One of these Nights - Sixteen Years Ago

Sixteen years ago this week, I was in the Special Care Baby Unit at Leeds General Infirmary. Two babies, colour-coded by their blankets, were in cots next to my bed. One, the blue one, was the biggest baby on the ward by some margin whilst his sister, wearing an enormous hat to stop heat escaping from her very tiny head and with a tube up her nose to feed her, weighed only just over half what her brother weighed - a couple of bags of sugar, no more. They were our miracles.

Scroll on a few days and we arrived back at the little house on the prairie which had, for their arrival, been turned upside down - literally. Their first nursery was the dining room (now our sitting room) as we had been advised that there would be significantly less running up and down stairs if their world was contained on the ground floor. Two of everything babywise takes up a lot of space!

We were joined for the first few weeks by a maternity nurse, Sister R, who had once been the supremo of Harrogate's only maternity hospital and where number 1 child and I had spent a few formative days - formative for her, reformative for me whilst I started to shrink back to the old me. Anyway Sister R had a lovely, old-fashioned approach to babies and routine and she quickly licked us into shape. She used to stay for three or four nights a week giving us desperate parents a few much-needed nights off to recover - and yes, I know we were very lucky to have her. Once in residence, she would spend the evening in front of the television with us with the remote control gripped vice-like in her hand, insisting (as if we had the energy to argue) that we watch medical programmes (yes, me the most squeamish person in the world and these were 'the bloodier - the better' variety), nature programmes (nature programmes with blood even better) and football - the only sport we never watch in this house. Anyway aside from the television, she got bottle production on a mass scale organised and dealt with 3 and 4 in the middle of the night whilst my beloved and I slept on.

When she left, we were ready for her to go and for us to face up to the task ahead. This involved my beloved staying up till late to do the last feed at any sort of sociable hour, then me getting up in the wee small hours to feed the one that woke up first, then waking up the second one (whether he or she wanted to be woken or not) for their feed. Sometimes, in tiredness and confusion, I wasn't sure whether I had fed one or both or perhaps three of them but we and they survived. I watched, in chunks in no particular order, The Commitments and, towards the end, the Olympics in Atlanta, which featured all those sports which only true aficionados, people who work night shifts (me) and insomniacs watch - women's weightlifting and synchronised swimming to name but two. Incidentally, anyone who thinks synchronised swimming and synchronised diving are in the same skill-category are way off beam. Synchronised diving is brilliant, brave and exciting and the stuff in the pool with the make-up and weird nose things is not, in my view, any more a sport than dominoes!

What was most wonderful was how the older two fell immediately in love with the twins. They helped brilliantly, changed nappies enthusiastically and were generally the proudest parents - apart from their own! And that relationship is still magic today and when they are all at home together - the messiest, loudest and happiest times happen. When war breaks out in this house, as it sometimes does, we need to remember how we are all lights in each other's lives.

When the twins were born in the early and very antisocial hours on May 3rd 1996, the song on the radio in the delivery suite was played by the Eagles. One of These Nights might have been appropriate and Take It Easy would have been nice and I can't, sixteen years on, remember what it was but this one is my favourite so here's the link:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EaO-kgG7eCQ

The Rain it Raineth Every Day

Morning all! I had to look up the quote in the title and, of course, was delighted to be reminded that it was from Feste, the fool in Twelfth Night which is appropriate since it was Shakespeare's birthday this week (on the same day at St George's Day) and I spent a lot of my teenage years in Stratford upon Avon, probably acting the fool myself. I'm not being picky about the 'upon Avon' bit but usually now when people mention Stratford, they are referring to the Olympics.

Anyway, back to the rain for which we must accept some responsibility in this house. You see, every time my beloved goes away for an appreciable length of time we get weather. Not the normal stuff we get which in Yorkshire is usually a selection of all four seasons in one day but proper, big stuff. When my beloved goes to Las Vegas in January, we generally have to dig ourselves out through the snow and now, on his first ever trip to Pittsburg, he has provided us with a month's rain in a week. In our house, where sport is very much a feature, especially at this time of year, we have been rained off cricket, golf, tennis and cycling and had it not been for pilates and indoor tennis there would have been climbing of the walls, by me anyway. We've also been carbooted off but that is, as they say, another story.

