Smokey the Magnificent

It is 16:51. At 17:00 a representative from Nosh will either ring to inform me I have won one of the categories of the pavlova competition… or not.

There’s a lot riding on this. I accidentally left the baking paper and red food colouring up in Auckland (we were icing cookies at the hospital), so I had to buy more this morning, as well as raspberries and some yoghurt to replace the stuff Helpdesk Man callously used up in a smoothie. Once you factor in three blocks of chocolate, seventeen eggs (’cause of the practice pavlovas) and a $10 thingy of vanilla paste, I’ll need at least a runner-up prize to break even.

Worse yet, we dropped off the pavlova today at the exact moment some reporters from Hamilton Press were having a slow news day. So the lady took a bunch of photos of me holding my pavlova aloft and beaming at a point beyond her shoulder (for the light - I know, seemed odd to me too); and the chap, who didn’t seem to be much of a culinary whiz, stared dubiously at the pavlova and said “So, did you use, like, a recipe?” and “How did you do those swirly things?”

Which is all very well. Fame comes naturally to me - I once served a chap at Rialto who I later heard was an All Black, and Harry Sinclair himself once gave me a dirty look. If I win, this will just be another gilded paving stone on my road to immortality. If I win.

If I don’t, they’ll probably select the most manic-looking photo of me and publish it with “LOSER” written underneath in 72-point type. And I’m not sure I could bear the shame.

17:01. Silence. Hmph.

17:05. Oh, come on. Seriously, people? There were raspberries stuffed with yoghurt and melted chocolate on that thing. I invented that. (Quite nice, in case you were wondering.)

17:09. Maybe the judges are still in paroxysms of delight over the beauteousness of my pavlova.

17:13. You know what? Nosh has an underwhelming selection of sharp cheese anyway. That’s right, I said it.

18:24. Well, I took the pigs and went to view the contestants, and it turns out I won runner-up for Best-Dressed Pavlova. A somewhat hollow victory, but I did get a nice basket of smeg out of it, containing (among other things) some rather nice olives and a fancy-looking bottle of olive oil, which pleases me. In the interests of Class I shall refrain from muttering about my competitors. Nosh really does need to get more tasty cheese in, though.

1. At this very moment, as we speak, my large, smallish sister is being laid open on a gurney, having bits of her spine chipped off and packed back in and augmented with metal rods and whacked back into shape, in order to render her less wonky. She asked them to take photos. I want to be that awesome when I grow up.

2. The pig and I have made cinnamon salt dough cookies to go on the Christmas tree. We brushed some of them with gold powder, and iced the others with white icing.

3. I am in the throes of creative angst. This Friday I am entering a pavlova competition at Nosh, a gourmet food store which sells unpasteurised cheese and strawberry balsamic vinegar, and other items too classy to come within a mile of our fair city, until now. The prize is Nosh vouchers, and a fair chunk of them too: so I am determined to win.

There’s only one slight problem: while I can churn a mean batch of sorbet and poach an egg without breaking a blood vessel in my eye, I’m not much of a pavlovier. I made a nice one a while back, but I can’t remember how I did it. And with Nosh vouchers at stake, I can’t risk presenting the judges with a mere white-on-white, strawberries-and-passionfruit monstrosity like eveyone else. My pavlova has to speak. To sing. To dance, if you will. To fly, to swirl, to plummet, to skim the moon-limned clouds of glory and come back to rest feather-light like a dove on an unsuspecting beetle, &c.

So last night I started experimenting. Pavlova 1.0 - theoretically a mocha pavlova with coffee-infused cream and the potential for adding hazelnuts later - was something of a disaster. Too much cream of tartar, cornflour and vinegar, and not nearly tall enough. Plus, interesting fact? If you heat cream and infuse coffee into it, it won’t whip no more. I’ll turn it into panna cotta, so it’s no great loss, but still.

