Parenthood is full of small absurdities. Yesterday, I discovered the entirety of the alphabet (in magnet form) inside my Doc Martens. Instead of wondering what my life was coming to, I merely thought, “Oh THAT’S where those went.” I often think of my mother-in-law, who once opened the freezer to discover the ice cube tray contained not only ice, but several Han Solo action figures “frozen in carbonite.” I think I can just be grateful for the moment that I don’t have a boy, because I don’t think I could handle waking up with an excruciating pain in my back to discover that I was lying on Action Man. At any rate, I digress.

The absurdity came to a head yesterday afternoon while on a routine shopping trip with The Prawn. Due to the misery of the weather, she was safely ensconced inside her rain bubble cockpit with trusty sidekick, Sir Humphrey Bollagaurd as I completed my errands. When I came to Waitrose in order to purchase cupcake making supplies for the up coming natal festivities of The Rock Star and Trumpet, I glanced down, and discovered, to my horror, that Humphrey was, in fact, AWOL.

“You’ve lost Humphrey!” I said out loud, and promptly burst into tears.

I blame my mother for this.

When I was small, she managed to instill a sense of extreme empathy that lingers with me today and unfortunately includes the anthropomorphication of inanimate objects. “Oh no!” she’d say, upon waking me up in the morning, “Bear fell out of bed! He must have had an awfully cold and lonely night on the floor.” Of course, this would emotionally cripple me for the day, imagining Bear spending the night on the floor, gazing up at me sadly, and wondering why I would be so callous as to ACCIDENTALLY KNOCK HIM OFF THE BED IN MY SLEEP.*

An instant search was mounted. I retraced my steps and stops all around town. I called back at shops I’d been in and shops along the route to see if anyone had handed Humphrey in. Then I did it again. And a third time. The town of Berkhamstead was treated to the sight of a grown woman with streaked mascara desperately hunting for a stuffed donkey.

The Prawn, meanwhile, who still has the short term memory of a goldfish, was fairly content to go along for the ride. She, of course, has no concept of “gone” or “lost”; to her, Humphrey simply IS. “Humfra!” she said happily, from time to time, deepening my despair as it became apparent that dear Sir Humphrey was nowhere to be found.

I wept bitterly all the way home, the Prawn in the backseat, happily oblivious. I could not help but imagine the sense of abandonment this well loved donkey must have felt as he tumbled from the buggy into the rainy street. I’m a 33 years old and I was devastated by the loss of this stuffed toy that my daughter had brought to life, just by loving him. I felt miserable and utterly absurd. The Rock Star was equally devastated when I tearfully informed him of the tragedy over the phone. I prefaced my confession with “Something awful happened!” leading him to believe that I’d crashed the car. I love that I married a man who would have PREFERED that I’d crashed the car.

The only thing that kept the disaster from becoming a catastrophe was that for once, the two of us had some foresight. Months ago, when it was obvious that Humphrey was becoming a fast favourite, we bought a “stunt double.” (This is when we discovered that he was, in fact, a pony called Parsley. It was a bit like finding out that your high school English teach that you had a crush on was gay.) Stunt Humphrey has been used once or twice when the One True Humphrey has been indisposed; either in the washing machine or left behind at Grandad’s house. The Prawn, of course knows only that Humphrey is white and soft, and has never been bothered by these substitutions, so when we returned from our ill fated trip, I went, with heavy heart, to the toy shelf to deploy Stunt Humphrey into active duty. In my head, I asked whatever spirit that formerly inhabited his predecessor to imbue the New Humphrey with the same spark of life, and then tentatively handed him to the Prawn, who’s face lit up as she embraced him.

To her, he is the One True Humphrey and always has been.

I remember eating out. I think it used to have something to do with eating. And maybe talking, but I can’t be sure.

We’ve been meaning to get together with the Cheerful Idiot and the Barmaid for sometime to celebrate our goddaughter’s birthday, so when we finally found a few hours that worked for 4 adults, it meant taking 3 children out in public and trying to get them to ingest something, which is always a situation to be avoided at all costs. To make matters worse, we chose a local branch of a crappy and overly pricey Italian chain joint with notoriously bad service, so we were obviously setting ourselves up for big fun. The Rock Star is also in the process of trying to get off of caffeine, so he spent the day thinking withdrawal related thoughts and wishing that he could sleep until forgetting that he’d ever HEARD of coffee, so his general fatigue was yet another factor to add to the general mayhem.