The other thing is that this is an old house and when it rains, it leaks. Earlier in the week, to cap a very tricky day - tricky because number 4 had to hand in her graphics coursework for her GCSE and the computer was not behaving in an appropriate manner - number 3 informed me that rainwater was running through the downlighter in the bathroom. Luckily it was running straight into the sink therefore negating the requirement for a bucket but with two leaks already in the conservatory and the boiler room leaking so much that large amounts of plastic are permanently placed over all the electricity controls for the central heating, this was not looking good. I half expected a selection of indigenous animals to be pairing up and lining up ready to join us for a cruise across the flooded plains of North Yorkshire.

Anyway, today my beloved returns and already the skies are lightening - although I believe the pitch is so waterlogged that there will still be no cricket again this weekend ... though there might be tennis - so clearly he is responsible. Incidentally, twenty eight years ago tomorrow it was a wonderful, hot, sunny day and we are about to celebrate yet another wedding anniversary. This will be followed next week by the twins' 16th birthdays - unbelievable, how did that happen? And then number 2 will have her birthday the following week, but she is feeling a bit sensitive about her age to which the only response is clearly: wait till you get to fifty something.

So off to walk the dogs now (who are fast developing webbed feet) and resisting the urge to wear any of the several wetsuits which are still on my office floor because we couldn't carboot them last week due to ... yes, the rain cancelling the carboot sale. Meanwhile I have been enjoying a spot of Fawlty Towers on Youtube, so here's the link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tcliR8kAbzc. Any similarities between members of the cast and our dear friends who run the best B&B in the Lake District are entirely ...um... deliberate!

The peace that passes all understanding...

On Easter Monday evening, we (my beloved and I plus three of the four children and one granny) found ourselves at our local pub for an early supper. Our lovely friends from our village had decided to do likewise and were there with two of their three offspring plus a brace of grannies. They, like us, had realised that they really needed not to cook another meal. In fact, they had totalled up that they had served over 50 meals during the Easter break and we were probably not far behind. In fact, my beloved was quite happy to rustle up a curry on Monday night but I couldn't face the ensuing mess in the kitchen and so we ate out on the largesse of the resident granny.

We are usually packed to the gunnels at Easter and Christmas with all four children home plus a boyfriend and a granny. Luckily this time no-one brought their pets as well because that does precipitate a sense of humour failure on my part. Anyway we had also had a visit from the other granny and her husband so we had done the family thing big style.

Today I put the granny on the train back to the Midlands and I and my little house on the prairie heaved a sigh of relief that we are now back to normal population-wise - two parents, two teenagers, two dogs and yes, daughter number 2 who has come back home for a while. And although it is Easter and not Christmas it made me think about the innkeeper in the Nativity.

Imagine, if you will, you learn that thousands of people are about to turn up in your town and that you are the proud owner of Bethlehem's equivalent of the Hotel du Vin. Great, you think to yourself, we'll spruce up the rooms, maybe slap on a mud hut extension and then we'll pack them in for the great taxpaying weekend and make a pile. And then, of course, you hear that your mother-in-law will be coming and will need a room and that is quickly followed by all the members of your extended family who all have to be in Bethlehem for the taxation jamboree. Suddenly your great moneymaking enterprise in which you have already made a considerable investment in art deco light fittings and shower attachments is being overrun with relatives who expect to stay gratis. So when the very expectant lady in blue and her rather harassed husband turn up you wonder which of your relatives you can turn out of their luxury accommodation, only to realise that, actually, if anyone gets asked to move there will be the mother and father of all family rows. Personally I feel sorry for him. And if any more of Noah's relatives had turned up we probably wouldn't have zebras (actually if his sons had been single, we probably would still have unicorns).

