grandpa

Grandpa visits at least once a fortnight and has done for ten years. That was when my eldest child was born and he was the first grandparent to hold her. I don’t know how he managed that, I think the others were being polite.

Grandpa can be grumpy, but that is because he is always in pain. He has been in pain long before he was grandpa, not long after he became my big brother’s daddy. He took a nasty fall down some stone steps which he was helping his badly arthritic mother in law down. Six months later he was diagnosed with arthritis. I think he was 27 or 28.

He has had artificial knees, elbows and one shoulder. The consultant won’t do the other shoulder until an artificial elbow is replaced. The elbow man doesn’t want to put grandpa through the operation and suggested he think about it for a few months, so grandpa lives in pain and the simple task of getting dressed in the morning is painful and arduous.

Grandpa worked in factories until he took redundancy at 58 and retired. This was after a prolonged battle with septicaemia, where we weren’t sure if he’d survive. It’s legacy is recurring ulcers on his legs and feet. His dream of being a market gardener died when his health first failed, he has always worked in factories, his colleagues supporting him by doing any heavy lifting when he had bad days. I remember my mother hugging him in the living room as he wept one day returning home early from work too ill to continue.

He has never let it beat him. He has been an enthusiastic and skilled vegetable gardener. In the summer, he brings with him green beans, strawberries, onions, carrots and potatoes and tomatoes that smell of the earth and the taste of which ruins you for any other type of tomatoes ever. In September, he brings apples from the tree and I bake pies, crumbles and apple cake.

I made a rare visit over to his place at the end of the season last year and he was sitting in his chair sucking on his teeth – a habit I hate – ruefully assessing that there was a patch of garden he couldn’t be bothered to dig over in the spring and so he hadn’t had as many carrots as he should have and they were “beautiful”. A little alarm bell sounded. I couldn’t recall a time he’d not done a complete garden.

A few weeks ago, I called round (I live 40 miles away) He had been told to sit with his foot up and rest because of an ulcer on his foot.  He looked smaller and he sounded quiet, sitting watching the weeds grow on a hot spring day. Over the brow of the field outside his house they have built a retirement home. He keeps saying he should move in.

I took a child and spent two days with him to keep him company, unfortunately it rained so I couldn’t garden and I think he just wanted to be left alone.

Then my brother went over and they did some gardening, I spoke to him on the phone and he sounded good. He came over for Easter but was too poorly to walk so wouldn’t come to the shops and I only just managed to get him to come to the pub for lunch.

Today, I was running about trying to mop and brush and dust before he arrived. He wasn’t as prompt as usual, I was confident I’d get it done. The phone rang. Grandpa was too ill to come. This is the first time I can ever remember this happening. I don’t like it. I am upset. I want my daddy.

the books you should read

Ok so I sometimes struggle to know where to guide my girls with their reading. But it is important to me so I don’t mind the struggle. My middle daughter went up to junior school this year and I had to make a fuss about the books they were sending her home with. She has problems with handwriting and so because they didn’t know her they assumed she was weak. SHE IS NOT!

However she likes an easy life, she likes to be babied too and she hates to give up any books to her youngest sister. Last summer she graduated from Michael Morpugo’s Mud puddle Farm series when she discovered her elder sister’s copies of Diary Of a Wimpy kid, because it had a mix of text and cartoon she loved them. I had to investigate children’s literature for similar books. Now she reads Jacqueline Wilson, David Walliams and Roald Dahl. Today I finally moved all the Lauren Child’s and Julia Donaldson’s to the youngest’s room .

My eldest child is also an avid reader, she loves Harry Potter and Malory Towers / St Clares. Her teacher says her writing is “old fashioned” I think that means she calls her characters things like Felicity and Gwendoline and they all love cream buns and ginger beer. I was never a big Blyton Fan. I am responsible for Harry Potter and Little Women though. She has given up on Anne of Green Gables – a book I lived for at her age, she has also lost my WEE FREE MEN – a Terry Pratchett novel for younger readers.

