On Vomit
Sitting at the edge of the airport food hall, in easy view of about two hundred people, C pukes up her bottle of milk on me.
I say milk, I mean velling. Velling is a Swedish powdered baby food. Various grains go into it, along with some kind of whey powder or something, I don't know. Sort of like horlicks, I guess, I've never seen it in the UK. Swedes swear by it, C loves it.
It has, when old or semi-digested, the worst smell imaginable. Somewhere between cheese and spoiled meat, with a rotting bread undertone. Hints of the smell of a brand new polythene bag, cut through with the diarrhoea of a Victorian pauper with typhus. My Room 101 is lined with flasks of the stuff, gurgling their contents drippily into a central tank in which I am immersed, head down, twenty three hours a day. For the remaining hour, I must drink it.
It is this slime that I am coated liberally with, half an hour before our flight.
C is prised off my shoulder with a sucking noise. Across my chest is a perfect imprint of her body, outlined in goo, like a suncream gag from Police Academy gone horribly wrong. There is a ring of disgusted faces turning away from me as I rise and head for the toilets. V lends me her jumper. We've got changes of clothes for the girls, but not for us. This goes on the packing list for next time.
Comprehensive though my moobs are, they are lesser beasts compared to my wife's. Her v-neck is a little loose on me, is what I'm saying. It also doesn't hide the belt of caked white slime round the top of my jeans. Or the smell. Nothing hides the smell. Five hours on the flight certainly doesn't, with C writhing round on top of me happily, kicking the back of the chair in front.
F loves flying, she gets to sit and eat sweets and watch the iPad with our blessing for hours straight. Her over-excited screams drew grumpy looks from the lady in front a couple of times. I wanted to deck her with my tray of reheated beef stew, unstained by children and spew as she was, the bitch.
We got home to the darkest day of the Swedish winter. Two days before Christmas, with all the shopping still to do and no sunlight to do it in. Nice to know we'd made it past the solstice. Uphill from here! By April, we'll be right back to three minutes of weak, watery light round midday! Glorious!
F wept when we got home. "What is a holiday anyway," she wailed, "if you have to come home afterwards?" Well, an expensive waste of time, if you look at it that way, love.
Not that it was, in any way. Change is as good as a rest, they say.
On More Vomit
Christmas goes swimmingly, the Swedish family are round for a buffet Julbord and we all eat too much and get loads of presents. Cousin A sees right through my fake Tomte beard, but at least plays obligingly along with the illusion in front of the others. F gets a Doc McStuffins playset and a remote control car. C gets her very own playdoh and forgets not to eat it in her excitement. Then she gets toy envy and follows F from room to room, playing with whatever has been discarded last.
The day after Christmas, or, well, actual Christmas Day by the English reckoning , we go and hit the sales for a bit. C buys herself a Frozen snowglobe wand that plays Let It Go slightly off key and much too loud. F invests in a toy toaster, which turns out to have a broken timer once its out of its wrapper. I can't find the receipt to take it back.
Then we all start vomiting in unison. Except Clara, she's been done it already. And except V, who doesn't believe in vomiting except in extreme circumstances. Oh, we deck the halls, we do. All night, F and I take in turns to hit the buckets. The washer is full of stuffed toys and blankets, the sofa is full of exhausted parents.
"Pook pook," says C tenderly, patting me on the head. "Awww." Then she pulls herself up on to my lap and resumes bouncing up and down merrily. Careful, daughter, I owe you one from a few days back.
The night goes on forever, but by boxing day we're all more or less okay again. Exhausted, but capable of swallowing without hurling at least.
I want to go back to Tenerife.
Thursday, December 29, 2016
Tuesday, December 27, 2016
Holiday Fever 2/3
On Water Fights
We got the girls water pistols, obviously. F very quickly learned to yell "not in my face!", according to the rules laid out by Mummy, without having anything like the aim required to abide by that rule herself. I learned to give a particular kind of apologetic nod to swimmers-by, a kind of 'oops, sorry, but what can you do' affair, coupled with a weak grin and, all to often, a faceful of water myself. It accomplished nothing.
C couldn't quite get the hang of firing a water squirter. So she took to wading up to me, seizing my nose and ducking my head under, then laughing uproariously at the bubbles. "Hold nose!" she's still saying, a week later, and pushing me under an invisible surface. Good. Sure I won't regret that later in life. At least I know she gave herself the same treatment, lapping water up or sploshing her own face in with surprising frequency, given that she hates getting water in her eyes in the bath at home. Maybe she just likes the taste of chlorine.
On Buffets
The all-inclusive buffets were open three times a day, all days a week. And in the afternoon, you could get free bar snacks - cladgy cold chips, grainy ice cream, burger buns curling in the sun. Delicious! And thank Christ I wasn't having to rack my brains for some new twist on pasta for the next meal. That alone was worth the admission price.
Buffets are something of a weak spot for me. You could plausibly cover a table with fifteen different kinds of manure, call it a buffet and I'd feel honour bound to sample all of them whether or not they were any good. And this from a baseline of not saying no to food very often, I'd add.
