe. Or, understanding the mind of God. Or, harnessing the sun’s power to meet the energy requirements of humanity for the rest of eternity. Or, getting Little Miss Gwyneth Paltrow’s perfect offspring to drink a mug of motherfucking Cup-A-Soup. That’s what. The other day, after about a billion attempts at typing a  captcha  - and having to suck out the insides of a whole Cadbury’s crème egg between each attempt just to stay calm - I tried the captcha audio version. Except that nobody told me that the captcha audio version is a download from Hel

This week’s been a helluva week. It all started last Sunday with a burst eardrum. I was resting in bed, recuperating from a nasty bout of flu, when this immensely horrible squealing noise erupted from inside my middle ear, as if there were a bunch of hedgehogs, fucking, right there, IN MY EAR. After that came an uncanny popping sensation, followed by an explosion of blood, pus, and assorted bits of ear percussion, all of which landed on my pillow. On Monday morning, the GP diagnosed a burst eardrum and told me I couldn’t a) go swimming, or b) wash my hair for six weeks. Now as far as I’m concerned, going swimming with three kids in tow is probably third in the League Table of Stress after divorce, and moving house, so I’m not bothered on that count. But not wash my hair for six weeks? Are you kidding me? I will smell and look like Satan. My hairline will be festooned with boiling pustules of acne. There will be mange all over my scalp and rivers of excess sebum coursing down

This week I am knackered. Red Bull doesn’t touch it. Touché Eclat doesn’t hide it.   Everyone has started asking me whether I’m okay. It seems my face is the main cause for concern. I look like a bloodhound on chemo. More specifically, I look like a bloodhound on chemo might look IF he were forced to shuffle around, say, Asda, for the rest of his life. My body, too, is exhibiting signs. I walk at a pace that would embarrass a sloth. I sigh and whimper and make grotesque mewling noises. In the evenings, when I haul my sorry ass upstairs, my posture is so spectacularly humped I cast a shadow that looks exactly like a FAT Nosferatu. There are many reasons for my exhaustion: 1. My partner has taken up a job in London, leaving me to care for three small children, two incontinent cats, and a house, single-handedly. When I say single-handedly, I’m not being literal. (I don’t know how that woman off CBeebies does it, to be honest.)   2. I need loads of sleep – but I don’t get it.

Once upon a time, my mother told me never to wash my dirty linen in public.   Luckily, my laundry has almost always been a private affair. These days, I am blessed with a new-fangled labour-saving device called a washing machine, which means that my smalls (which, naturally, reek of fornication and menstruation and other vile secretions) never have to make the journey to the village watercourse. Of course, there is the possibility that my mother was using A Metaphor. In my childhood home, metaphors were powerful tools, used for moulding our young impressionable minds into dark abnormal shapes. Take this one: ME: What’s the big deal with pre-marital sex? MY MOTHER: You wouldn’t go to a greengrocer’s and take a bite from an apple before paying for it, would you?  Now I’m the first to admit that sex is a fruity business. But not that fruity. But anyway, if the advice about the dirty linen was a metaphor, I am about to disappoint mother (once again). You see, a month ago, I was tagge

I have nits. All day, it feels as though the four horsemen of the apocalypse have been galloping freestyle across my scalp. I have scratched my head so much I look like the Medusa. When I told my partner about my condition, he looked so disgusted, so well and truly turned-off, I may as well have said, “Hey darling, I just love eating shit.” Or, “Honey, I seem to have acquired an infestation of pubic crabs, but not to worry, they’re as happy as larry playing in the moist, thrushy rock pools of my groin.” I should explain. My partner is the Nits Nemesis. He hates nits more than anyone else on the planet. I would go as far as to say that his hatred of nits is so off-the-scale that he now has a fully-blown Hedrin habit . Every time he goes shopping, he buys another bottle of the stuff. I say things like, “Look love, it’s not as if you’re stocking up on bottles of water, which, you know, in the event of the Mayan Apocalypse, might be really useful. It’s only Hedrin. And we’ve got