In A Village By Mistake

I am attempting to write this blog in the centre of a maelstrom of far too much feverish, childish excitement. It’s like Christmas Eve, the night before the holidays and National Poetry Day* all rolled into one.

And what is the cause of this excitement?

The White Stuff, the right stuff.

Snow.

Sparkly Daughter and Gothic Daughter heard on the radio this morning that there was a 50% chance of snow. Since then they have been pressing their noses pretty much constantly against the window, waiting for the first flakes to fall.

Of course this was pretty much old news to the rest of the household. Like you, I had been watching ‘news’ reports all week foretelling the ominous approach of The Snow.  We have all watching the extremely excited weather-predicting folk leaping up and down shouting ‘SNOW! SNOW! Batten down the hatches! Actual WEATHER is coming!’

They love a bit of snow those weather forecasters, don’t they? They are suddenly at the top of the pile. Everyone’s listening. They are at the beginning of the news rather than the end, muttering incoherently about lingering cold fronts and accumulating scattered precipitation. When they have SNOW to talk, everyone stops making the tea for a bit to go – ooh snow. I should maybe buy some milk!  Or a generator?? Or at least a shovel.

We have also endured the hyperbolic and pointless local news reports, featuring chilly, solemn men standing in front of piles of salt talking very very seriously about hazardous driving conditions and trying not to seethe too much about being stuck out in the freezing cold with almost nothing of any interest to say.

So the news all week has been the oncoming snow, dividing the country, and indeed the house, into the snow lovers and snow loathers.

(Actually the LongSufferingHusband is in a smaller category – the Snow Denier. The white blobs on the BBC website certainly fail to convince him; he says PHOOEY to the white blobs even when they are falling to the actual ground in the actual garden. ‘It’ll fall as rain!’ he says. ‘It’s just sleety!’ he adds. ‘Oh. Well maybe it won’t settle,’ he counters when I ask him to come and help me dig the cat out of the snow.

Sadly for the children, the snow didn’t start falling in earnest till bed time, meaning two over-excited girls who could only be reconciled to the idea of sleep by promises of snowy fun in the morning – ‘if it’s still here’, I whisper, hopefully.

For yes, reader, it’s true. I’m a Snow-Loather. I honestly can’t bear the stuff. I am a snow curmudgeon. Here are just a few of many objections to the White Stuff:

1. Snow is very very cold. That’s the key really. I mean I don’t get in the house and think oh I’ll just have a little snuggle down in the freezer. Why would I want to choose to surround myself in a pile of fluffy frozen water?
2. In addition to the coldness aspect, snow is also extremely wet. Making me wet. I do not like to be wet unless it is in a hot tub. I certainly do not like to be wet from the melting snow, for that means being cold and wet. For my feelings about being cold, see 1.
3. Playing in the snow generally involves creating some sort of sculpture. I can just about manage a snowman, as long as your standards of realism and aesthetics are not high. I can certainly manage an abstract snow blob. With optional carrot nose. Unfortunately this will not cut the mustard with the Gothic Daughter. The Gothic Daughter has high standards for snow sculpture. One year I was required to produce a Snow Bush Baby; she was not impressed. Last year she raised the bar: a Snow Barn with a selection of Snow Cloven Footed Mammals, a feat of engineering and artistry way beyond my pathetically limited skills. Never have I prayed more fervently for a thaw.
4. Sledging – The Village is very flat indeed so to find a slope steep enough for this extremely dangerous activity involves a long tramp past some very chilly looking sheep. On the way, one of the party will  inevitably tell the story of the time they had to call the air ambulance to whisk away the injured sledgers. This story is met with much hilarity by everyone but me. I try not to compare my plastic tea tray with the expensive and exotic fairy-tale equipment everyone else has mustered from their garage. Why did I not buy one in October like everyone else?? Because I am in DENIAL that it will ever snow, that’s why.

So to tomorrow …. Well tomorrow I want to go into civilisation. Eat lunch and buy things in shops and drink coffee with friends in the warm and look at the dreaming spires. And this snow is going to get right in the way. Isn’t it? Yes. Yes it really is. Bugger.

So why, why then, am I standing right now, clutching my tea, and gazing out of the kitchen window. Watching the falling snow and the Petite Narnia it is creating in the back garden.  Pogging snow – it’s inconvenient, it’s irritating but it’s beautiful and it’s magical.

And tomorrow I’ll put on my gloves and scarf and I might even muster a carrot and give it my best shot to create whatever complex snow menagerie is required.

Yeah. Let it snow.

*I will concede it’s possibly just me who finds Poetry Day exciting.

This week TicTacGirl turned 18.

Do you remember turning 18? Well it wasn’t yesterday but I remember it vividly. This was back when Thatcher was still on the throne and Michael Jackson was Bad but you know in a good way.  And we were still prosecuting Nazi War Criminals. Ah happy days.

