What weekends are meant to be

Despite being from Africa, I don't do very hot weather very well. I long to live somewhere warm, where flip flops and t-shirts are the order of the day, but with a gentle cooling breeze making it all bearable, rather than oppressive.

Which is why England on a sunny summer's day is about as good as it gets. Honestly (to you lot with raised eyebrows). You wake up to a dawn chorus, with a perfectly blue sky and a sun that promises a day full of potential. So often in this country, you are faced with a choice of wet, grey or cold, or possibly a combination of all three. It doesn't inspire adventure or the sense of opportunity that a sunny day does. When there is sun, the whole world opens up.

So with 3 whole days (that happened to coincide with a weekend!) of glorious sunshine, we were all set for perfection. And it would have been had my husband been in the country instead of me being a single parent. But despite this one small snag, it was exactly as a weekend should be.

It started with friends to play on Friday afternoon while the mummies sat in the sun sipping on chilled drinks. The kids got to swim in the newly opened pool. The same pool that one short month ago was home to 8 frogs (all now sadly perished from a choline overdose) and was almost solid green with multiple congealed worms floating in it. But after 30 days of hard graft on my part (again, someone tell me why the pool is my job?) it is now sparkling blue, if a little chilly. After swimming (them) and chatting (me), Son1 went off to football practice in the evening while son2 and I vegged out enjoying the evening sunlight.

Saturday - and another morning that you could write poems about. Morning cartoons for the boys, a long hard session on the cross trainer for me, setting me up for a day of virtuousness which meant I could eat with impunity. And indeed I did.

Then off to our first ever cricket practice at the brand new cricket club in the neighbouring village. I sat in the sun with my Saturday paper wearing a sun hat and occassionally giving a little clap when the boys got close to a ball. If I'd taken a flask of tea and a few scones with jam and cream, it would have been perfection. What's more I got to talk to other adults. This is always a novelty given that I work at home on my own and seldom leave the village, even to get groceries (see previous post).

Grilled sandwiches on the BBQ for lunch, followed by the friends who live over the road coming round and the boys spending all afternoon in the pool. And then another BBQ for dinner (because if it's BBQ weather, we SHALL BBQ). And then a quiet evening on my own with a chilled bottle of chablis and full control of the TV remote.

Sunday morning. And possibly even more glorious that the one just gone. French toast with syrup and cinnamon for the boys (something slightly less calorific for me) before heading out to the nearby nature reserve for a bike ride with friends. I didn't bother to do any exercise this morning as I knew what was coming up. Attempting to teach son2 to ride a bike without stabilisers. I challenge anyone to come up with something more strenuous that running semi- crouched holding someone upright.

Then back home for - you guessed it - a BBQ! Sausages and garlic bread this time. And then more swimming in the pool, the boys climbing over the fence to go fetch their friends from across the road, them racing over, all of them shrieking and splashing and generally having a ball while I got to read the Sunday papers. Eventually even I was too hot to stay out of the water and spent ages chashing the boys around the pool.

We finally all lay on a big blanket in the garden, drying out. The lazy heat of the late afternoon sun, combined with the gentle breeze left me feeling all tingly as my body tried to figure out if it was hot or cold. Eventually it settled on sleepy and I drifted off with my son lying in my arms.

And now, I'm just about to put two small boys to bed before I head off to the local pub with an all-girl team for the pub quiz, which will involve wine and other things not approved by weight-watchers.

It has been lovely. Utterly lovely. Carefree, spontaneous and exactly the way I want my children to remember their childhoods. May all weekends be as good as this.

Pool of tears

I gotta tell ya, I'm a woman on the edge. I can feel it. I'm like a pressure cooker and am about to blow. I cannot deal with anymore stuff going wrong. What is it about this year? So far in the space of the last two months we've had:

- our kettle died - new one needed
- our microwave died - new one needed
- our washingmachine died (but could at least be fixed instead of replaced)
- our dishwasher has begun leaking (this problem has so far been ignored)
- our roof started leaking requiring us to rethatch it for a cool £13 000
- the three year old decided that the rotary washing line made an excellent swing and has broken it. New one needed, not yet bought.
- the kids needed new beds as trying to squeeze a five year old into a cot bed just wasn't working. So new ones had to be bought
- the phone died and had to be replaced
- the printer cartridges for the printer I have (which isn't THAT old) are no longer being made. This means I will very soon need a new printer
- my computer is so old and slow that it gasps along at a 1995 pace. I'm ignoring this because I cannot afford a new one
- but topping the list of things that have gone wrong is the swimming pool.

If you ever buy a house, no matter how lovely the house is, DO NOT BUY IT IF IT HAS A SWIMMING POOL. Not unless you or your partner are a swimming pool engineer.

Our pool was built in the early 80s. Everything about it needed to be overhauled (including the fence around it). We have until now ignored this because pools are expensive. VERY.