Even without the child factor, our local branch of Frankie and Benny’s (a restaurant that tries hard to convince you that it is oozing with New York Italian charm while simultaneously employing underage chavlings from the wrong side of Aylesbury.) is not exactly the venue for a restful repast. This was proven within moments of being seated when, in lieu of the traditional annoying, but generally innocuous, congregation of waiters to wish a guest Happy Birthday, the entire establishment was plunged into darkness and treated to a cacophonous version of the popular natal hymn the blared from every corner, followed by a fit-inducing light show. And then they did it again. And then a third time. The waves of hate emanating from my body could have killed small mammals.

The Rock Star and I don’t get out to restaurants much these days, but generally when we do get a chance to eat al fresco (al fresco translating to “not sitting on the couch watching The Simpsons”) it’s not quite the relaxing ordeal that it used to be seeing as how the third member of our party chews with her mouth open, belches loudly and feels that her hair is just as good a place as any for the main entrée. When wait staff as us “How many?”, “Two and a half” has become a standard answer and we tend to leave a fair amount of work for the poor sod who has to clean the table in the form of partially chewed pasta and baby wipes covered in various organic substances.

We miss dining mano y mano, the Rock Star and I.

I normally don’t undertake literary rants for fear of sounding like a total prat, but it’s occurred to me recently that I care far less about sounding like a prat than I used to.

Trumpet, my virtual sister-in-law and I exchange books a lot. We’ve both done our time in the book trade, (although I was simple a lowly information desk monkey and she was running a major shop. If she had been my manager, she probably would have kicked my ass.) so we both have an abiding love of literature. Our tastes are usually fairly similar, although she has on occasion complained that the books I recommend to her are “weird” to start out with, but she usually enjoys them by the end. (I’m a bit of a Christopher Moore fan, so the book about sentient dolphins waving their wedding tackle at people was the final straw for her) To make up for my odd choices, she insisted that I tackle The Master and Margarita, Mikhail Bulgakov’s scathing satire of life under a groaning Russian bureaucracy in 1930’s Moscow.

I’m not going to knock Russian literature out of hand, although you could beat a horse to death with Anna Karinina. (which I actually really enjoyed, by the way, but there’s a lot of room in 800 pages for angst.) Nor am I going to knock surrealism, although it’s just not my thing. (This is probably why I can’t deal with animae. A world where a small girl and a rabbit are standing in a forest waiting for a 12 legged cat-bus is not one that I want to inhabit.) What I would like to take to task is the automatic assumption that those of an intensely literary bent have that this is a masterpiece. I was pleased to see that among all of the glowing comments under the listing on Amazon, there was one lone voice who dared say, “What IS it with this book, anyway?”

Which is pretty much the question that I asked myself every night as I marked my place and closed the cover. The Rock Star, I imagine, is also pleased that I’ve finished this ponderous, bizarre piece of fiction so that he can stop hearing about how much I wanted to be finished with it every night before we go to sleep.

“Why don’t you just stop reading it?” he asked, distracted from his autobiography of Slash.

“Because I CAN’T. Trumpet said I HAD to read it.” I tend to blindly stick to promises, no matter how much they make me want to die.

Besides my promise to Trumpet, once half-way through, I kept waiting to see what all of the agony was leading to. I expected a revelation; some kind of Owen Meany-esque “oh my god, that’s what this whole novel has been building towards” moment. But instead, I was assailed with the mischievous doings of the devil (who apparently takes great pleasure in making sure that people end up in public in their underwear. To me, this is not the mark of the Prince of Darkness, but rather, an unruly stag party.) and his band of miscreants as they descend on the city of Moscow to bring down the system and to exploit the greed of the newly moneyed classes.

While this novel had all the hallmarks of a literary spooge-fest (the dichotomy between good and evil, themes of salvation and redemption and of course the blistering indictment of a society rotted from the inside out by a complicated system of rules and regulations that brings out the worst in its citizens.) after having slogged through it’s canyons of oddity, I’m left wondering if SURELY there must be other books that make this same point better? My main question: why is this such a famous book?

It seems that an untimely end can ultimately increase booksales as well as rocket you into the ranks of the literati. Bulgakov died in 1940 and The Master and Margarita wasn’t published until 1966, during the middle of the international frostiness known as the Cold War. Perhaps this glimpse into the intricacies of Communism put a human face on the Red Menace, catapulting this incredibly odd novel into public consciousness.

