Smokey the Magnificent

1. Other than “agua” (Spanish), “K’Plagh” (Klingon) and “dada” (ingratiating),  Miles has not said much of note. His first English word is, however, promising. It is “indeed”.

He even uses it in context. “Aww, aren’t you cute?” “Ndee!” “Are you talking to me like a clever boy?” “Ndee!” “Would you like some milks?” “NDEED!”

He is a pleasing child.

2. Miles has also taken up a sport. It is called Squelchy Belching, and he is its champion.

3. Tonight we had a housewarming, for no good reason. Most of the attendees had already visited the house, and we (sadly) had no major milestone to celebrate, like finishing the painting or unpacking all the boxes; but we had it all the same. Sadly the canister from the ice cream churn went AWOL, so the ice cream sandwiches turned into cookies dipped in chocolate and yoghurt; but worse things can befall a shindig. (Zombies, dysentery, demon possession, plague of bees… I don’t know. I don’t get invited to many parties.)

Anyway, as it does as such gatherings, the question came up: would you rather wear a burqa for the rest of your life, or go naked? (One vote each way with one abstention, all females.) Thoughts?

You know what phrase is beginning to haunt my waking dreams?

“A quick coat of paint.”

There’s this insidious myth that painting is a swift and easy panacea. “Quick lick of paint, she’ll be right.” “Nothing wrong with that house that a quick coat of paint won’t fix.” “Lovely well-made piece, just needs a drop of paint.”

It is LIES. Helpdesk Man, myself and my stalwart younger sister have been painting portions of our new house for three days straight - three rooms, to be precise. None of these rooms is entirely finished. Either we’re doing it horribly, horribly wrong, or Big Pigment has some kind of stranglehold over the media. For the record: painting is a mammoth, horrific undertaking. Perhaps it’s quick compared to putting up wallpaper, a particular form of torture I vaguely remember Mother engaging in during my childhood; but that’s a little like saying World War One was “the nice short one”.

And the indignity of it is, one spends so little time painting. Most of it’s preparation and cleanup - laying drop cloths*, hunting for the masking tape, washing out the rollers - and, in our case, passing back and forth a baby who is beaming and contented, but nevertheless undeniably there. Naturally it is important to mask one’s windowsills off accurately, but I always feel a bit impatient with the non-roller-wielding parts; just as I get peeved with the non-stitching parts of sewing (ie. the vast majority), and the non-seed-planting parts of gardening (also the vast majority).

Anyway, it is Getting There. The kitchen is a vaguely French dull yellow, of which Helpdesk Man and I are very proud because we conquered much Aspieness in choosing it. The living room is cream with a feature wall in a kind of purply blue, which we’re not entirely sure about, but it is a vast improvement on the previous hue - a rather lurid green which at the time of writing is still present on the skirting boards, shocking us whenever we look at it. Then the pig’s room is cream as well, with a dusky pink for the wardrobe doors and - thank you, Pinterest - wide vertical stripes on one wall. These are pretty neat, even though I was envisaging a sort of muted, dusky Victorian look and instead got an aggressively cheerful candy shop. Still, we feel skilly, and our enthusiasm was only slightly dampened when the landlord, upon being asked for his opinion of our colour scheme, grunted “Oh well, you’re the ones who’ll have to live with it.” (Well, my enthusiasm was slightly dampened. Helpdesk Man suffers from very little self-doubt, and immediately concluded that said landlord must be colour-blind.)

Oh, smeg. It is nearly midnight. I have to get up early tomorrow to paint again while the chaps load up the truck. My clothes aren’t packed. There is undoubtedly some awful evidence of my slovenly housekeeping hiding behind the fridge or under the couch, ready to shock the nice man from church who offered to help us move. I packed the peanut butter and can’t find it. One of my hand-written cookbooks is missing. The Christmas tree is still standing, half-decorated, in the corner of the lounge. I am covered in paint, but don’t know where the towels are. The freezer is defrosting itself all over the kitchen floor, because I couldn’t face it. Two of our ex-flatmate’s socks were welded to the bathroom floor behind the washing machine. Helpdesk Man hasn’t even started packing up his office.

I am going to bed.

*Helpdesk Man insisted on calling them “throw rugs” for a while; now he’s taken to calling them “drop bears”. They all have holes in strategic places.