So here we are, after another big family weekend which was great fun, relaxing back into what passes for normal in this house, and very nice it is too.

So a quick update (in case you missed it on facebook) of the annual Easter egg hunt: 96 eggs were hidden in the garden very early on Sunday morning, after the church service on the top green in the village at 6.15am and breakfast in the small hall. Child number 4 was the runaway winner with child 2 coming in second and complaining bitterly that her younger sibling had been aided by the official referee. The stewards' enquiry rejected that accusation and the result stands. Number 1's boyfriend came a very creditable third - but he is training for the London Marathon and so is fairly nifty on his pins - with number 1 returning in fourth place. Child 3, however, proved that last year's win was a complete fluke and failed to find his quota of eggs which means there are more for me to find when I'm gardening for the next few weeks.

We are now rushing headlong into the tennis, cricket and GCSE season and are hoping for success in all three - it may kill me!

Memories from a Box

I have been doing some spring cleaning this week and have been, in the words of Captain Kirk, boldly going where no man has gone before. Actually man (and woman) have gone before but not for a very significant length of time. I have been in the cupboard under the stairs.

Without boring you with the immense amount of swimming equipment we seem to have (snorkels, flippers, masks, wet suits etc) for children aged two to fourteen ie nothing that will fit the current crop, and other 'stuff' in the broadest sense of the word, I also found a wooden box which had, many years before my children turned this planet into a noisier but far more interesting place, been given to me as a wedding present by some lovely old bachelor friends of my parents. The box once contained a huge selection of dried herbs and spices and was a proud possession in my very first kitchen. The herbs and spices were obviously chucked years ago (be relieved if you've eaten here recently) and only the box remained, finding its place under the stairs.

A couple of years ago, I sent a Christmas card to one of these lovely old chaps who used to come on holiday with us, first when I was a child with my parents and brother, and later with my own family and mother. I sent Jack a card every year and he always reciprocated. On this occasion he didn't. And thinking about it sometime later, using the marvels of the internet, I found his obituary. It made me sad that he had passed away in April of the previous year and we had not known. He was a really lovely chap.

When we were very small, we ventured bravely (as this was the nineteen sixties) on holiday to Ibiza which was then an island with just two hotels and an airport which could only be reached by planes powered by very strong elastic bands which were pulled tight and then released from Palma airport on Majorca. We stayed in one of the two hotels in what is now the clubbing metropolis, San Antonio, and a group of rugby friends of my father's happened to be staying in the other. These friends were three charming bachelors - Hoppy, Jack and Tiny and my childhood holiday memories are littered with these three legends.

Hoppy was perhaps the most hilarious. To us, my brother and me, they seemed quite old - they were perhaps in their early forties! Hoppy had all sorts of inventions. He had a machine (which looked like a wooden box about the size of a cigar case) which made money. You put cigarette paper in one end and bank notes came out the other. Not only were we children transfixed by this but the rather less sophisticated locals could not believe that this Englishman could produce money out of a box. He also had performing fleas (which were, of course, invisible) and the star flea was called Alphonse. Alphonse would only perform after considerable amounts of alcohol had been consumed by Hoppy and the gang. He also sang (and whenever I hear it, he is singing it in my head) The Girl from Ipanema.

Tiny came (out, as it turned out) and disappeared and was only part of the first few holidays and was replaced by Harold or Ha'hold as we called him. He was the absolute king of the Nuttalls Mintoes and there were no occasions upon which Mintoes were not available. I swear he had a suitcase full of them on every trip.

But Jack was my favourite. He taught me to swim and we swam for miles every day (although he must have been swimming with some terrible hangovers) and we would swim out across the bay to the caves where the Dragontikas lived (like dragons but not as dangerous). He was also responsible for my first major drinking incident aged about eight when he was left in charge of me while the rest of the crew went for a walk and he introduced me to some local wine (bottled water not being available). When my parents returned I was sleeping it off under a tree.