After four days, I think the novelty was wearing off. Each meal had a loose theme. After American Night (make your own burger), Canarian Night (wrinkly potatoes, green mojo) and Taco Night (Tacos), International Night felt distinctly like several days of leftovers heated up, mixed together and relabelled as Fusion. Of course I ate it anyway, far more than I needed to, but I was grumbling through my mouthfuls of chocolate breakfast doughnuts and fruit salad with prawns.
C took fat handfuls of sausages for breakfast, chain eating them. F decided that being allowed to take whatever she wanted as long as she finished it was about the best rule for eating ever. Pasta with chips three times a day? Yes, okay then. Protein with that? Hell, no. Protein is for losers.
Obviously, it couldn't all last, all this lazy, sprawling bliss. That's holidays for you. At least the volcano didn't erupt until we were going home.
We got the girls water pistols, obviously. F very quickly learned to yell "not in my face!", according to the rules laid out by Mummy, without having anything like the aim required to abide by that rule herself. I learned to give a particular kind of apologetic nod to swimmers-by, a kind of 'oops, sorry, but what can you do' affair, coupled with a weak grin and, all to often, a faceful of water myself. It accomplished nothing.
C couldn't quite get the hang of firing a water squirter. So she took to wading up to me, seizing my nose and ducking my head under, then laughing uproariously at the bubbles. "Hold nose!" she's still saying, a week later, and pushing me under an invisible surface. Good. Sure I won't regret that later in life. At least I know she gave herself the same treatment, lapping water up or sploshing her own face in with surprising frequency, given that she hates getting water in her eyes in the bath at home. Maybe she just likes the taste of chlorine.
On Buffets
The all-inclusive buffets were open three times a day, all days a week. And in the afternoon, you could get free bar snacks - cladgy cold chips, grainy ice cream, burger buns curling in the sun. Delicious! And thank Christ I wasn't having to rack my brains for some new twist on pasta for the next meal. That alone was worth the admission price.
Buffets are something of a weak spot for me. You could plausibly cover a table with fifteen different kinds of manure, call it a buffet and I'd feel honour bound to sample all of them whether or not they were any good. And this from a baseline of not saying no to food very often, I'd add.
After four days, I think the novelty was wearing off. Each meal had a loose theme. After American Night (make your own burger), Canarian Night (wrinkly potatoes, green mojo) and Taco Night (Tacos), International Night felt distinctly like several days of leftovers heated up, mixed together and relabelled as Fusion. Of course I ate it anyway, far more than I needed to, but I was grumbling through my mouthfuls of chocolate breakfast doughnuts and fruit salad with prawns.
C took fat handfuls of sausages for breakfast, chain eating them. F decided that being allowed to take whatever she wanted as long as she finished it was about the best rule for eating ever. Pasta with chips three times a day? Yes, okay then. Protein with that? Hell, no. Protein is for losers.
-
Obviously, it couldn't all last, all this lazy, sprawling bliss. That's holidays for you. At least the volcano didn't erupt until we were going home.
Monday, December 26, 2016
Holiday Fever 1/3
Sorry for long hiatus. Much has happened, most of it mundane and uninteresting to write about. Additional posts saying 'my children grew up a bit more, did some funny stuff, I'm tired because Jeez! Parenting!' didn't really feel worth writing. Hurray, therefore, for the following life events, ever-reliable for giving me something inspirational.
On Seaside Towns
We took a little pre-Christmas break this year, nipping out to Tenerife for a week. F was very excited about this until we actually woke her on the day of the flight, at four in the morning. Then she howled and went back to bed.
Thomas Cook Sunwing hotels - nothing I'd ever been to before. And nothing, in my stuffy middle-class mindset, that I'd really considered as being relaxing. Even Tenerife had never appealed, I'd always had it pegged as a clubbing hotspot and nothing else. But a week of sitting by the pool, watching F and C get confident around water in blazing sunshine, and I'm convinced.
Bleak island, Tenerife. Craggy and dusty and deserty, scattered with little towns that look like miserable places to live. The ground doesn't look fit for human life, it's all gullies and sagebrush. No water other than the sea, which actually adds to the salt flat harshness of the place. Once you get into the towns, it's no better really, Hotel industry buildings, with everything desperate to tell you it's your home from home. Real English Food, Best Steak for Best Prices, Spectacular Sea Views, boasts each and every identikit bar. And the leathery touts hand you tickets and banter as you pass each one, until your pockets are full of business cards and your brain full of empty promises.
I still liked it! I just like moaning more. We didn't have to eat at any of the tourist traps, we'd gone all-inclusive with the hotel. Pacing the black beaches under the sun and examining knock-off bag shops at a snail's pace was surprisingly relaxing.
On Water
Neither of the girls like the sea yet. Too loud and scary for F. And C got some surf up the back of her legs unexpectedly, after which she would leg it for the dry part of the beach as fast as she could given a moment's notice.
The pools back at the hotel, though, that was different. Bath-warm water at either knee or thigh depth, depending on which of the kids' pools you chose. V and I lay next to the girls as they paddled and splashed, taking it in turns to panic when one or the other fell over or dunked her head in. By the end of the week, we were more or less lying still as they waded about, squirting each other and cackling.