Nothing daunted, I am preparing Pavlova 2.0 for dessert tonight. This one will be pink (potential pitfall: browning in oven. Maybe I should omit the initial 10-minute high-temperature in favour of preheating it high and then cooking it for longer at a lower temperature); covered in chocolate curls and strawberries (raspberries for the real deal, but they’re expensive), and possibly dusted with gold. A girly pavlova. I need to find a big star-shaped nozzle for the cream, though. Would rosewater be a pleasing addition? No, possibly not. And I’ll need to put the dehumidifier on - this is the worst pavlova weather ever (although at least all the other contestants will face the same problem).

4. Today the pigs and I went to a hangi at Playcentre, except we were the only ones who showed up. I think it was an elaborate plot to scam me out of my contributory pumpkin - which was not cheap, let me add. $3.99 a kilo is very different to $3.99 a pumpkin, but I didn’t want to disappoint the nice grocer lady.

5. I am becoming quite the gardener. (Gardeness?) Our soon-to-be new landlord rototilled me two enormous patches of dirt for veggies, and there’s also a huge flower bed out the front of the cottage. So for the past few weeks I have been dragging Helpdesk Man and the piggies out to the new house to plant, water and mulch my tiny seedlings.

During this process I have learned a very important lesson: no matter how many dozens of pots you have on the deck, and how many trillions of seedlings you think you’ve planted, a really decent-sized plot of earth will take about four times the quantity you have.

So in an insignificant section of the flower bed I’ve planted nigella, sweet peas, echium, cornflowers, snapdragons and a few other punnets’-worth of flowers I can’t even name; and I have fifty pots on the deck containing seedlings for sunflowers, Canterbury bells, dianthus and poppies.  But that still won’t be enough… which is super, actually, as it justifies my new impulse purchase habit. Seeds. $2.99 a pop and very fulfilling. I got clary sage, gypsophila and dwarf sweet peas last time I was at the supermarket, and I plan to sneak off to the Warehouse today to buy more. And for the first time in my gardening career, I’ve actually used up an entire packet of seeds at one go (partly because they’re stingy with sweet peas, but still). It feels marvellously profligate. I even borrowed some rooting hormone from a friend and am trying to grow geraniums and roses from cuttings.

[Later]

1. Sister is out of surgery - apparently minus a good dollop of blood, but still in the land of the living.

3. Pavlova 2.0 refused to crisp up on the outside, but was pleasingly shmallowy and a tasteful shade of pink. With some minor modifications, it should be suitable.

5. White geraniums, dwarf lobelias and a perennial petunia. Or was it a primrose? Pink and bushy. Miles disgraced himself by ripping off half the plant when I wasn’t looking, and then beaming gummily. Probably my fault for letting him fight trees when he’s bored.

Still having Christmas gift trouble. According to Helpdesk Man, buying him a moderately awesome possum-shooting kit - gun, pellets, holster, fancy hat - would make me the Best Wife Ever. But buying him a much more complete and instantly-usable kit containing a gun, pellets, holster, fancy hat and a possum is crossing some sort of “line”.

He will get socks and like it.

Well, here I am, aground once more and more or less intact, save for a splitting headache that probably indicates intracranial bleeding, but is acceptable because Jamie has a similar headache, thus preventing him from being all “Typical Smokering, having an intracranial bleed” at me.

I feel I should share photos of the event, but they are a little scanty. Getting a professional photographer to take three photos and a DVD cost about a hundred and fifty dollars extra, so we declined; with the result that we have before and after photos, but not during. (At least, not of us. Helpdesk Man, the snortlepig and Miles were waiting on the ground, and the snortlepig took an arty photo of Miles’ knee at approximately the time I was plummeting through the skies. But it doesn’t quite convey the scope of the occasion.)

So, you know. Not exactly a visual treat. But there are plenty of YouTube videos of skydivers prettier than ourselves, with rock music to boot, so you can always pop over there to get the general gist.

This is us getting suited up.

This is a chap called Max checking my fixings. Max was a gung-ho, daring-older-brother type chap who introduced himself as “I’m Max, I’m your guy” and spent the entire skydive trying to get me to do the thumbs up and give him high-fives to indicate I was having a jolly old time. About ten seconds after he pulled the chute he said “So do you think you’ll do this again?”; that sort of chap. Nice, though.