But given the forecasts for a hot summer, we thought it was high time we fixed it. So we got a man what does to come and fix it. And he did. And I paid him £1200 of your British Pounds for the priviledge. For one glorious (yet rain filled) week the pool worked (we didn't go in it because of the rain and cool temperatures so the fact that it worked sort of passed us by).

This weekend I had to backwash the pool. I followed the instructions given to me. Except, one of the vital instructions (which was told to husband, not me) was that the backwash hose must be kept straight with no kinks in it. Unbeknownst to me, husband had mown the lawn and had curled the hose up. Husband hadn't passed either of these facts onto me. So I backwashed the pool and low and behold, the fitting holding the hose in burst. Costly mistake number 1.

Then I attempted to empty the leaf basket, as per the instructions. I did this but noticed as I was doing it that it meant plenty of air was getting into the system. The man wot fixes pools had managed to get all the air out. But I didn't know how else to empty the basket without opening it and letting air in.

Anyway, I then tried to manually vacuum the pool. This worked for about 1 minute before the suction went - exactly as it had done before I paid £1200 to have it fixed. I guessed it must be air in the system. Husband came and helped to bleed the system. It still wouldn't suck. So I resorted to the automatic cleaner instead.

The automatic cleaner got stuck, so while I attempted to move it to the shallow end, a pipe came undone. So I had to turn the cleaner off to get it back on. Once reattached, I went back into the shed of evil (as I've now come to call it) and turned it all back on again. But apparently I turned something on in the wrong order. I still don't know quite what.

In a split second, the filter lid cracked open and sprayed water everywhere. I hit the 'TURN EVERYTHING OFF AND PANIC SWITCH' and ran to call husband for help. (You might be wondering right now why he isn't in charge of the pool as this is obviously a boy job. Good question. One I have asked myself many, many times. Answer is still awaited). Husband took one look at the cracked lid and proceeded to have a strop. Rightly so. I had in the space of 20 minutes managed to break three things that before I got there were all working well.

He stropped. I wept. I stropped. We all ignored the pool. We didn't have a happy father's day.

This morning I called the pool man. I explained, rather embarrassed, about the littany of disasters that had taken place. I could hear him rolling his eyes down the phone.

Now here's the really, really good bit. Our type of filter no longer exists. It is obsolete. The chances of finding a spare part for the bit that has cracked is roughly equivalent to our chances of winning the lotto, which would incidentally solve all of our problems.

The man said he would call around and hunt for the proverbial needle in the haystack, but we'd probably need to buy a new filter. Filters are not cheap. They are vast pieces of machinery that probably easily cost the same as a pleasant weekend mini break to Paris, including a champagne dinner.

But without one, the pool cannot function. At all. So we can either pay for this new piece of kit or just ignore the pool altogether and laugh off the £1200 already invested in it. I'm all for filling it in or turning it into a fish pond or emptying it out and making it a skate boarding pit.

I have no money left. Nothing. Not a penny. The tax man will be expecting a small cheque from me by the end of this week and he might just have to have a tear filled telephone call from me instead.

Sigh.

I don't like being a grown up.

Dilemma: summer body or summer food?

This must be the longest spell of good weather I have experienced since I moved to the UK in 2003. If this is global warming, bring it on.

We have a swimming pool in in our garden. I'm not sure why but I always feel that I have to justify myself when I say this. We don't live in a mansion with acres of grounds, a tennis court, stables and pool. We just happen to have a pool in our garden. It is a pain in the arse 99 out of every 100 days. But for the last few it has been marvellous. The boys have swum everyday and have had friends over to splash around with them. We are the envy of all.

Yesterday we had a friend over and the mum coolly whipped off all (I mean all) of her clothes in the garden without batting an eyelid before slipping into a bikini. Yes, she has a child and wears a bikini. And she looks like super model in it. I wanted to weep into my iced elderflower cordial. I decided that I really did need to give myself a good talking to and stop eating so much, not to mention cutting back on the gallons and gallons of wine I've been consuming of late.

But what's the point of al fresco dining if not to dine? Admittedly, summer foods can be a lot lighter than stodgy stews and steamed puddings, but we've BBQd so much that I'm starting to resemble a sausage. And although I've eaten my body weight in salad, I've washed it down with good helpings of creamy potato bakes. Then there are the lazy smorgasboard dinners outside in the sun, cold meat platters, cheese boards, grilled asparagus - just lovely summery food - but lots and lots of it.

And today, given the magnificence of the weather, I felt it was my patriotic duty to create a summer dessert that celebrates the infamous British strawberry. After reading a recipe in the Sunday Times magazine this weekend, I made sure the Ocado man delivered all the necessary ingredients so that I could create a dessert masterpiece, something I've not done for a while (well since deciding to sail across an ocean).