Actually, a week-long bath was pretty much what I needed. Obviously, everything was mixed in with the standard tantrums and howls too. So it was tiring. But not tiring like home, where the filthy weather and darkness traps you indoors too often, and there's nothing new to see or do that doesn't cost money.
Dolphin watching was probably the most extreme distillation of the week. We sat in the bowels of a glass-bottomed catamaran watching pale flocks of strange creatures drift by, trying to convince F not to sulk by buying her squeaking, light-up keychains. At the time, it was actually exhausting and annoying, even slightly boring. But now we're home again, it's a memory of something exotic and unexpected to be treasured against the winter chills.
- Travel
- Christmas
- Bodily Fluids
-
On Seaside Towns
We took a little pre-Christmas break this year, nipping out to Tenerife for a week. F was very excited about this until we actually woke her on the day of the flight, at four in the morning. Then she howled and went back to bed.
Thomas Cook Sunwing hotels - nothing I'd ever been to before. And nothing, in my stuffy middle-class mindset, that I'd really considered as being relaxing. Even Tenerife had never appealed, I'd always had it pegged as a clubbing hotspot and nothing else. But a week of sitting by the pool, watching F and C get confident around water in blazing sunshine, and I'm convinced.
Bleak island, Tenerife. Craggy and dusty and deserty, scattered with little towns that look like miserable places to live. The ground doesn't look fit for human life, it's all gullies and sagebrush. No water other than the sea, which actually adds to the salt flat harshness of the place. Once you get into the towns, it's no better really, Hotel industry buildings, with everything desperate to tell you it's your home from home. Real English Food, Best Steak for Best Prices, Spectacular Sea Views, boasts each and every identikit bar. And the leathery touts hand you tickets and banter as you pass each one, until your pockets are full of business cards and your brain full of empty promises.
I still liked it! I just like moaning more. We didn't have to eat at any of the tourist traps, we'd gone all-inclusive with the hotel. Pacing the black beaches under the sun and examining knock-off bag shops at a snail's pace was surprisingly relaxing.
On Water
Neither of the girls like the sea yet. Too loud and scary for F. And C got some surf up the back of her legs unexpectedly, after which she would leg it for the dry part of the beach as fast as she could given a moment's notice.
The pools back at the hotel, though, that was different. Bath-warm water at either knee or thigh depth, depending on which of the kids' pools you chose. V and I lay next to the girls as they paddled and splashed, taking it in turns to panic when one or the other fell over or dunked her head in. By the end of the week, we were more or less lying still as they waded about, squirting each other and cackling.
Actually, a week-long bath was pretty much what I needed. Obviously, everything was mixed in with the standard tantrums and howls too. So it was tiring. But not tiring like home, where the filthy weather and darkness traps you indoors too often, and there's nothing new to see or do that doesn't cost money.
Dolphin watching was probably the most extreme distillation of the week. We sat in the bowels of a glass-bottomed catamaran watching pale flocks of strange creatures drift by, trying to convince F not to sulk by buying her squeaking, light-up keychains. At the time, it was actually exhausting and annoying, even slightly boring. But now we're home again, it's a memory of something exotic and unexpected to be treasured against the winter chills.
Monday, October 31, 2016
Scary
C igs hekl0.ping me to0 typ0e t0his0..
.
.She's 093 learnt lots of communication skills this last month. In fact, the last two (since she started dagis) have been amazing in terms of how muchg she'nhj57 ty has learned and how fast. "Ring!" she has just told me, and then explained with gestures that she meant 'take your silver celtic knot ring off, Daddy, so I can first put it on and then hurl it across the room really hard so you lose it under the sofa for a while.'
Yeah, it's cute that she's talking, enough so that I fall into the idiot trap of doing what she tells me. a
ynn6ghyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyystop it! Daddfy is tuyping jrusitynowhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhno, get off.
-
It's been a busy couple of months. I've been devising and rehearsing a play with local theatre powerhouse GEST. Working full time (a rare joy for this actor) was exhausting, coupled with going straight to Dagis to fetch the girls. What should we have for dinner? Pasta with no sauce and frankfurters? But we've had that every day for the last six million years, god dammit. Why can't you let me exert my will as alpha male in the house just once, you pack of she-devils?
Alpha male, hah. Omicron is nearer the mark.
-
Riddles with F, courtesy of the back of the breakfast milk carton.
"What can a rat draw as easily as an Elephant?" I ask her. The riddle works better in Swedish, the verb dra is more like pull or drag, and my translation makes the answer a bit too easy.
"Breath!" says F, happily.
"What can cross a river without moving?"
"A bridge!"
V comes in and is impressed, F is pretty good at these. "Who always wears his hat on his feet?" she asks.
"Mummy!" snaps F. "That is wrong! You asked the wrong number! Don't! Do! That!"
The answers are obviously harder if you ask the riddles out of order. F writes her own one by way of revenge.
"Daddy, what is red and goes over water and can't stand still?"
I have no idea. Luckily for my reputation, neither does F. Answers on a postcard, please.