My mother, who travelled to the Soviet Union roughly 6 months before the whole thing came crashing down, met a man who taught English and gave her a rather telling description of Communism:

“In America, if your neighbor gets a new car, you think, “What can I do so that I also might have a new car?” and you work harder. In Russia, if your neighbor gets a new car, you set fire to it in the middle of the night.”

It was this depressingly bleak social outlook that Bulgakov meant to satirize in “Master” and in that sense, he probably did a fairly decent job. (Seeing that the first draft of the book was censored by authorities. If someone’s trying to shut you up, you must have something worth saying.) It was simply the utter surrealist nature of the novel that was off-putting in my opinion. I am a huge fan of Gabriel Garcia Marquez, who’s work is liberally sprinkled with magical realism, but none of his novels have ever wanted to make me slap myself repeatedly in the head.

Trumpet told me before I started on this project that she’s often thought of this novel in the years since she’s read it.

I imagine that I will too. But for totally different reasons.

WHY DID NO ONE INFORM ME THAT SHORT HAIR REALLY DOES NEED CUTTING EVERY 4 WEEKS?

Sorry, I’m just a bit on edge after realizing that my hairstyle has unfortunately become something of an investment, costing me more per month than car insurance.

When I had long hair, it was easy enough just to wash, dry and whisk it out of  the way with whatever hair-entrapment device I saw fit. However, now that I am shorn, my barnet ritual has been enlongated twenty fold and includes three, count them THREE different styling products. (As in, “Do you need any products?”. Yes, yes, I DO need products, damn you, you hair harpies.)

My hairdresser, (I refuse to call him a stylist. I have never been, and will never be appearing in OK! magazine.) who is an incredibly heterosexual man in a traditionally non-heterosexual man’s profession, is a talker. As for me, I really kind of despise idle chit chat and would rather sit and stare out the window or daydream about winning the lottery than answer forced questions about where I’m going on vacation. No only is he a talker, but he’s an incredibly FAST talker, so to answer one of his inane queries, I must first ask him to repeat himself, which lends more importance to the question than is actually necessary. I should just sit down and say,

“Hiya, just a trim please. My little one is fine, I work for a company specializing in GPS navigation, I’m not doing anything this weekend and have no holidays planned. Now make with the scissors, hair boy.”

To give him credit, I have always been pleased with his cuts, although he also neglects to provide me with one of those little rubber keep-hair-from-going-down-your-shirt jonnies, so I spend evenings after my trims squirming around and trying to scratch myself in a million different places. The trim I received last evening had me slightly worried when he produced the electric clippers, making me think that my instructions, “just a tad shorter in the back” had been grossly misinterpreted and nearly prompting the exclamation, “Don’t buzz me, bro!”

Luckily, it all turned out well in the end and I am free for another month from the tyranny of the salon.

It’s around this time of year that I always like to talk about the abundant foliage that springs forth from every nook and cranny here in the countryside, delighting the eye and offending the nose, if one happens to suffer from hay fever. However, there is one particular plant that I feel that I have to mention every year because of it’s rather notorious aroma.

My walk to work, if I have the time to take it, is such a pleasure on a day much like today, when the sun is high, but the breeze is cool and I have the assurance (thanks to factor 40 sunblock) that I will not crisp on my 5 minute journey. The smells of May in England can be heavenly. I amble down the path thinking,

“Mmmm, lilac.”

And then a little further,

“Mmmm, hyacinth.”

And then just around the corner,

“Mmm..ACK!”

Smack bang into the olfactory real estate of a Stuff Tree.

Stuff Trees are actually members of the Berberis family, characterized by dark, reddish leaves, yellow blossoms and the aroma of an adult movie theatre after the 12am showing of “Amateur Butt Babes III”. Mr. Clive Murray kindly invented an appropriate name for the offending shrub several years back; spoogebaum.

We no longer live next to one of these hedges as we did back in our boating days, but several grow in the field opposite and lie in stinky wait for me to pass by.

It’s no wonder what the pagans used to get up to in the springtime.

When I get an idea in my head, I don’t pussyfoot around. All I can say right now is that my ankle hurts.