The suit wasn’t exactly flattering. They should have made it white, to give a kind of Princess-Leia-in-The Empire-Strikes-Back vibe. That, or they should have gone with the dieselpunk theme suggested by the hats. Costumed skydiving; it could be the new thing.

Anyway. This is us by the plane. The snortlepig saw it and was all “Whoa, it’s HUGE!”, which, no. Helpdesk Man did try to take an arty from-behind shot of us walking to the plane like a ragtag group of astronauts, but the thing about ragtag groups of astronauts? Their suits don’t sag around the hindquarters. So we will omit that one.

Then we went up. It took a surprisingly long time. We got above some nice, puffy cumulus clouds, and I thought “Whoa, look how high we are”, and then Max tapped me chummily on the shoulder and said “We’re at 5,000 feet now - 10,000 more to go!” We ended up going up past the next lot of clouds, which were thin and blankety, and rather obscured the view. It was high. We had to breathe through oxygen masks for a while, although Max eventually stowed mine away and I began to feel a bit funny. (I assumed it was protocol, but the others, who were sitting behind me, said they got oxygen right up until they exited the plane. A thrifty chap, that Max: not a quality I was especially seeking in my skydiving partner, but no doubt it will serve him well during the recession.)

Then we jumped out; except we didn’t, really. By this time I was intimately strapped to Max and unable to walk, partly because my feet would have been a foot off the ground, and partly because the wee plane was extremely crowded. So we shuffled along the bench onto the floor, dangled our legs over the side of the plane and just sort of fell out. It wasn’t the sort of situation in which one would cry “For Gondor!”; more like “Oop, there goes my sammich”.

Free-falling wasn’t all that fun. My eyes watered like billy-oh under a pair of painfully tight goggles, it was cold, pieces of ice got stuck to my face and it was generally somewhat painful and buffety, and not improved by Max expressing frenetic exuberance with his thumbs (presumably in case I had let my mind wander to the Sunday roast and was missing the fact that yes, we had just fallen through a cloud). I mean, yes, the fact that one was hurtling through the air at 15,000 feet was kind of neat, but it was more awesome in theory than sensation; somewhat like reading War and Peace.

Then he pulled the chute, and I got to steer the parachute here and there, and we went round and round, and it was pretty oose. Max said “Woo-hoo” a lot, and I felt I should say it as well so as not to disappoint him, but I couldn’t quite muster the chuff; so we twirled round a bit and headed over the lake a bit and back again, and eventually came to land in a surprisingly precise spot back at the hangar.

Whereupon the snortlepig, who had been watching with Helpdesk Man for a very long time, came running out to meet me.

Apparently she was pleased to see me.

And then Miles was like “This is all very well, mother, but I require the milks”, and we went off to find a restaurant, but the first one was shut and the second one had a moosehead in it, so we traipsed all round town looking for another one, which we didn’t find, so we went back to the second one on the proviso that I could sit somewhere where I didn’t have to see the moosehead. And somewhere along the way Miles kicked off a sock. And all was back to normal. We spoke judiciously of the event and decided that we might do it again if there was an awesome view and/or a special on, but that next time we should try hang-gliding.

And then we went to the Huka Falls, and the pig was all “Does it got a plug in? How does it go by itself?”, and I realised I could not explain the mechanism of churning waterfalls to a three-year-old (or, indeed, anybody). Maybe I could have before the jump, but not now. And it occurs to me that this could be a handy excuse to use in later life. “Oh yeah, sorry, I fell out of a plane once at 15,000 feet and ever since then I haven’t been able to do my taxes”.

PS: The waiter at the restaurant mocked me openly. I said “Do you do iced chocolates?” and he smirked and said “No”, with a tone that implied “Duh” and also “Ew”.

Today I did a brave, noble, adult thing - something midway between draining the septic tank and getting a mammogram, and about as enjoyable (I imagine) as either. I went to see a doctor, even though I was not actively spurting blood or clutching a severed digit in a baggie. What’s more, I went expecting - nay, intending to demand - a blood test, and alive to the possibility that I would be prescribed antidepressants, a form of medication I have until now viewed with horror and suspicion.

