flossing the cat

My husband has a condition called anosmia. This means he has no sense of smell.  For the most part, this works out pretty well for me. For a start, I never have to buy scented sanitary towels. (Although why any woman needs a scented sanitary towel, unless she has a) neglected to change her sanitary pad in, like, two days, and also happens to be in a heatwave, or b) recently noticed her vagina is exuding a pyroclastic flow of green slime, is beyond me.)   Ditto any other feminine hygiene products.  But there are downsides to having a husband who can't smell. For example, deep down, my husband believes there is no such thing as a bad smell. He prefers the idea that bad smells are simply figments of my imagination, originating in deep-seated neuroses and hysteria. So, if I say, "Darling, the living room is redolent with the smell of shite", or, "Did you happen to tread in a bunch of dog shit when you went to get those logs from the garden and then smear it over...

My eleven year old has become obsessed with the question of lady whiskers. MY lady whiskers. I catch her standing in the kitchen doorway staring at me as I cook dinner. She looks decidedly queasy. "You ok?" I say. "Something wrong?" She is staring directly at my face. Clearly, my face is the thing that is wrong. "It's a stubble isn't it?" I say, finally. Her concern over my chin hair has become routine. Terrified that I might be morphing into Gandalf, she has taken to scanning my face for deviant follicles. I give my chin a quick sweep to reassure her. "Nothing there", I say breezily.  "I plucked them this morning!" I see her gag and little and figure that "plucked" is one of those words, (like "moist" or "Michael Gove"), that revolts people. "It's underneath. In the middle!" she says, with rising hysteria. "It's sticking out loads. It's totally black...

It's been a while since I blogged. The reason, dear readers, is this:  DAISY. (No relation of Kiss lead singer Gene Simmons, in spite of the tongue) Yes folks. A couple of months ago, we acquired a dog. A two-year-old boxer called Daisy, whose role was to shake our family out of its iPad-induced inertia, and get us out and about. Like the von Trapp family. But with poo bags. But what we hadn’t quite accounted for was the sheer magnitude of Daisy’s walking habit.     The fact of the matter is that Daisy likes walking.   Daisy like walking more than Lord Sewel likes to wear orange bras and leather jackets whilst snorting coke off the chest of a prostitute. Daisy likes walking more than Gwyneth Paltrow likes to give her nether beard a good old steam clean. Daisy likes walking even more than she likes the smell of asshole, which, my friends, is saying something. All of which means I now spend seven hours a week walking Daisy, when I could be blogging,...

A contagious strain of hypochondria is sweeping through our house, thwarting all attempts at physical activity. The ten-year-old points to a cluster of tiny spots on her forearm and informs me she is allergic to sunlight. Her eyes shimmer with the kind of longing I recognize from my own teenage flirtation with exotic maladies. “I   don’t have ANY allergies”, says the five-year-old, developing a pronounced limp as she approaches us. “But the back of my knee hurts a lot.” The five-year-old has acquired a range of issues that affect her mobility.  The back of her knee is a total bastard, but there is also an itch under the nail of her big toe, and a surface scratch on her calf, which reminds her of the vulnerability of human flesh. “Such a drama queen”, says the ten-year-old. The ten-year-old has a short memory. Last year, she was THIS close to putting “crutches” on her wish list for Father Christmas. Also, those who don’t have to walk anywhere, i.e. amputees, paraplegic...

Did I tell you the one about the werewolf, the cul-de-sac in suburbia, and the courting couple? Well, the story starts one weekday evening, back in the Eighties, with my mother furiously attempting to rid the lounge window of the coating of dust produced by the crematorium opposite. “Ych a fi” she says, her face like a cat's bum. “No self-respect.” I follow her gaze to the lay-by outside the cemetery gates, where two teenagers are busy sucking each other’s faces off in the front seat of a green Ford Cortina. I am almost fourteen at the time – but my experience of open mouth kissing is limited to the time Great Auntie Maud launched her tongue into my mouth thinking I was her dead husband, the great big lezzer - so  I lean into the window to get a better view. “They’re only snogging”, I conclude. For my mother, however, there is no such thing as “only snogging”. Snogging involves EXACTLY the same level of risk as eating your dinner straight off the toilet seats ...

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As you will know by now,  I'm a self-confessed scaredy-cat. Slip roads, space hoppers, rounders, and checking voice mail, all give me the willies, as does the line: It puts the lotion in the basket. And don't get me started on that feathered monstrosity from the Seventies, Emu.  But now, following a recent visit to Bounce Below , a disused slate cavern featuring suspended trampoline nets, I have to add trampolines to the shit list. I should have known better, of course. Anything that describes itself as “offering a degree of physical challenge” is not for me.  But, as we are on a family holiday at the time, and there has already been an awful lot of visiting national monuments, a trip to a subterranean playground seems in order. ABANDON ALL HOPE, YE WHO ENTER HERE We make our way to Llechwedd Slate Caverns, boarding the underground train to the trampolines. “This is the actual old mining train”, I say, reading the leaflet. “It’s Victorian.”  “OMG. W...