It was a big deal then, turning 18; back then it was all about the KEYS. Symbolising the keys to adulthood and in fact literally getting your own key to the front door. So you could come and go as you please, treating the house like a hotel. Now to be fair, my house was very little like a hotel by any stretch of the imagination. Very few chocolates on the pillow, and a very poor concierge service indeed. But still, nice to have your own key to fumble around for on the darkened doorstep.

And for some reason you also got another key when you turned 21; I guess this was the key to all the things you could do at 21, like, er, well I’m pretty hazy on that one.

These days it’s all different. By 18 most children seem to have not only their own key but their own car, garage, annex and kitchenette. But it still seems to be a cause for celebration. Cakes are baked and eaten and congratulations are in order. There’s still a feeling of Coming Of Age.

So I was browsing the racks to find a suitable card to celebrate this momentous occasion, which was very enlightening for any observer of the world in 2012. What message is contained in these cards? What are we passing onto our fresh young people about what it means to be an adult?

Well it’s very simple. How do we celebrate the passage into the adult world?

Just.

Get.

Drunk.

Now I knew for certain that TicTac Girl had no plans to get drunk on her birthday. Mostly the conversations about her forthcoming celebrations centred on whether Twister should be played before or after the food*. Less with the vodka, more with the Vimto.

So all those cards reading – GET TOTALLY OUT OF IT ON YOUR BIRTHDAY AND VOMIT ON YOUR FRIENDS! And YOU’RE 18! It’s time to start on the long path to CIRRHOSIS! – Well they just didn’t seem appropriate.

In the end I was forced to create my own personalised birthday card for Tic Tac Girl, a sort of collage of her favourite Tictacs providing an interesting texture on a backdrop of quotations from Eric Hobsbawm. Now I appreciate that TicTac Girl is perhaps not the average 18 year old but surely she’s not alone in having hobbies and interests other than drinking. Surely we have more to offer a young woman on the cusp of adult life than the prospect of public vomiting.

And TicTac Girl is certainly contemplating the end of childhood with a sort of thoughtful introspection, so I was very sorry that I didn’t have some sort of ritual to jolly her along a bit. A couple of weeks in the wilderness might do the trick, but there is precious little wilderness within striking distance and leaving her at the side of the M4 isn’t really equivalent.

So I had a little browse on the internet for some coming of age rituals. Well it all sounded very exciting. There was quite a bit of blood letting, a great deal of scarring, and – my personal favourite – wearing a large conical hat with leaves to the waist to symbolise oh goodness only knows but it does sound funny. I’d like to see just about any of my friends and acquaintances, of whatever age, in one of those.

But to distract her attention while I sneak up behind her and clamp this enormous conical hat on her head, I thought I would come up with a list of the real initiations into adult life, which TicTacGirl can work through methodically before she gets the key to the, er, door of life or something.

So here they are, the true endurance tests of adult life:

1. Paying out more in library fines than the actual books would cost in the first place. If I added up all the money I have spent on library fines over my adult life I would be able to buy a small flat in Bloomsbury and that’s no exaggeration. Ask the Long Suffering Husband.

2. Going to the house of an old person and listening to them read out the obituaries while you pretend to know who they are talking about (‘you know! Maureen! Used to live next door to your Auntie Joyce! Had that dog that looked like Eric Morecambe!’) whilst eating a very questionable bit of homemade cake and drinking bright orange tea from an extremely chipped cup and saucer.

3. You must be able to remember any number of passwords, PINs, phone numbers, postcodes, old addresses, when you moved to this house, the shoe sizes of all your children (and ballet shoe sizes which are slightly bigger, or smaller, possibly), which month and year you had that minor accident in Iceland Car Park, answers to secret questions, various unmemorable combinations of letters AND numbers and you must keep these all in your HEAD AT THE SAME TIME AS EVERYTHING ELSE. NB I am not quite here yet, but still not quite as bad as the woman of my acquaintance who writes her PIN on a sticker and sticks it to her credit card.

4. Pretending to understand and care about your pension, even to the extent of reading the letters they send to you every year with a deeply furrowed brow before chucking them into the pile of Important Stuff with the sinking feeling that your twilight years are going to be spent eating Pedigree Chum whilst wearing a lot of jumpers.

5. Christmas

On second thoughts Tic Tac Girl, I’d go for the hat; or maybe having your canines filed down like they do in Bali – ‘slightly to symbolize the effacing of the individual’s “wild” nature’. It won’t hurt a bit. Well maybe a little bit.

OR HOLD ON we could have a debutantes’ ball! Now we’re talking! Nice frocks, passion fruit TicTics on the tables and a great big cake with – why not – a key on top.

And don’t forget the Twister.