The doctor (officially “mine”, although we had not met before) was a small, gentle Indian lady who, upon hearing me say (quite calmly) “I’m here because I’ve had depression for a while..” walked across the room with a deadpan expression and plonked a box of tissues on the desk. I liked her, although every time I said something like “Do you think we should check for thyroid issues?” and “Maybe I should get my iron checked” she would brighten and say “That’s a good idea!”, which didn’t exactly fill me with confidence.

Strangely, although she seemed meek and inoffensive and mostly said “mm”, when I left her office I was bearing prescriptions for the two things I’d carefully informed her I wished to avoid if at all possible - a steroid cream for a pesky skin condition, and an antidepressant known in the biz as Citalopram, which is not nearly as catchy as Prozac, but it turns out at least three and possibly four members of my immediate family have derived succour therein in the past, so at least I’m maintaining a glorious family tradition. (Really. Why do we feel perpetuating our line is a Good Thing?)

Citalopram, according to the label on the packet, is supposed to render me joyous and full of bees, apparently by turning me into a palpitating, overweight, queasy, dizzy insomniac with blurred vision and the skitters. In the past, fear of these side effects prevented me from taking antidepressants at all, especially when I was hopeful that light therapy and ionisers might do just as well (even though I had very little intention of ever purchasing a light box or ioniser, which now I look back on it was somewhat of a logical flaw.) Today, however, inspired by a vision of myself in a Betty Draper dress, dusting bluebirds and skating over a parquet floor with an Angora Lop attached to each foot, not to mention the fact that I’d paid three dollars for the blessed things and had ninety of them… I downed one.

It did not make me happy.

It did make me nauseated.

Upon which I went online, found a mental health forum with a 153-page thread about the Citalopram, and read a bunch of anecdotes mostly skewed towards the “I threw up for three days, lost all my short-term memory, started slurring my words and tried to kill the Pekinese with a novelty ice-cream scoop” end of the medical spectrum.

All of which would not matter quite so much, except that tomorrow I am going skydiving. This is a long-cherished dream of mine, and one for which I have saved up many a mystery shopping penny. I do not want the experience to be marred by me throwing up in the car all the way to Taupo - or at 10,000 feet, which is probably considered airspace bioterrorism or something. Nor do I wish to come over with palpitations, hot flashes or panic attacks on the way up in the airplane. I can just imagine the burly skydiving chaps guffawing as I rock in a corner, going “It’s always the cocky ones” and “It’s all right, love, we don’t many anyone jump if they don’t want to” while I mutter wildly “It’s not the jump, it’s my happy pills!”, which will probably lead them to conclude that I am planning to use the jump to end it all.

In short, I will not be taking a second pill tomorrow. My mental health will just have to wait, and well, it’s waited this long… In other news, I am going to go henna my hair, so that if tomorrow does end in splatter they can make an inspiring movie about me called She Died With Her Roots Done. One should endeavor to live life in a manner that provides one’s biographers with plenty of good wordplay, I always feel.

Today I spent a merry four and a half hours scrutineering NZQA exams for a boys’ high school, in return for a chunk of money that sounded generous until I was doing it. I think I strode about ten miles. I handed out innumerable tissues, prevented who knows how many acts of Dishonesty and Abetting, and earned the respect of one callow youth when I forgot my place as I was making him fill out the Toilet Roll and muttered “Sorry, I know it’s a bit fascist”.

Matters arising:

1. I’d forgotten that I quite like teenage boys; so many of them mean well. I’d been expecting a bunch of reeking, flatulent yokels - and, granted, after the first thirty minutes you could have cut the fug with a knife - but many of them looked up at me with earnest “I can’t think of the name of that author” faces, intent and free of malice, and it was sort of touching. Also, despite their no doubt numerous flaws, they were undisputably not teenage girls, and that is a virtue indeed. Which brings me to point 2:

2. I am old. Some of those young varmints were, like, ten years younger than me. A decade younger. Yet still the size of a tank. I was still a good fifteen years younger than most of the other scrutineers, some of whom had children in high school themselves; but that still left me in the oldest ten per cent of the room. I wasn’t sure if I should wear a Batman T-shirt next time to appear accessible and with-it, or just skewer a tight bun to my head with hairsticks and go with it. I do have hairsticks and don’t have a Batman T-shirt, so I might as well embrace my decreptitude. Still, though. Depressing.