-
Time out for me, starting tomorrow. Off to Kuala Lumpur for my brother's wedding, leaving the family at home. Mixed feelings as usual, the bubbling glee that the prospect of sixteen hours of flight/sleep brings tempered with the massive guilt complex of abandoning the family nest for a week. You can see where my head's at by the fact that I think the wedding is less exciting than sleeping on the plane right now.
-
Halloween has been heavy on F's mind these last few weeks. Pumpkins everywhere, and much talk of spooks, In the spirit of this haunted day (see what I did there?), F has written, illustrated and performed her first ghost story, which I here reproduce for your eerie titillation. Reader, beware.
The Blood Ghost
Once upon a time there was a ghost. She made a dress out of blood, and then she put it on a coat hanger.
When she put the dress on, she was very scary. She scared everybody, a pumpkin and a witch and spook and some bats. Even you, Daddy.
And then she took her dress off because she was too scary. Everyone could see she was just a ghost underneath and it was okay again. Then that was the end.
Thursday, October 6, 2016
Lumpy
C is nearly a metre tall already. After two months at playschool, she can jog and climb with facility, eat with a fork or a spoon (player's choice) and realise when F is trying to take a toy away from her before it happens.
She loved the first few weeks of Trumman. V stayed in with her for the first few, then we slowly weaned ourselves out of the way. About a week after we did that, C cottoned on to the fact that mummy and daddy were leaving her behind, and started screaming miserably as soon as we went in the school gate. There's nothing that says thank-you like the look on a preschool teacher's face as you hand them a rigid, weeping child and scuttle cheerily off to work. Unless it's the look on a preschool teacher's face when said child then immediately shits itself.
"Gaafn," C says, waving a fork (Swe: gaffeln) at me. Her sister is Eyya, her shoes are Sues, when she's finished eating she wants to get dahn, dahn. Mostly she points with a muscular ferocity more suited to throwing darts, and snaps "Dare!" at whatever she wants identified, donated or transport to. "Wow!" she says when she's impressed. "Oh deah," when less so. My name, of course, she can utter smoothly and flawlessly, especially at 0245.
I served her leftover pasta this evening. "Oh deah, Daddy. Dahn, dahn."
I need to have a lump taken off my face. It's the encysted remains of a decade-old boil, delightfully, and therefore the medical equivalent of John Masefield's Box of Delights. The BBC adaptation, naturally, full of unexpected Wurzel Gummidges.
Calling anyone on the phone in Sweden remains a crapshoot for me. Unable to see the shapes of people's mouths or read their body language, I am deprived of two thirds of my comprehension.
- I have a lump on my face. I want it taken away, I said plaintively to the booking line. There was a longish pause.
- Oh, right, a lump, she said, sounding unusually happy about this. Well, we'll see what we can do.
The Swedish for lump in this context is knöl. The Swedish for Fuck, on the other hand, is knull. Retrospectively, I rest happy in the knowledge I brought joy to someone's morning.
F was told a while back to choose a soft toy from home that she could take to playschool with her and keep there. Bunbun was too precious and had caused problems by being left in the wrong place at various points, either at home during the day or in a classroom locker by night.
Parental pride! F chose the Cthulhu hand puppet I bought her when she was very little. Probably, in fairness, because she was told to choose one that wasn't too important, but rest on your laurels while you may, I say.
Double laurels, in fact, for F has started a spate of drawing. Neatly coloured and cut out parrots, mostly. But not all of her winged creatures are of this earthly realm. Iä! Iä!
She loved the first few weeks of Trumman. V stayed in with her for the first few, then we slowly weaned ourselves out of the way. About a week after we did that, C cottoned on to the fact that mummy and daddy were leaving her behind, and started screaming miserably as soon as we went in the school gate. There's nothing that says thank-you like the look on a preschool teacher's face as you hand them a rigid, weeping child and scuttle cheerily off to work. Unless it's the look on a preschool teacher's face when said child then immediately shits itself.
"Gaafn," C says, waving a fork (Swe: gaffeln) at me. Her sister is Eyya, her shoes are Sues, when she's finished eating she wants to get dahn, dahn. Mostly she points with a muscular ferocity more suited to throwing darts, and snaps "Dare!" at whatever she wants identified, donated or transport to. "Wow!" she says when she's impressed. "Oh deah," when less so. My name, of course, she can utter smoothly and flawlessly, especially at 0245.
I served her leftover pasta this evening. "Oh deah, Daddy. Dahn, dahn."
-
I need to have a lump taken off my face. It's the encysted remains of a decade-old boil, delightfully, and therefore the medical equivalent of John Masefield's Box of Delights. The BBC adaptation, naturally, full of unexpected Wurzel Gummidges.
Calling anyone on the phone in Sweden remains a crapshoot for me. Unable to see the shapes of people's mouths or read their body language, I am deprived of two thirds of my comprehension.
- I have a lump on my face. I want it taken away, I said plaintively to the booking line. There was a longish pause.
- Oh, right, a lump, she said, sounding unusually happy about this. Well, we'll see what we can do.
The Swedish for lump in this context is knöl. The Swedish for Fuck, on the other hand, is knull. Retrospectively, I rest happy in the knowledge I brought joy to someone's morning.