*BEFORE! Clearly before. You see, these are the lessons that only experience can teach you.

I heard on the radio that this is National Squirrel Day. And, it seems, also National Hug Day.

Now there are a number of questions that arise from these two seemingly random pieces of information. Firstly, why I am I listening to a radio station that thinks this is the kind of thing I need to know at 8am?

This is a very pertinent question, and the answer has much to do with Iain Duncan Smith making a noise on the Today programme and God knows I can’t bear more than a few seconds of that before turning over to Radio Ridiculously Local and Relentlessly Chirpy. I like to try and forget that we have a Conservative Government if I can possibly help it, but the fact that Iain Duncan Pogging Smith has a position of actual power in the country was hard enough to stomach first time round, but really? Again?

Anyway the presenter of the Breakfast Show of Radio Ridiculously Local and Relentlessly Chirpy FM – “GOOD MORNING MILDLY DEPRESSED MARKET TOWN!!!!!” – thought having these two days simultaneously was a recipe for disaster. “What if you actually got confused and HUGGED a SQUIRREL! Tee hee!” I am pretty sure he said tee hee. In fact if there’s one person who can get away with saying tee hee, it’s Mr Ridiculously Local and Relentlessly Chirpy. Anyway he certainly carried off this line with panache.

But his ‘joke’ does lead onto a second pertinent question – IS it a good idea to celebrate hugs and squirrels on the same day? Surely it compromises our ability to celebrate squirrels fully and appropriately, if all the time we’re thinking, oh gosh maybe I should be hugging someone? It is, to say the least, something of a difficult juggling act.

And so I started thinking about this whole clash of the Squirrel/Hugging celebration, as Mr Ridiculously Local and Relentlessly Chirpy followed up his tee-heeing with a groovy tune.*

Is there some sort of governing body in charge of deciding which aspect of life is celebrated on which particular day, that we could appeal to, in order to avoid this kind of clash in the future? Is there a committee, making sure that there’s a good long time between celebrating Weasel Day and Stoat Day to avoid any potential overlap, and side-stepping the significant potential problems of simultaneously marking National Kissing Day in the middle of Herpes Simplex Awareness Week.

And that’s another thing. Why do some things get whole weeks, and others only days. Now I’m as keen on breastfeeding as the next Weirdy Lentil Weaver – keener, possibly – but come to think of it, is it really appropriate to have breastfeeding WEEK and Book DAY? Maybe to ensure fairness we should pressurise this committee into slicing down time even further to meet the needs of minority interests. Gherkin Hour for example. Ladle Afternoon. Michael Gove Minute.

But the more I think about it, the more I suspect that there isn’t really a governing body in charge of allocating these days, is there? It’s all a big free for all. In which case I hereby designate the next two weeks to be Number6 Fortnight.**

I am quite willing to incorporate Squirrel Day AND Hug Day in this Fortnight actually. Because I am quite terrifically keen on them both. Both literally and symbolically in terms of what they represent.

I wholeheartedly approve of hugs. Hugs are marvellously things. Cuddles too, although we have established I’m shaky on the differences between the two. I would definitely like more of them, but in our inhibited buttoned-up culture the number of people we are allowed to cuddle is really very small. I am prone to waylaying Sparkly Daughter about her daily business for a cuddle; not so much with the GothicDaughter, whose first sentence was – no word of a lie – STOP TOUCHING ME. There’s a girl who values her own personal space.

And I am particularly fond of the squirrel. They are wily little creatures and have very lush tails, to name but two of their many excellent points. But go to any garden centre and you will see a variety of expensive equipment specifically designed to prevent squirrels from eating the food laid out like a big squirrel banquet – but, it turns out, not for the likes of them. We don’t feed squirrels. We only feed birds. Squirrels are basically demonised for being too clever and way too successful and ‘stealing’ food from ‘bird’ tables. We don’t approve of that kind of thing. We like our animals to be vulnerable, needy and preferably pretty much on the verge of extinction due to their inability to function in any meaningful way in the world.

Pandas, for example, who are basically too lazy to mate. If the panda got a grip of things and started raiding bird tables for scraps instead of lolling about expecting bamboo to be served to them lightly braised on golden platters with a tarragon jus – well, we would soon go off them.

And the most ironic thing of all about our squirrel hating, panda-loving preferences is that the most adaptable, wily, bird-table raiding species of all is us – the human. Maybe we’re worried that one day squirrels will start ruling the world.

In fact why not try swapping Iain Duncan Smith for a squirrel for a bit. And Michael Gove for cockroach, the other great survivors of the animal world.

And you know which one of those I’d rather hug.

*Stevie Wonder, I think. Or possibly ELO.

** I did think about a month but you know, I don’t want to seem greedy and self obsessed. Not in public anyway.