A few weeks ago, I professed my profoundly embarrassing love for “reality” series, Miami Ink, chronicling the life and slightly staged times of the Floridian inkers at Love/Hate Tattoos in South Beach and the effect that these nightly forays into the world of body modification was having on my willpower to not have any more work done. The Rock Star was already getting some ink to commemorate the birth of the Prawn, so I couldn’t very well let him have all the flesh scarifying fun. After a few days of playing around in Photoshop, I came up with a design that I was happy with and today, the two of us trotted off to the local inkery to get marked for life. (The Prawn was safely and temporarily ensconced with the Barmaid so that she didn’t spend the duration of our appointments tearing flash off the walls and decorating the floor with as many different colors of ink as she could get her mitts on.)

Tattoos always seem to be a great idea until the moment the needle touches your skin for the first time causing a sensation akin to someone viciously and repeatedly stubbing a very fine cigarette out on you. And then doing it again, and enjoying it. This is not to elicit pity, because asking for compassion following an entirely unnecessary and self-inflicted hurt would be just a tad foolish, but it doesn’t change the fact that it hurts like the proverbial motherfucker. It’s lucky for me that my inker is not only tremendously talented, but a fast worker, so the agony was a relatively short one and I came out the other end with a rather lovely bit of art on my right ankle with should heal up in relatively short order.

The Rock Star went second and offered up his arm to the needle to be adorned with the initials of our daughter. The area of the hands, for my husband, is a bit of a delicate region. In fact, such is his squeamishness about his digits and their outlands that, if given a choice between hand surgery and losing one or both testicles, I think his boys might have a run for their money. I was expecting at least a bit of pallor, but he took it like a man under the quick hand of our artist and was soon in possession with a very cool set of initials in a great font, ironically called Skin Deep.

So, here we both sit, blogging our experiences and nursing the niggling pain in our extremities and enjoying our new bits of ink.

Until the next time.

This is the one time of year that I get to post “don’t you wish your countryside was hot like mine” pics. Our local bluebell woods was remarkably quiet this afternoon. It’s a shame that this isolated and quiet spot turns into Disney World when the flowers come out, complete with shouting children, quarreling adults and rambunctious dogs.

This is the Prawn’s second visit to the woods an the site of her first smile a little over a year ago. This time, she got to navigate the paths under her own power.

Relationships are difficult. But OTHER people’s relationships always seem to be mystifying.

Anyone who’s ever experienced the joys of condo living will know what it is like sharing your aural space with people who may have very different ideas about what is pleasant to listen to and when it is pleasant to listen to it than you do. Like those college girls downstairs in the apartment below yours (paid for by daddy, of course) so that they’re not accountable to harsh campus restrictions, like, oh, I don’t know SHUTTING THE FUCK UP BY 3 AM, who like to throw parties for 237 of their closest friends on weeknights. Or the small group house who’s stereo system (the effects of which can be felt by microscopic organisms at the bottom of Lake Vladivostok) butts up against the floor of your room and vibrates objects right off the desk.

The Rock Star and I got lucky this time. Apart from the apparent complications of living in a first floor flat with a toddler (lugging said toddler and all accoutrements up two flights of stairs), we decided that we were old enough not to want anyone stomping on our heads. (So, instead we allow aforementioned toddler to build large towers of blocks and knock them over, probably causing apocalyptic acoustic disturbances below. Luckily, our neighbours are out during the day.) Although it took us almost a year to invite them up for tea, they’re a nice, friendly young couple who like a lot of the same things that we do and are getting married sometime in fall.

The thing is….we hear things.

Not the sort of things that you’d imagine. Not the normal headboard- banging- on- the- wall- oh- my- god- are- they- having- sex? kind of noises, but rather more angry ones. The most puzzling thing is that these disputes are often heard earlier than our alarm clocks are set, which leaves one to wonder, how do you get THAT upset by 6.30 am?

“The only way I could imagine being THAT pissed THAT early is if one of them took a dump on the carpet before bed and the other found it when they woke up,” commented the Rock Star.

The majority of these verbal volleys take place in the bathroom and bedroom, where we can hear more clearly, which leads to another question, which is, who fights in the bathroom? At 6.30? Does this mean that one of them is in the shower at the time of the arguments? I don’t know about any of you, gentle readers, but being angry, naked and wet at the same time would seem to me to lessen one’s position in any sort of disagreement.

Some couples thrive on the constant tides of conflict in their relationships. One has to wonder, however, about the long term viability of a relationship that relies on provocation for it’s sustenance.

At any rate, the wardrobe doors need to stop slamming before breakfast.