3. It is a very tragic thing to watch a boy hand in his papers as soon as the first 45 minutes are up and he can legally go. A fair few of them did, either with quiet despair, or a jaded air of “I’ve put in my time, the world can ask no more of me”. I wanted to exhort them to think of the wife and chillun, and one of the scrutineers said that she always asks “Are you sure?” in meaningful tones, but I doubt it helps.

4. While stalking down the rows, I read snippets over their shoulders. It was fun. “The author creates tension by…”; “The movie “Inception” is about…”; “the key relationship in the novel”; “Finnegan’s Wake is a metaphor for…”. I wanted to stop and read on, and I suppose I could have - what could they have done? - but I refrained. Scrutineering the maths exam won’t be nearly so much fun.

5. That evening, I went to do a mystery shop at a supermarket and ran into one of the boys, who was stocking shelves and recognised me. We had a pleasant chat - he seemed sanguine about his prospects, despite only having filled in two of the four English booklets. It seemed a bit late to point out that unless he wants to stock shelves forever, he should probably attempt all four booklets. Still, he was nice.

6. Miles really ought to have a medal. He is the Best Baby Ever. I left at one and he slept until four; drank milks from a bottle like a pro, and was happily chillin’ with Helpdesk Man when I returned home at traffic-past-five, despite having suffered a slight plummet during my absence. (Helpdesk Man put him on the narrow window seat, turned to get a chair to wedge up against it, and told the snortlepig “Stay there and don’t let him fall off”. Which might have been due diligence, but the snortlepig wasn’t paying attention and drifted away, and Helpdesk Man turned back just in time to watch Miles roll over joyfully and plop to the floor. Luckily he did not land on his head but his tum, which has fewer brains.)

1. Last night Tiny Miles emitted a poop of such force and vehemence that the snortlepig sat up in bed and said “Mummy, are there fireworks?”

2. National Novel Writing Month. I am doing it. Usually I plan ahead and end up paralysing myself with the crippling horror that what I produce might not end up being the next Harry Potter. This year, fortunately, I forgot; until the first of November, when Helpdesk Man casually said (I was in the bath, just to set the scene) “It’s NaNoWriMo, are you doing it?” And I was all, “Why not”. So I am. 3361 words so far. Most of them rubbish. Will keep you apprised.

3. We’re moving to the country. A friend’s mother has an orchard with a cottage on it, and she offered it to us - cottage, not orchard - to rent for a very reasonable sum. Moving will not be an unalloyed joy - the house isn’t as pretty as our current place, and it’s less convenient, being out of town. Plus, of course, we will have to move house, and you know what that means? Cleaning the oven. But still, though; we’ll get to keep chickens, and I can have a veggie garden practically as big as I wish, or even two - one in the backyard for the frillier sorts of lettuces, and a big old rototilled patch out in the orchard for the less presentable veggies like pumpkins.

And in the front yard, I plan to plant flowers. I have never grown flowers before, but I’m suddenly very excited about the prospect. In the last week I’ve read about eight books on garden design, and it’s fascinating. The authors make all these oddly specific pronouncements, and you think “Come now, don’t be narrow-minded, I’m sure that would look nice in certain circumstances” - but then you ponder a bit, and realise their way is Right and True. For instance, one chap was scathing of garden beds in which the plants were neatly arranged from shortest at the front to tallest at the back. Apparently you have to have some skinny, longer plants at the front (like poppies or tulips, that kind of shape), dotted about to add texture and prevent the bed from looking unnaturally tiered. This was news to me. Similarly, another chap went on a rampage about home gardeners who only buy six tulip bulbs in different colours to save money. What you have to do is save up your pennies and buy a whole bunch in the same colour, planted in a drift, and interplanted with some low-lying species to set off the colour and cover the area near the ground, which will otherwise look bare and leggy. He showed pictures. He had a good point.