So I made this:

It was dead simple, dead gorgeous and dead tasty. It would also quite possibly result in dead me had I attempted to eat all of it, such is its richness.

So you see, this is why I can't wear a bikini. Summer food is just too good to ignore. It's a tricky choice: summer food or summer body? I know which one is winning around here.

Sod it, there's always winter to slim down.

Things that annoy me

Today I am in a black mood. Dark, brooding and thoroughly unfriendly. Strange that I should have this mood on what is a gloriously - if incredibly rare - sunny morning. What's more, husband is back home. I had a full day to myself without children on Saturday sailing the high seas and spent yesterday pool cleaning and gardening so that we now look like we live in a show home (except for the congealed cornflakes under the kids table). I've even managed to get the pool to be blue, clear, clean and warm all at once. Small miracles do happen every now and then.

However, I am still in a miserable mood. Let's hope a full day of sunshine can cheer me up. But while I'm in a grump, I might as well make full use of it and have a little rant about things that annoy me:

Annoyance 1: The fact them when trying to type this blog, I can't leave a space between numbered items if I use their silly numbers so have to type it as I have here.

Annoyance 2: The Gillette Venus razor advert that blathers on about women revealing their inner goddess. Do the ad executives who come up with this shite really think that women feel like a goddess when they shave their legs? Don't they think that perhaps women shave their legs because they've started to look so hirsute that people have begun to call them Yeti and their husbands keep complaining that they've got stubble rash on their own legs thanks to yours scraping theirs in bed. And do they really think that women get to lie in the bath, languishing about with candles while they transform themselves into a goddess? Of course they don't. They hop about frantically on one leg in the shower while two children crawl around the supporting leg trying to catch the bubbles and learn a few choice words when mummy realises that the blade is so blunt she's removed her shin bone instead of the hair. So no, I do not want to unleash my inner goddess while shaving thank you very much. I just want to be able to not bleed to death.

Annoyance 3: Those pages in magazines - particularly the Sunday Telegraph magazine (Stella) but it is not alone in doing this - that take some mildly famous person and ask them for their address book of their favourite places. So of course they prattle on about some fabulous little shoe shop in Venice and the perfect place to get sushi in Tokyo as though they are there every second Wednesday just because it's so fab that they'll endure a transcontinental flight just to eat some raw fish. Stop showing off. For a start, your carbon footprint is pants. Secondly, I too could rustle up a handful of must-see places in different parts of the world. Just google it. Twats.

Annoyance 4: Stuff. We seem to accumulate a lot of stuff. And it drives me nuts. There is a particular corner in the kitchen that is particularly prone to gathering stuff. And it's homeless stuff. Stuff that has no real place but probably shouldn't be chucked out as it might be vaguely useful one day, and so it goes into the Drawer of All Things (which in itself is a nightmare but at least it is out of sight). Why do we have so much stuff? Why am I not better at selling stuff on eBay, giving it to homeless shelters or just putting it in the bin? I think my life would be happier if it was completely decluttered. But you just never know when you might need an inflatable exercise ball or a bag with 25 tins of paint samples in it. Do you?

Annoyance 5: That I have to drive all the way into Newbury now to post a parcel and withdraw some money (on the wildly optimistic assumption that there is some money to withdraw) because I refuse to pay a £1.99 fee to a hole in the wall money box at the service station. Of course the petrol to get to Newbury will cost more than £1.99 and the time I spend not working is worth far, far more but it's the principle of it. Blood sucking thieving swines.

Annoyance 6: That women who've had children end up with stomachs that look like tinned sweetcorn mixed with orange peel wrapped in an uncooked thin covering of pastry, with the consistency of a jelly that isn't fully set. It's not fair. We had to cart the little beasts around for 9 months and then push them out doing untold damage to our pelvic floors and fanoirs only to be thanked with a Mr Blobby jelly roll that prevents the wearing of midriff tops and bikinis ever again. Where is the justice in that?

I'd better wrap it up there as I do have to do some work (another annoyance). Here's hoping my mood improves. Otherwise it's going to be a long week (particularly for my husband.)

Kiss kiss.

Summertime and the living is easy

As I sit and type, I feel something I haven't felt for quite some time. It's the warm, slightly taut, prickly sensation you get on your skin when it's caught the sun. And it's lovely. Much like today was, because SHOCK! HORROR! ALERT THE MEDIA!, the sun actually shone. Admittedly it was what weatherman calls 'sunny spells' so hardly consistent and when the sun went behind the clouds, I was tempted to reach for a jumper. But still, the spells that were sunny definitely constituted a summer's day. I think that makes it three so far this year.

To celebrate, the boys and I spent most of it lying on a picnic blanket in the garden. Well I lay on it, they hurled themselves at me, wasted most of the sunblock on 'painting' each other and shouted at bugs that deigned to crawl on the rug (which I didn't mind).