Sometimes I cheat and if they really won’t read the books I think they should, I read them as bed time stories. One particular example is Alice in Wonderland. My husband has done the same… or maybe I set him up, I am probably the more cunning and Machiavellian of parents…anyway, he really enjoyed Danny Champion of the World and Stig of the Dump. The Dancing Bear by Michael Morpugo was a lovely surprise, the first venture into an episodic bed time story which resulted in him coming downstairs in floods of tears. ( if you haven’t read this story do not read further) 

“The bear dies” he gasped, finally.

“Are they ok?” I asked aghast.

“They’re fine, “ he replied, “I’m not”

He recovered and went on to read more books to them and for a man who claim,s quite rightly , never to read novels , I think it has done him the world of good.

I had to buy books that were no longer in print ( Jacob Two Two and the Hooded Claw, Elephants don’t sit on Cars) in order to share my childhood favourites. I’m not keen on Ratburger , but the girls loved it. I am hoping to try an old story my mum gave me years ago, based in Herefordshire called The TangleWood Secret and then I’m going to sneak some Terry Pratchett in if I can find where she’s hidden it!

element of suprise

Tomorrow my husband is fifty. He doesn’t look it: damn him, neither does he act it but I think he might be starting to feel it.

Anyway, for his fortieth he had a baby and also a telescope. There is no trumping that really.

I didn’t organise a surprise party because he would hate that and he would spoil it by finding out or refusing to go to it.

A few months ago I started to ask him how he wanted to celebrate. He didn’t know. He ummed and ahhed and then two weeks ago decided on a family meal (extended family and best friend) in the local Italian restaurant where we always celebrate his birthday.

I’ve known what I was going to buy him since last summer when he fell in love with a limited print in a gallery in Bed Gellert, north Wales. However the gallery opens seasonally and I started to panic. Once I did get hold of them they no longer had the print and so I had to order it direct from the irish based artist. I started to get cold feet. Perhaps time would have cooled his love of the art work. I showed it to my hairdresser who didn’t like it much. This made the doubts stronger. I also had to try to order it on my phone so that he wouldn’t see it on the browser history. My phone always seemed to lose connection with the internet before I got to paying for the print. All of this boded ill.

On a trip to IKEA, he reminisced about a chair he had owned and discarded. “ That’s what you could buy me for my birthday, a chair.” He announced.

This seemed so right.

“I’ve already decided what I’m going to buy you” I stammered.

“Oh go with that then” he said.

Now it preyed on me, he WANTED a chair, he never asks for presents usually. He might hate the print.

I couldn’t rest.

A few days later, before falling asleep,“ I’ll get you the chair, “I said, ”but you will have to choose it so its perfect.”

“I might like what you are going to buy me” he protested.

“I’m not sure it’s the right present”

“What is it?”

“It’s a surprise, unless you want the chair.”

After about half an hour, he was sure he wanted the chair and wanted to know what my present was. Reluctantly I told him.

He groaned, “ That would have been perfect!” and hid under the bed clothes, like a big kid upset he’d spoilt a surprise.

I asked his mum to give me a picture of him as a child in his astronaut suit. Somehow it fell out of my handbag and although it was still in the picture wallet I’m sure he looked at it. Still I went to get his cake with two of our three girls today. The youngest came in and said to the middle child

“Don’t tell daddy about the cake.”

“WHAT CAKE?!!!”

Daddy pretended to be deaf.

I have just bought him a helium balloon, it’s in the car boot. I know he is going to go out and open the boot before midnight, I just know it. He doesn’t do surprises.

birthday celebrations

Now I only have myself to blame. I have three children , you think I’d have more sense, but we do tend to throw each child a party for  their birthday. The middle child gets short changed having a birthday in August,  we are often at the seaside. To make up for it last year, she invited a group of girls for an afternoon tea in September.