4. Being off sugar is boring. I do not like it at all. It’s not exactly fierce, intense suffering; it’s just dull. I see a picture of a fancy three-layer cake and think “Ooh, I should make that”, and then realise I can’t eat it. Or I think “I should make mousse tonight, it would bring joy to Helpdesk Man’s rheumy eyes”, and then I remember, and think “Oh”. And am I bursting with new life and energy? No, I am not. I complained about this to my sister-in-law, who has been nagging me to do it for months, and she said “You’re probably still eating too many grains”. I think she’s trying to drive me to suicide so she can have my cast iron pots.

5. This is the pig in a dress I made her.

6. What is the definition of a millionaire? This has been nagging at me. If you have $750,000 in the bank and a $250,000 house, are you a millionaire? What if you have a million-dollar home, but no money in the bank at all and you can’t buy cheem? Can it be shares in a business, or can you have invested it all in a posh necklace? And it gets even more confusing when people say “He made his first million by the time he was 30″. Everyone who works a $50,000-a-year job for twenty years makes a million dollars; but that’s not generally seen as worth mentioning, and it certainly doesn’t make them rich. Does the “first million” have to be a spare million, as in, he’d already made enough for the house and groceries and then made a million on top of that? That seems wrong, but then so does not accounting for expenses. I don’t get it.

7. The other day - I was in the shower. I feel a need to point that out. A lot of interesting stuff happens while I ablute. Sometimes when I wash my hair, I finish it off with a blast of cold water to lock the cuticle, and the cold water tends to trigger a panic attack because I have a phobia of whales and they live in cold water, so I have to brace myself for it and keep my eyes wide open and see how cold I can let the water get before I panic and turn it off. It’s sort of life-affirming: lends spice to the experience. Anyhoo. I was in the shower, talking to Helpdesk Man, and I said “I just read a book called 50 Buildings That Changed the World. It was interesting. But most of the buildings didn’t actually change the world, they were just kind of nifty. They should have called it 50 Nifty Buildings. That rhymes.” And Helpdesk Man said, in a supportive, vaguely patronising manner, as one would congratulate a child on its crooked W, “It does! Not, you know, well…”

My self-confidence is at a pretty low ebb these days, so I said “mm” and washed for a bit before my mind went “‘Ang on”, and I said “Fifty. Nifty. How does that not rhyme?” And Helpdesk Man said “Oh. I was thinking of “nifty” and “buildings”.”

Christmas is approaching (fools), and I have begun angsting about gifts. A while back I discovered a rather lovely rhyme - purportedly from the Victorian era, although I doubt it - designed to make the process easier. It goes thusly:

Something they want

Something they need

Something to wear

And something to read.

Gosh, I thought. That’s nifty. And I vowed to do it. But it turns out, it’s not as easy as it looks. For instance, do craft supplies for the snortlepig come under Want or Need? She doesn’t, as far as I know, actively want anything for Christmas; I don’t think she’s figured out the concept of a wish list yet. So does it count if it’s something I know she would want? Does it break the whole principle to divide, say, Something They Need into four separate gifts - say, crayons, chalk, stickers and glue? Does the poem include Christmas stocking presents, or exclude them? What if Something She Needs is also Something To Wear, and possibly Something She Wants as well?

Pottering around the internet, I discovered that mothers more cunning than I have wrestled with this selfsame problem, and overcome it. Basically, they cheat by changing the poem. So a mother who has already planned to give her child, for instance, a handmade tote bag, a toy that goes ping, a zoo membership and a bag of cocaine will simply justify the purchases by altering the poem to read:

Something handmade

Something bought

Something to do

And something to snort.

Or, if I were to retroactively justify various presents bought for Helpdesk Man over the years - a whiskey glass with a moustache etched on it, a hip flask, a wallet and some hand-embroidered manly hankies  - I’d make it something like this:

Something unintentionally hipster

Something from which to swig

Something made outta the dried skin of a dead lamb

And something not very big.

No Shakespeare, but it gets the job done. And y’know, the existence of this literary form this really sheds some light on the origins of the poem “Three Rings for the Elven-Kings under the sky”; don’t you think?