-
F was told a while back to choose a soft toy from home that she could take to playschool with her and keep there. Bunbun was too precious and had caused problems by being left in the wrong place at various points, either at home during the day or in a classroom locker by night.
Parental pride! F chose the Cthulhu hand puppet I bought her when she was very little. Probably, in fairness, because she was told to choose one that wasn't too important, but rest on your laurels while you may, I say.
Double laurels, in fact, for F has started a spate of drawing. Neatly coloured and cut out parrots, mostly. But not all of her winged creatures are of this earthly realm. Iä! Iä!
 |
| Like a tiny Pickman. |
Monday, August 29, 2016
Empty Den
"Daddy, I don't want to die."
Oh, good. F has cottoned on to the fact that mortality is a problem for us puny humans. Through various discussions about growing up and biology, she has absorbed the following information.
These three facts have combined into a superfact, much like a trio of tiny autobots becoming something much larger and ridiculous.
"When I'm nineteen, I will be so tall and big my head will reach the ceiling and then I'll die! That will make me sad, because I'll miss you, daddy."
It's been a few years since I revised my physiology, I know, but I'm usually more accurate a teacher than this. F can explain immunity to you, post-chicken pox, and was annoyed to learn it doesn't apply to the cold she's about to catch from C. She can, with a little help, write her name (although the letters are generally in whimsical positions and rotations about the page).
Although my first instincts were to dismantle the broad raft of inaccuracies on which her fallacy was floating, I found myself considering the deeper and sharkier sea of knowledge underneath it. I guess knowing the straight-up facts about death isn't exactly a high priority when you're three and a half. There's a reason Ladybird don't do 'Peter and Jane Do A Eulogy'. Instead, I reassured F that death was nothing to worry about and that she wasn't ever going to outgrow the roof, and she's not spoken about it since. Probably fine, then.
C started daycare a couple of weeks ago. She'd been looking forward to it after the sneak previews she got when she helped me go and pick F up. She's a lot more outgoing than her older sister was at the same age. She's already running off without a backward glance, glad to be free of her oafish parents for a few hours, and importing all the local viruses back to the home for closer study. Last Saturday after breakfast, she stood at the front door hammering on it angrily and barking impatient reminders to us that it was time to go now.
I suppose this is positive? There's an acting job starting next week for me, and until it kicks off, I can actually sit at home by myself and get things done. That's a novelty, I can tell you. A lonely, echoing novelty that's lousy with guilt. After a few hours, I had to put Peppa Pig on and spill some milk somewhere in the house so I could clean it up and feel redeemed.
V and I actually had a day off together today, for about the first time since F was born, where we didn't have to book a babysitter to go out and relax a little. Floating semi-coherently round the spa, letting exhaustion flood out of me like sweat from a Trump campaign manager during a live broadcast, I couldn't help but feel I was shirking responsibility.
Tiny creatures on my shoulders, with the faces of my children, floated with me, mouthing "why, daddy? Why don't you like us any more?" as miniature tears sparkled down their cheeks. It countered the effects of the looped Enya album the spa was playing pretty acutely, I can tell you.
Could have just been the tiredness, mind you. A pulled pork lunch and some coffee down by the canal, and I perked right back up.
Oh, good. F has cottoned on to the fact that mortality is a problem for us puny humans. Through various discussions about growing up and biology, she has absorbed the following information.
- Children slowly grow into adults, and usually stop growing before they are twenty years old
- Living things eventually die
- Death is, in general, a sad thing that people don't like
These three facts have combined into a superfact, much like a trio of tiny autobots becoming something much larger and ridiculous.
"When I'm nineteen, I will be so tall and big my head will reach the ceiling and then I'll die! That will make me sad, because I'll miss you, daddy."
It's been a few years since I revised my physiology, I know, but I'm usually more accurate a teacher than this. F can explain immunity to you, post-chicken pox, and was annoyed to learn it doesn't apply to the cold she's about to catch from C. She can, with a little help, write her name (although the letters are generally in whimsical positions and rotations about the page).
Although my first instincts were to dismantle the broad raft of inaccuracies on which her fallacy was floating, I found myself considering the deeper and sharkier sea of knowledge underneath it. I guess knowing the straight-up facts about death isn't exactly a high priority when you're three and a half. There's a reason Ladybird don't do 'Peter and Jane Do A Eulogy'. Instead, I reassured F that death was nothing to worry about and that she wasn't ever going to outgrow the roof, and she's not spoken about it since. Probably fine, then.
-
C started daycare a couple of weeks ago. She'd been looking forward to it after the sneak previews she got when she helped me go and pick F up. She's a lot more outgoing than her older sister was at the same age. She's already running off without a backward glance, glad to be free of her oafish parents for a few hours, and importing all the local viruses back to the home for closer study. Last Saturday after breakfast, she stood at the front door hammering on it angrily and barking impatient reminders to us that it was time to go now.
I suppose this is positive? There's an acting job starting next week for me, and until it kicks off, I can actually sit at home by myself and get things done. That's a novelty, I can tell you. A lonely, echoing novelty that's lousy with guilt. After a few hours, I had to put Peppa Pig on and spill some milk somewhere in the house so I could clean it up and feel redeemed.