My youngest had her fifth birthday at a wacky warehouse but previous birthdays  saw me shaking off the January blues and  breaking out in a sweat, cleaning the entire house two weeks after Christmas and decking out the downstairs in a theme of her choosing (pirates and princesses aged 3 and Under the sea aged 4)  We ransacked the costume and set cupboards at school and I begged an art teacher to draw me a pirate for pin- the- parrot- on-the-pirate and a pirate ship, which the children decided to colour in before I got around to pinning the jolly roger on it.

My eldest daughter was told last year , that she was too old for parties. Then I secretly invited five of her friends and a cousin to the bowling alley and pizza place the Saturday before her birthday. A couple of hours before, I bathed all three kids, painted their nails with glitter and put their party dresses and shoes on with a “it’s just nice to dress up sometimes isn’t it?” I actually couldn’t believe they fell for it, it was only daddy who nearly blew it, he was so excited we nearly got there too early and had to side track to Aldi to get a bottle of wine. I am at this point texting everyone to make sure they are there. They were.

We walked through the doors and her friends shouted “surprise!” My beautiful daughter, turned around in panic to see who she was supposed to be shouting “ surprise” at! One of her friends had to explain to her that it was her own party. She loved it, once she got over the shock and I have been smug about it right up until about a week a go when she requested doing the same thing but knowing about it this time. I suddenly thought that she had missed looking forward to her treat. That realisation finally took the shine off my success.

My husband is 50 next week, we are going for a family meal. I didn’t attempt a surprise party. I couldn’t even keep his present a surprise, blurting it out when I thought we had decided on something else, only to find that it would have been a perfectly lovely surprise after all. I do want him to have a really good day, as my memory of his 40^th is that it was over taken by a week old baby, mastitis and baby blues. The hi-light was him taking our screaming infant for a walk while his hormonally deranged wife wept herself to sleep. His birthday tea was interrupted by a trip to the walk in clinic. That’s not the plan this time.

baking cakes

My eldest is 10 the day after tomorrow. How on earth did that happen? I am trying (and failing) not to calculate that another one of those will make her 20 and she will be off in the big wide world.

At the weekend we took her, her sisters and three friends bowling and then for pizza. Earlier that week she had posed for a cute picture , clad in a onesie and clutching her teddy bear, it appeared on a shop bought cake from the supermarket that prints photos on cakes.

However, I like to bake. So they usually get a homemade one too for the actual, special day. We blow the candles out at breakfast and have a piece then too. (Europeans eat pastry and cake for breakfast don’t they?) My cakes are lop-sided and often a tad crispy around the edges but they taste good, they never last long. The children like to bake with me. Our most celebrated cake was daddy’s robot birthday cake, unfortunately the shop bought icing was vile and rendered our work of art inedible.

I loathe baking programmes, they just make me feel inadequate and can send me on a spending binge in expensive supermarkets for arrowroot and ground almonds and other stuff that will fester in my baking cupboard. I don’t like to see contestants having panic attacks over their decorating or firm, family favourites being rubbished by the softly spoken judges. It’s worse when it’s the junior version and some ten year old Arabella or Tarquin is  in absolute bits because their Eiffel Tower creation has not worked out the way they planned. I end up screaming at the telly “She’s cooked a bloody cake! On her own! Give her a bloody medal !”  Then my own children lead me away from the television to my haven; my kitchen where homework projects, art creations and hairbrushes invade our eating space. Nigella and Jamie don’t have to contend with this sort of stuff in their kitchens do they?

I bake when I am stressed, it helps me to think and plan. If there is a particularly important family event or work commitment on the horizon, I will make puddings, cakes and pies before tackling the actual job in hand. I think it is also another protest at the fact my mother didn’t bake when I was a child and my only memory of licking the mixing bowl was occasionally at my grandma’s. I obviously felt I was missing out and have determined my own children won’t feel that way, but also in response to my mother’s practice of always having cake in the tin since marrying a farmer…who eats fruit cake for breakfast every morning, not just birthdays.

Which brings us to the day after tomorrow, and the cakes that wait to be eaten. The icing is drying, the decoration is amateur and the cakes are lopsided and crispy. I’d be thrown off bake off and I don’t care!