A few days ago I babysat two preschoolers, while their mother was gallivanting off to hospital with a breast abscess. It was a strikingly traumatic experience. Not that anything happened - we made coconut macaroons and Mother Please Don’t Die of a Breast Abscess cards, and ate toasted sandwiches and carrot sticks for lunch. But for the angst and turmoil it cost my scabby soul, I’d rather have washed lepers in Namibia for a year, or saved an uninteresting species of beetle through a letter-writing campaign.

Other people’s kids are scary. I have thunk on it, and here is why.

1. Watching other people’s children brings all my insecurities to light. Children are judgy little smeggers, prone to looking at you with withering xenophobia when you inform them that you do not stock avocadoes, are unfamiliar with the Wiggles’ oeuvre, or cannot provide them with a Thomas two-handled cup. You can just see them thinking “What kind of one-horse Mickey Mouse operation is this, in which I have to wipe my face on a cloth of the wrong colour?” Or “Off-brand peanut butter? Spare me.” Their mother, they clearly think, is far more capable than myself; and they’re probably right, so after about half an hour I start to think so too and find myself hoping they won’t ask to see the state of my linen closet or tax returns. And the worst part is, whereas with an adult one could conceivably salvage one’s pride by saying snootily “No, I don’t keep that in the pantry; it has nitrates in it, you know”, or “We try to stay away from licenced character toys”, basic decency prevents one from explaining to children that their Mummy probably doesn’t care about their gut flora, but I do.

Especially because I don’t, really.

2. I’m always worried they’re going to drown or commit self-immolation on my watch. It only takes a second, you know. The other day the snortlepig was sitting next to me on the couch, quietly eating scrambled eggs, when she suddenly said in resigned tones, “Mummy, the fork went in my eye”. Not dreadfully far in, apparently, because she just blinked for a bit and went back to having her eggs; but still. And should something dire occur, it is not just my negligence that will be scorned (ie. “You let little Johnny play in the Iron Maiden?”), but also my medical care (”His arm was off and didn’t give him any Rescue Remedy?”). This frightens me.

3. Bodily fluids. I’m agin them. One can be inured to one’s own child’s faecal matter, in much the same way as one can become inoculated to the grease-borne pathogens of one’s local fish and chip shop; but substitute a strange child (or deep-fried won ton) and the results are too ghastly to contemplate. My usual method is to avoid the issue until the parent comes back, and then lamely say “I think I might have smelled something before”, in the hopes that the parent will believe that the bulging, reeking nappy was filled just as they pulled into the driveway. Actually, it works quite well - at least, they don’t complain, after all I just watched their kids - but it is a cowardly move, and unworthy of me.

4. You know how some people emit a brisk, no-nonsense vibe that commands respect from the young? I do not have it. I have more of a wimpish, craven aura that broadcasts “I only realised last year that Megan was mocking me that time when we were nine”. (She could hear me after all. It was a revelation. I think it broke Helpdesk Man’s little heart when I told him. He looked at me as one might look at a marsupial that was not only crippled, but the last of its kind.) What is one to do (to take an example from the other day) when a child throws all the carrot sticks on the floor, or (to take an example from thirty seconds after that) starts up a shouting match with her brother while the baby is trying to sleep in the next room? I don’t know. I suppose I could bite off the tip of my own finger and just silently start drawing tally marks on the wall in blood, maintaining eye contact all the while; but it seems a bit subtle for the preschool crowd. Seven to eight, certainly.

The amazing thing is, I know people who are not like this. I know mothers who say things like “What’s one more?”; staunch women who say “Can I take the kids?” without their eyes begging “Please no”. It fascinates me. But then, they probably clean their guttering every six months as well. Freaks.

As of three days ago, I am Off Sugar. There are several reasons for this, the most interesting being that Pioneer Woman is doing it, and am I not a better man than she? (Actually, maybe. I’ve been reading a bunch of anti-Pioneer Woman blogs after my little sister, who I feel shouldn’t know about such things, informed me of the existence of anti-Pioneer Woman blogs; and while for the most part they are, yes, petty and small-minded, they make some good points about her business practices. Don’t read them, though. Bad for the soul.)