Hoppy died and Ha'hold disappeared (but probably not for the same reason as Tiny) and Jack continued to holiday with us on Ibiza where he had a rather scruffy but endearing apartment with only one egg cup. Each year, he entertained my older girls when they were little as he had entertained my brother and me. He was rather follicly-challenged by then but that didn't stop number 2 daughter from tying what little hair he had into many multi-coloured hair bobbles. The sight of his rather rotund shape performing a perfect bomb into the swimming pool will be with me for ever. Not much water left in the pool after that!

So finding the box in the cupboard under the stairs brought all this back and Jack's picture is on our gallery on the kitchen wall so if you stop by, I'll show you.

By the way, if you are in need of wet suits for children, I seem to be the proud owner of a few and will happily part with them for a small contribution to the Vietnam World Challenge fund for a young man in our village.

Keeping it Real

I've been giving a lot of thought to the kindle versus book debate and I think - though I reserve the right to change my mind at a later date - that I have reached a conclusion. You see, I can see that there are lots of good reasons for the kindle - portability, instant availability of titles and not least that you can whack up the type size which, as an optically-challenged older person, is obviously a huge bonus. But I think it is important to keep things real and that means buying actual books.

Curiously, it wasn't thinking about books that made me come to this conclusion. It was actually thinking about records, the demise of the record store and particularly, about the disappearance of the album cover. Hundreds of years ago, shortly after dinosaurs stopped walking the earth, when I was growing up, buying your first album and the subsequent ones that made up your collection and defined your street credibility amongst your peers was such a big thing. You went to a record store and looked at the covers, and the whole choosing thing was an event. An album purchase was something you could hold in your hand. 

And here we are now with books and bookshops. It is a small, but real pleasure to browse in a bookshop. To look at the book covers, see the illustration on the front, read the comments from the critics and a summary of the story and the feel and size of the book is still important. Do you buy a book in hardback because it's a book you'll treasure - or more often in my case, because I simply can't wait for the paperback to come out? 

Anyway, the more I think about it, the more that I worry that we may live our lives watching things on a screen. Yes, I know, I'm writing my blog on a computer and winging it into the ether but I like seeing things for real because when it is for real it becomes something which addresses more than one sense. Like the atmosphere at any kind of live sporting event which is vastly superior to the brilliant view that watching it on the television gives you - even with a very knowledgeable commentary, although frequently I shout as much at the television as I do from the stands. But there is nothing like being there. 

Live music is the same. You might be squashed up in an arena surrounded by strangers but the sound and the craic that you get from being there is unforgettable. I can remember every band I've ever seen from sitting in the second row at the Coventry Theatre for David Bowie on his Aladdin Sane tour in my mid-teens with my friend Adrian to the Christmas Lindisfarne concerts at Leeds Uni, every one of the times we have seen Phil Collins (which is a lot because he is a big favourite of my beloved's) and some rather more up to date than that. 

The theatre and the cinema are the same. I would always rather go and see a film on the big screen for which films are rightly made, rather than wait for it to appear on the rather smaller screen in the comfort of our sitting room. I have just seen The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel which is set in India and the colours and sounds had such intensity that you cannot possibly feel in your own home. A few weeks ago I took my mother to see the absolute god of comedy, James Cordon in One Man, Two Guvnors in the West End. We laughed almost till we cried and, as they say, you had to be there.

So of course you can buy everything through the internet, make all your choices through the screen - computer, television and so on. But there is nothing like feeling, tasting, touching and using all your senses to make your choices. I'm for keeping it real. Yes, definitely.

For the love of rugby

This afternoon, number 3 and I are headed north to Newcastle to watch what may turn out to be one of the last Premiership matches in the North-East with our beloved Falcons holding up the entire Premiership by some margin. We're off with our Irish chums, Declan and his lovely daughter as Newcastle are playing London Irish and we are very excited.