I also had a moment of complete nostalgia. I set up the garden sprinkler thing that waves backwards and forward spraying water out in a fan shape. The two of them charged through it stark naked, shrieking in delight. It took me straight back to my childhood. Particularly the part when they decided to bring the sprinkler over to mummy , which resulted in more shrieking, only there was a bit less delight involved.

As husband hopped on a plane to enjoy a week of sleeping late in a hotel and long boozy dinners in the evenings, obviously interspersed with 'work', I decided to prove that I can be thoroughly self sufficient as a single mother and managed to rustle up a lunchtime BBQ. That's not quite as taxing as it sounds as I didn't have to rub two twigs together to get a fire started or even use firelighters and charcoal. I simply had to turn the knob on the gas grill, but still, that's normally husband's job so I got a small moment of omnipotence as I stood manfully turning sausages. (It also reinforced what I already secretly knew - that BBQing meat is easy yet men make it out to be A VERY IMPORTANT JOB THAT ONLY MEN CAN DO - so that women get to prepare everything else with all the credit going to the man with the tongs.)

I'd also spent much of the morning manually vacumming our swimming pool. Let me stop right here in case you think we're landed gentry with a butler called Jeeves. We're not. We just happened to buy a house that has a swimming pool. It was built in the early 80s and hasn't been updated since. I'd ignore it or add fish to it, except that having two small boys who might appreciate it once they progress out of armbands, means that I spend many, many hours trying to figure out how to make it blue. In the last month we've had to change the filter sand and pay £500 for a new pool pump. Now our automatic pool cleaner has died and the pool guy thinks its because an impeller has gone in the cleaner pump (I'll bet that sounds as though I know what I'm talking about. I don't.)

Which means that I have to manually vacuum it. Like vacumming a house that has two very mucky boys isn't enough. It is a somewhat therapeutic pastime, if only I wasn't constantly yelling at the boys to get their hands out of the pool chemicals or to stop leaning precariously over the deep end.

(I'll interrupt this pool story to tell you another one. Last week when Andy the pool guy was here, he helped me fish a dead mouse out of the pool. Chuckling at my squeamishness he said: 'That's nothing mate. I've just come from a pool with a dead cow in it.' Apparently the people who owned the pool had been away for a week. Their pool lies next to a field, home to several cows. One cow, in a bid for freedom or just bovine stupidity, managed to escape, charge across the pool cover before sinking into its watery grave. It's now spent a week getting nice and bloated. Andy was about to go join the fire brigade to try and remove the cow while trying not to burst it. Because if it burst, the pool owners would have a terrific cleaning job on their hands, making my paltry efforts pale in comparison. I can only imagine the poor pool owners popping out for a morning dip, rolling back the cover to find a bloated haunch of beef bobbing in the pool. Must have put them right off their breakfast.)

Anyway, back to why I've blathered on about the pool. Because having finally gotten it to a point where it is mostly clean, mostly blue and mostly warm, I thought it was time we actually swam in it. And so we did. Well I did. The children sat on the edge and wailed until I pulled one of them in, which resulted in even more tremendous wails until he realised that is was actually quite pleasant.

So a combination of sun, swimming, sun tanning, sprinkler running throughing, BBQing, crazy dancing to my new '101 sounds of summer' compilation CD - earmarked for use at our summer party taking place in two weeks time - including doing the Macarena much to the boys bemusement, it was all a rather lovely day.

There was only one real blight on the whole thing (well besides the odd lurking cloud and a two year old who got overtired and whingey mid afternoon). Me...in...a...bikini.

It's official. I am vile. I knew things had gone a bit pear shaped (literally) of late due to lack of exercise from sprained ankle. But looking at me in the bright sunshine today, I realised that I cannot blame my ankle on the state of my flab-tastic body. There is not one bit that is toned. This is years of abuse I feel, coupled with carrying two children in my belly. I look like a rather plump uncooked pork sausage. It's not pretty. Something has to be done. What, I'm not sure. But I am sliding into middle age hitting every cellulite bump on the way through.

Although, come to think of it, realistically it's not really too much of a train smash. I mean it's only 3 days a year that I'm going to be seen in public with very little clothing on anyway. If we move to the tropics, I might have take the self improvement venture a bit more seriously. But for now, I think I'll eat another left over chicken goujon from the kids supper and wash it down with a glass of wine. We've had summer now. Bring on the winter pies.

Toodle pip.

P.S. A footnote. Just finished bathing children and getting them into bed. I was told that they want to move house. I asked why. They said they would like to leave this house to the bugs. Again I asked why. 'Because, the bugs keep coming into our house through a hole somewhere and we don't like bugs. Specially beetles and spiders. So they can have this house and we'll get a new one.' I'm not sure anyone has mentioned the economic downturn to them...