V and I actually had a day off together today, for about the first time since F was born, where we didn't have to book a babysitter to go out and relax a little. Floating semi-coherently round the spa, letting exhaustion flood out of me like sweat from a Trump campaign manager during a live broadcast, I couldn't help but feel I was shirking responsibility.
Tiny creatures on my shoulders, with the faces of my children, floated with me, mouthing "why, daddy? Why don't you like us any more?" as miniature tears sparkled down their cheeks. It countered the effects of the looped Enya album the spa was playing pretty acutely, I can tell you.
Could have just been the tiredness, mind you. A pulled pork lunch and some coffee down by the canal, and I perked right back up.
Wednesday, July 27, 2016
Homeland
Holidays. London feels like a foreign city to me now, which makes it very disconcerting when I recognise vast chunks of it. It reminds me of reading about that neurology trick you can do with a pair of prisms, forcing someone to see upside down until their brain corrects it. Perhaps if I survive the first few hours, I'll remember to look the other way when crossing the street again.
Everything is smaller and dirtier than I remember. Hotter, too, we've arrived in the middle of a heatwave. Strapping a baby to your chest and jumping on a bus is cheaper than the sauna, but somehow less replenishing.
Ten days of touristing to go.
London Zoo. F is about a foot and a half away from a ring-tailed lemur. It's squatting in the undergrowth next to the path inside the free-roaming enclosure, gnawing on the husk of some kind of fruit, eyes like tiny black marbles and the face of a wizened toddler. F makes an 'awww, cute' squeaky noise of excitement.
The lemur looks at her and makes pretty much the same noise back.
The two of them converse briefly before the lemur goes to pick and eat lice out of its friend's coat. Later that night, as part of an entirely different conversation, I ask F what she wants to be when she grows up, she says "ring-tailed lemur."
C's cousin H spots her across the room and shouts her name triumphantly, then launches herself into a huge, vigorous hug. The kind where you dig your heel into the back of the other person's knee in order to get extra purchase. C isn't quite able to provide the same kind of support as an adult, somehow, and over they both go.
Half an hour later, when Cousin H spots C again, C edges round to the other side of the coffee table and smiles politely.
Meanwhile, F and Cousin S are playing tigers under the same coffee table. A polite discussion is had with them regarding the correct use of fingernails during a playful scratch after I lose a small piece of my nose.
F wades deeper into the stream, leaving a turbid cloud in the water behind her. The cloud drifts towards the row of stones at the side of the pool, slowly dispersing through the gaps and being replaced by clear water.
The hedgerow swaying with murmuring bees, the brook chuckles and gurgles. We wade about with Cousin D and Uncle P, any skin not covered by the icy water sweltering. F catches some stones, a dead slug and much slime. D catches tiny shrimp-like things, larval stages of some beetle or other in their transparent early life.
I remember a lot of dam building from my own youth. Eternities of it, some afternoons, sluicing about in the river Tay during low summers or lurching round foresty streams with my trousers rolled up. Where has my energy gone? Why am I not crashing to all fours to lever up a boulder and plug that last gap? I just want to lurch home and avoid sunstroke. Staying up until two in the morning having a drunken conversation about the monarchy with Aunty R probably didn't help. My sweat is probably poisoning those poor water lice even now.
Happy all the same, though. Because F is.
"Ooowlou!" squeals C, pointing.
"Oh look!" I repeat after her. "Yes, that's a silver necklace in the shape of a human heart!"
The shop outside the Evolution of Man exhibition has gone all pseudo-victorian with its tat. Steampunk skull ashtrays and collections of empty specimen bottles to drink cold brewed coffee out of, through the fronds of your hipster Darwin beard. C is loving it. She slept through the earthquake bit earlier, wasn't too impressed by the gemstone hall (who is?) but this is a shop. C likes shops.
"Ooowlou!" she says again.
"Daddy, I haven't got one of these at home so I want one," F says, brandishing god alone knows what. A biro with a mangy peacock feather tail? A human cranium ashtray? A tea towel printed with a diagram of Huxley's arse? Memory fails me. Nothing anyone without a certain level of disposable income could justifiably want or need. That's not me. The only disposables I do these days are nappies.
We go to Hamleys. Part of me never comes out.
H and E are playing vigorously with F, who is doing her best to keep up with the two older children despite being tired, too hot and massively overstimulated. Round the back of the Naval Museum in Greenwich is a cafe, where V, S and I sit and chat as C smears cake and ice cream over her face happily.
Their game is tickling. Having established that I am ticklish, they are chasing each other around by the long terraced fountain beside the cafe poking each other gleefully and trying not to let their shrieks become screams.
It's very good to see old friends again. S and her husband I along with their children H and E today, CC from drama school the day before, Clara's godfather J for the first time and the CMDEB family unit (families look like items from the Christmas Honours list in my shorthand. Commanders of the Militarily Distinguished Empire Brigade, all of them) later in the week. People I now cling to contact with via Facebook or Whatsapp, instead seeing regularly as I'd like. So many children, alarmingly energetic miniatures of their parents with the same traits, the same smiles, all new purpose and (generally but not exclusively, and certainly compared to me) more hair and better waistlines.