Helpdesk Man, incidentally, is not Off Sugar. His attitude during the past few days has fluctuated from “I suppose I’d better do it too, or you’ll get skinnier than me and laugh at me” to “I guess I’ll have to do it too, because you won’t be making any cupcakes” to (five minutes ago) “You want to go for a walk? Ooh, we could go get ice creams”.

In the mean time, aside from reflexively going to eat a shmallow before remembering I shouldn’t be eating shmallows (moot, willpower-wise: Helpdesk Man had eaten them), I haven’t noticed any of the changes that are supposed to come with such a diet - radiant skin, vibrant energy, superpowers etc. Then again, I haven’t been strictly strict; we have some pears that need eating through, and I’m still having carbs. But on the upside, a year ago I wouldn’t have grasped the significance of carbs in a no-sugar diet at all; so I guess I have grown as a person. (Which is, of course, largely the problem.)

In other news, I have been making things.

This, for example, is a messenger bag. I made it out of quilting cotton and a placemat - making bags out of placemats is quite the thing these days, which I never really understood until now. Good and sturdy. Unfortunately, this bag came to a rather dismal end. I made it for the birthday of a certain nephew, hence with a manly demeanor - it’s a bit hard to see in the photo because Helpdesk Man was being arty with the tungsten setting, but it’s forest green and beige and has impressively masculine topstitching. Unfortunately I had not reckoned on the nephew’s father; a man who, despite wearing suspiciously arty shirts, has such a horror of femininity that he refuses to wear his own sons in the Ergo, which is, I might add, black. I once offered to make him a leather one with buckles and studs and spikes, but he felt that even this would be a blow to his manly pride. I know, right? So anyway, Nephew Pig opened up the present and it was greeted with a shout of “Noooooo!”; and my protestations that it was a Manly Messenger Bag went for naught, especially when the snortlepig, who hadn’t been paying attention, found the bag and held it up to Nephew Pig, saying excitedly “This is for you, it’s a HANDBAG!”

What became of the bag, I do not know. Presumably Uncle Man poured bacon fat on it and set it alight with his own alcohol-infested vomit, or however manly men kill things these days. A sad thing, anyway; it was a nice bag.

Somewhat more successful was a wee jacket I made for Tiny Miles. (Incidentally, Tiny Miles is rarely known as the Auxiliary Pig in real life. He generally goes by either Tiny (on account of being big); the HMS Tastyface; fizzypig; The Chaowld (snortlepig pronunciation); Fatcheeks (after his sister)  or the catfish, because when he sucks his two middle fingers he looks like one. I shall endeavor to take a photo of this at some point; it’s blimmin’ uncanny.)

The jacket is green and hooded, like your eyes,  and was fairly successful given that the sleeves nearly drove me to innocentpasserbyicide on several occasions. I eased, Gentle Reader, like no man has eased before.

Here is Miles in his jacket with his grandpa. (Heh. Sounds like Cluedo.) I like this photo. When Father kicks the bucket, as he undoubtedly will, I’mma lobby to have it on the slideshow. Do you think there’ll be a slideshow? Probably a bit technologically heretical for our church. Maybe a nice collection of woodcuts. He’d look good in a woodcut, Father. Anyhoo.

And then there’s this object here.

Now I see it lurking like that it comes across as pretty sinister, but it’s actually a hydrangea cake based on the far snortlier one by I Am Baker. My hydrangea colours are more realistic, I think, but hers look more… edible. It was yummy, though; carrot cake with cream cheese icing - after piping which, incidentally, I may never use buttercream again. Buttercream is sadistic and needs to be quashed.

Also, you know what’s awesome? Fabergé eggs. I just read a book on them. Now I’m reading one about Madame Tussaud, which is equally oose. Apparently pre-Revolutionary women “of a melancholic bent” would adorn their pompadours with little urns and coffins. I told Helpdesk Man all about it - both the fashions of Versailles and the pinnacle of technical perfection and creative excellence that is the Winter Egg - the other day on a walk, and his eyes glazed over. Then I told him he didn’t love me. Then we bought a cauliflower.

Finally, here is another photo of Tiny Miles, for the benefit of his hemisphere-hopping aunt. Is he not a fine and goodly child? It was all the fermented cod liver oil I consumed, I think. And for that, he owes me.