My love of rugby goes back to my teenage years with my father. As the youngest of four - the other three are boys and older than me - it became my duty to go with Dad on a Saturday afternoon to watch Coventry who were the Leicester Tigers or Saracens of their day, topping the league most seasons. A few matches in and I was hooked.

In the years that followed, I played a bit at college before our team fell apart when the captain went off with a photographer from the Sun (for all the reasons that are probably springing to mind!) and then I met and married two men (not at the same time) who were not interested in rugby. In fact, the first one turned out to love Bradford City more than he loved me and romance in the Shed End was something of a struggle.

Anyway, years went by and I only occasionally watched rugby on the tv and then in 2003 the rugby bug bit me again. England were immense - some of them rather long in the tooth but nonetheless immense and I ironed my way through the World Cup in Australia, nearly burning a few shirts at key moments, and numbers 2 and 3 started to get hooked too.

After the joy of the famous World Cup winning drop goal by you-know-who, I wrote on the downstairs loo blackboard that I wanted to see the best fly-half in the world play at Newcastle. Of course, I hadn't factored in that he might be injured most of the time for the next five years, after which he would quite rightly move to sunnier climes but number 2 bought me tickets to Kingston Park, home of the Falcons and actually by the time the great one did play we were huge fans of the whole team.

In better years, Kingston Park has been a fortress - Newcastle might not have been able to win away from home but on their own ground they were impenetrable and we watched them beat some of the best. One time, it was a whole family outing to see Northampton, not least because number 2 had a bit of a thing for Ben Cohen. The sound of the home crowd - including us - singing the Blaydon Races when they score a try is absolutely epic.

So today number 3 and I are going to have a brilliant time, sing the Blaydon Races - even though we only know half the words, the rest being in Geordie - and fingers crossed Newcastle will make a miraculous escape from the drop at the end of the season and we will have another winter of rugby to look forward to.

And in the meantime, there'll be a whole summer of tennis for us to enjoy!

PS Number 1 plays rugby too and I am sure much better than I ever did. I did a lot of running down the wing, mostly without the ball and only occasionally with it. Number 1 is really good and having looked at her team, hopefully no photographer from the Sun will want want to run off with any of them - fine though they are!

Later: Just back and Newcastle won so definitely worth the trip. Off to celebrate with a glass of red and some good friends.

Growing Old Disgracefully

Last weekend, we (my beloved and I) and a whole host of England rugby supporters headed north to beautiful Edinburgh. Of course, not everyone was there to celebrate my birthday (which has a number way too large to admit to) but celebrate we all did!

Our love of Scotland's fairest city goes back to when number 1, and subsequently number 2, played lacrosse there in the Scottish Schools Championship. Though not at a Scottish school, northern lacrosse schools were always invited to make up the numbers and we, along with some like-minded parents, decided this was an excellent excuse for a weekend away, especially when once it neatly coincided with the Calcutta Cup. The first year, we actually stayed in Melrose, well away from the clubs and bars of Edinburgh of which more later, and as the girls were only just sixteen we larged it in Melrose instead. Although this is over ten years ago, I still remember my beloved performing one of his classic turns - standing on a chair, surfing whilst singing the theme to Hawai 50. Anyway we emptied the restaurant - more of that later too!

Further epic trips followed for the lacrosse and included several tales which perhaps should never see the light of day but amongst which eating polo mints which were sewn on to a girl's sweater in Rick's cocktail bar is just one. So we were especially delighted when number 1 chose Edinburgh for her university career. For four years, we had the best possible excuse for heading north and we got to know the city quite well. We did, in the last couple of years, find a boutique hotel in the centre of Edinburgh in which each room is charming and different and named after a place. We have now stayed in Reyjavik, Atlantis and, most recently, Moscow. 