F later recalls this as her favourite favourite moment of the week. "I was so so happy," she says, "playing tickling by the fountain. We should get a fountain like that for our house. We can have it outside the balcony." I notify the local council on our return to Sweden.
Melted ice cream on the Southbank. People grabbing cheeky pints from the Founders Arms, then chugging off along the river in motor cruisers. A tired round of applause for the anticlimactic end of some hyperactive street performance. Someone selling the world's smallest kite at the end of the Blade of Light bridge. London, as sweaty, boisterous, dangerous, swarming and cheerful as I ever remember it, a wonderbox of nostalgia and a paean to going home all at once.
V pops into a shop, a Tesco somewhere on Poultry. For fifteen minutes, I juggle both C and F, trying to get them to sing or guess the incoming bus number. Nearby, someone plays dance music at a boggling volume. The sky is mostly blue, but filtered through dust, fumey heat and ominously tarnished clouds, it fits over the city like the lid of a dry well.
Moments away from tantrums, V arrives, then the no. 8 bus. F is furious that someone is sitting in her seat (top front) and somehow makes them get off early through focussed venom. "I can see everything!" she declares, proudly.
In the back garden of my aunt and uncle M&M's house, F and C play with a tub of water and a now-antique toy. A red plastic hippo with paddling feet, wound up by pulling a duck on a string out of his mouth. In the bath in Sevenoaks, against a tiled vista of an exotically white sanded beach and years ago, he would swim down the string and eat the duck. Three of his feet are missing, but none of the essential joy of his existence.
Later, walking along the Greenway as we come back from the Olympic parks, C starts singing along with us, copying the words and music as best she can. One of those toddlery approximations that sounds like garbage and makes you feel like you've birthed Mozart. Bje-dje-djoy-zhoy-zhoy-zhoydjizyoy!
A last day. Exhausted after over a week of thundery sun and childbearing, I stay at home to watch Ceebeebies with the girls as Mummy goes to John Lewis. F likes seeing new cartoons in English, especially ones she knows in Swedish at home. Tree Fu Tom gets extra yoga-powered support here, and she bemoans the fact that she won't be able to watch the Lingo Show in Gothenburg.
C attempts the stairs, when she isn't attempting the oven, the bins or the back garden. She strips cd cases from the shelves and hurls them at the walls, laughing delightedly. If she sleeps, F wakes. If F sleeps, C wakes. Neither of them seem to enjoy any food that isn't ice cream any more. "I don't want to go home to Gothenburg," F says, "I want to have my own room here with stairs and a rainbow quilt."
I will miss London too, fiercely on occasion, but probably not for several months.
C points up and says "Oh luh!", her face transformed by wonder. It's her house! She lives here! In ten days, she's survived chickenpox, seen various new worlds and modes of living and probably eaten at least one fridge magnet because I'm sure there were seven not six when we arrived in Bow. And she's taller, more confident and much more chatty, not that she was doing badly in any of those stakes when we left. Travel broadens the child, it seems.
Borta bra, hemma bäst.
Everything is smaller and dirtier than I remember. Hotter, too, we've arrived in the middle of a heatwave. Strapping a baby to your chest and jumping on a bus is cheaper than the sauna, but somehow less replenishing.
Ten days of touristing to go.
-1-
London Zoo. F is about a foot and a half away from a ring-tailed lemur. It's squatting in the undergrowth next to the path inside the free-roaming enclosure, gnawing on the husk of some kind of fruit, eyes like tiny black marbles and the face of a wizened toddler. F makes an 'awww, cute' squeaky noise of excitement.
The lemur looks at her and makes pretty much the same noise back.
The two of them converse briefly before the lemur goes to pick and eat lice out of its friend's coat. Later that night, as part of an entirely different conversation, I ask F what she wants to be when she grows up, she says "ring-tailed lemur."
-2-
C's cousin H spots her across the room and shouts her name triumphantly, then launches herself into a huge, vigorous hug. The kind where you dig your heel into the back of the other person's knee in order to get extra purchase. C isn't quite able to provide the same kind of support as an adult, somehow, and over they both go.
Half an hour later, when Cousin H spots C again, C edges round to the other side of the coffee table and smiles politely.
Meanwhile, F and Cousin S are playing tigers under the same coffee table. A polite discussion is had with them regarding the correct use of fingernails during a playful scratch after I lose a small piece of my nose.
-3-
F wades deeper into the stream, leaving a turbid cloud in the water behind her. The cloud drifts towards the row of stones at the side of the pool, slowly dispersing through the gaps and being replaced by clear water.
The hedgerow swaying with murmuring bees, the brook chuckles and gurgles. We wade about with Cousin D and Uncle P, any skin not covered by the icy water sweltering. F catches some stones, a dead slug and much slime. D catches tiny shrimp-like things, larval stages of some beetle or other in their transparent early life.
I remember a lot of dam building from my own youth. Eternities of it, some afternoons, sluicing about in the river Tay during low summers or lurching round foresty streams with my trousers rolled up. Where has my energy gone? Why am I not crashing to all fours to lever up a boulder and plug that last gap? I just want to lurch home and avoid sunstroke. Staying up until two in the morning having a drunken conversation about the monarchy with Aunty R probably didn't help. My sweat is probably poisoning those poor water lice even now.
Happy all the same, though. Because F is.
-4-
"Ooowlou!" squeals C, pointing.
"Oh look!" I repeat after her. "Yes, that's a silver necklace in the shape of a human heart!"
The shop outside the Evolution of Man exhibition has gone all pseudo-victorian with its tat. Steampunk skull ashtrays and collections of empty specimen bottles to drink cold brewed coffee out of, through the fronds of your hipster Darwin beard. C is loving it. She slept through the earthquake bit earlier, wasn't too impressed by the gemstone hall (who is?) but this is a shop. C likes shops.
"Ooowlou!" she says again.
"Daddy, I haven't got one of these at home so I want one," F says, brandishing god alone knows what. A biro with a mangy peacock feather tail? A human cranium ashtray? A tea towel printed with a diagram of Huxley's arse? Memory fails me. Nothing anyone without a certain level of disposable income could justifiably want or need. That's not me. The only disposables I do these days are nappies.
-5-
We go to Hamleys. Part of me never comes out.
-6-
H and E are playing vigorously with F, who is doing her best to keep up with the two older children despite being tired, too hot and massively overstimulated. Round the back of the Naval Museum in Greenwich is a cafe, where V, S and I sit and chat as C smears cake and ice cream over her face happily.
Their game is tickling. Having established that I am ticklish, they are chasing each other around by the long terraced fountain beside the cafe poking each other gleefully and trying not to let their shrieks become screams.
It's very good to see old friends again. S and her husband I along with their children H and E today, CC from drama school the day before, Clara's godfather J for the first time and the CMDEB family unit (families look like items from the Christmas Honours list in my shorthand. Commanders of the Militarily Distinguished Empire Brigade, all of them) later in the week. People I now cling to contact with via Facebook or Whatsapp, instead seeing regularly as I'd like. So many children, alarmingly energetic miniatures of their parents with the same traits, the same smiles, all new purpose and (generally but not exclusively, and certainly compared to me) more hair and better waistlines.
F later recalls this as her favourite favourite moment of the week. "I was so so happy," she says, "playing tickling by the fountain. We should get a fountain like that for our house. We can have it outside the balcony." I notify the local council on our return to Sweden.
-7-
Melted ice cream on the Southbank. People grabbing cheeky pints from the Founders Arms, then chugging off along the river in motor cruisers. A tired round of applause for the anticlimactic end of some hyperactive street performance. Someone selling the world's smallest kite at the end of the Blade of Light bridge. London, as sweaty, boisterous, dangerous, swarming and cheerful as I ever remember it, a wonderbox of nostalgia and a paean to going home all at once.
V pops into a shop, a Tesco somewhere on Poultry. For fifteen minutes, I juggle both C and F, trying to get them to sing or guess the incoming bus number. Nearby, someone plays dance music at a boggling volume. The sky is mostly blue, but filtered through dust, fumey heat and ominously tarnished clouds, it fits over the city like the lid of a dry well.
Moments away from tantrums, V arrives, then the no. 8 bus. F is furious that someone is sitting in her seat (top front) and somehow makes them get off early through focussed venom. "I can see everything!" she declares, proudly.
-8-
In the back garden of my aunt and uncle M&M's house, F and C play with a tub of water and a now-antique toy. A red plastic hippo with paddling feet, wound up by pulling a duck on a string out of his mouth. In the bath in Sevenoaks, against a tiled vista of an exotically white sanded beach and years ago, he would swim down the string and eat the duck. Three of his feet are missing, but none of the essential joy of his existence.
Later, walking along the Greenway as we come back from the Olympic parks, C starts singing along with us, copying the words and music as best she can. One of those toddlery approximations that sounds like garbage and makes you feel like you've birthed Mozart. Bje-dje-djoy-zhoy-zhoy-zhoydjizyoy!
-9-
A last day. Exhausted after over a week of thundery sun and childbearing, I stay at home to watch Ceebeebies with the girls as Mummy goes to John Lewis. F likes seeing new cartoons in English, especially ones she knows in Swedish at home. Tree Fu Tom gets extra yoga-powered support here, and she bemoans the fact that she won't be able to watch the Lingo Show in Gothenburg.
C attempts the stairs, when she isn't attempting the oven, the bins or the back garden. She strips cd cases from the shelves and hurls them at the walls, laughing delightedly. If she sleeps, F wakes. If F sleeps, C wakes. Neither of them seem to enjoy any food that isn't ice cream any more. "I don't want to go home to Gothenburg," F says, "I want to have my own room here with stairs and a rainbow quilt."
I will miss London too, fiercely on occasion, but probably not for several months.
-10-
C points up and says "Oh luh!", her face transformed by wonder. It's her house! She lives here! In ten days, she's survived chickenpox, seen various new worlds and modes of living and probably eaten at least one fridge magnet because I'm sure there were seven not six when we arrived in Bow. And she's taller, more confident and much more chatty, not that she was doing badly in any of those stakes when we left. Travel broadens the child, it seems.
Borta bra, hemma bäst.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)