Four years ago, when number 1 was in her final year, we thought we would give the Calcutta Cup another crack en famille. We managed to secure four tickets (two and two) for my beloved and me, plus children 1 and 3. This is not to say that 2 and 4 would not have enjoyed the experience but 1 and 3 were selected for the team on that day. Number 3 and I went with my Scottish brother in law (sort of brother in law as he is married to my ex-sister in law and is part of our rather elastic family group) and my beloved went with number 1. We turned up, England didn't. It wasn't that they lost having been massive favourites, it was the manner of the losing. Scrappy without the S.

When I noticed in the autumn that my birthday and the Calcutta Cup shared the same date, it had to be done. My beloved got two tickets and on Friday we headed north in an absolutely packed train to Edinburgh. I say packed because we couldn't sit together and I shared (and I mean shared) my seat with a substantial Scotswoman with a handbag of equal proportions who spent the entire time chatting her way through her contacts list on her phone. I pondered whether if I included her randomly and rather unflatteringly in the TFN which I was working on on my laptop, she might notice but then again... she was bigger than me and she might have hit me. 

Checked into Le Monde (with a couple of complementary glasses of fizz), we headed into the very cold Edinburgh night to our favourite Thai restaurant. It looks fairly unprepossessing from the outside but it is a cracker. We ordered and ate so much that we scarcely managed to waddle back to the hotel but it was worth it. (Our children were as disgruntled about missing Dusit as they were about missing the match - that's how good it is!)

Now if it's one thing my beloved does really well, it's my birthday. Presents, cards and out for a lovely breakfast and then on to the streets of Edinburgh for some shopping. After a few hours, he begged for Guinness and we found a great bar and listened to the craic about the match ahead from lots of really cheery (and confident!) Scottish supporters. The great thing about the rugby is that everyone is up for it in a really non-aggressive way. On the train, in the bars, on the bus and on the streets on the way to and from the match, the feeling is just one of 'we're having a great time, we're lucky to be here'. I cannot imagine such a thing at a football match, but perhaps I am wrong. It would be nice to think so. 

Murrayfield has a great atmosphere and we sat behind the posts looking down the pitch. Next to me was a young man who greeted me with a big smile and said, "I hope you shout - I do!" I think he knows now! Although he was an avid Scotland supporter, he and I had lots of banter and he was generous in his applause of the England scores as we were for theirs. The only discordant note in the whole day was the booing of Owen Farrell when he took the penalties. For goodness sake, he's 20, scarcely a man, at his first international. But he held his nerve - well done. And we were thrilled to see Phil Dowson get his first cap. We met him when he was at Newcastle and had dinner with him. He is a really bright guy who chose rugby over one of the top accountancy firms. He also introduced me to Jonny Wilkinson so he has a place in my heart forever!

Back in the city after the match, we met up with our chums from the village and had a fabulous night out. More Guinness, red wine and dinner at a tapas bar where we emptied the place and were asked to leave so the staff could go home. Then on to the nightclub below the hotel which is a really buzzing place. We could have queued for the Opal Lounge which is where the players usually go but Shanghai was packed and we braved the dance floor to show that even at our, well my, advanced age I've still got it. I made a new friend and I'm not going to say anymore about that - you had to be there! 

Yesterday I felt like hell. It was the worse hangover since the grappa incident in Cyprus a few years ago. I remembered asking my beloved for a soft drink at about 2.00am and he told me that a double Hendricks and tonic was one and got one for me. Apparently I didn't argue. Anyway we went for a brisk walk and emergency trip to the supermarket to buy painkillers, and one big fry up later I felt much better and well enough to squeeze onto the train home. 

So, hoping that this year continues to be as brilliant as my birthday weekend (but without the hangover) and fingers very firmly crossed for my friend to continue her excellent recovery from her major operation and that my children do as well in their exams as they deserve to (given the huge amount of school work currently occurring in this house). Have a good one!

PS Edinburgh was also the home for many years of the late, but very great Uncle Bill Hook, hero of Colditz and the most modest man I ever met. Gone but very definitely not forgotten. 

Phil: looking mean I think!