Is everyone familiar with the Handmade Ryan Gosling meme? For some reason, I find it incredibly amoosing. I don’t even know he is - at least, I know he was in The Notebook, but I haven’t seen it. I read it, and I’m still picking schmaltz out of my ears. It was the same chap who wrote The Time Traveller’s Wife, I believe, only this one didn’t even have double-amputation to dilute the sappy.

Anyway, the Internet being the vasty and inscrutable place it is, some bod got it into her (certainly “her”) head to find photos of Mr Gosling and caption them… thusly. (Yes, I couldn’t resize the photos. I’m not… Wonder Woman. Scroll across, it’ll be fine.)

Or:

There’s a whole website of them. And they make me go “heh”; while at the same time, driving the point sadly home that Helpdesk Man (and indeed, surely all actual men) is unlikely to ever truly appreciate the difference between a store-bought duvet cover and a lovingly handcrafted one, or feel genuinely buoyed upon putting his mugs in a cupboard ModPodged with scrapbooking paper. This is OK. One can and, according to feminists, should do these things for one’s own satisfaction and fulfilment; but one should not endeavor to shoehorn them into the Good Wife category, any more than Helpdesk Man should claim that his proficiency at double-tapping virtual alien hordes makes him a Better Husband; because in fact, though I would like to feel crafting is vaguely morally superior, our hobbies are probably about equally as relevant to each other’s happiness (ie, neutral at best, and an irritating waste of time in less cheerful moments).

But he lets me do it, and does not complain when I spend ghastly sums on quilting cotton; and I watched the pigs for three days while he was at a LAN this week. So we tick along. And I have finished all 25 of the nine-patches for the snortlepig’s summer quilt. It was supposed to be 21, but by the time I got around to counting I’d already done 22, so I just decided to tack another row down the side and make it a square seven-by-seven, instead of a seven-by-six. The proportions are unlikely to correspond to any standard bed size, but the pig’s toddler bed isn’t standard anyway - it was handmade by someone’s grandfather, and we got it off TradeMe - and anyway, when she gets big enough for a real bed I can make her a new quilt, and this one can be a lap quilt.

The nine-patches were surprisingly successful. My usual method with quilting is to be careful and precise for the first ten minutes of every session, then go “Ach, she’ll be right” and fling needles and rotary cutters wildly about, with the result that my corners don’t match up and I spent the last half of the project wondering what I was thinking. I thought for many years that when I asked my mother (who is an excellent quiltress) the secret and she said “Oh, you have to be very accurate and careful” that she was holding out on me. It turns out, though, that when you actually do it it works. Who knew. I wouldn’t exactly call my nine-patches the apex of the craft, but I could show them in public without blushing, and that is a great improvement.

Heh. Heheh. (Look, it beats “Keep Calm and Carry On”, alright? Those are just getting ridiculous. People aren’t even trying. The Hermione “Keep Calm and Marry Ron” was kind of funny, but “Keep Calm and Have Coffee”, with the whole font? Please. Let it die.)

*Squafts is what the pig calls crafts. She also refers to skydiving as (the infinitely more awesome) “skyfighting”, and the Star-Spangled Man anthem from Captain America as the Speckled Man song. It is an awesome song, incidentally - Mother, you would like it. Here it is:

Today the pigs and I were chillin’, and Tiny Miles let out a belch to wake the dead. The pig had been jumping about, not paying attention, but stopped and said “What was that, a growl?”

“It was a huge boip,” I said.

The pig started jumping again and said with satisfaction, “It was MIRACULOUS huge!”

So anyhoo, yup, that was awesome. Also, it is now 2012, an uncannily futuristic date. And this year I shall be 26. Soon I shall be dead, And Tiny Miles will be one, which is just absurd.

I celebrated New Year’s Eve with a shindig, at which I served ice cream sandwiches and won a game of poker. My method for success is to sit out most of the hands in order to milks Miles to sleep, thus preventing myself from frittering away chips; and then to come back and go all in on a straight. I recommend it. Sadly, everybody left the party at 11:30, and the pig woke up at midnight having flashbacks to ‘Nam from the fireworks, so it wasn’t a terribly auspicious beginning to January.

Nevertheless, I am full of new-yearly vim and resolution. I started piecing an Irish chain quilt of the pig’s, the fabric for which I bought two years ago. I made resolutions in a nifty list. I bought a diary (after the New Year, for the discount, though it pained my soul to wait) and filled it with reminders about church lunch, birthdays and the need to pull weeds out of the garden. I joined a challenge online to complete 52 crafting projects. I bought a new dress, in order to swish through 2012 chicly instead of slobbing around in an ex-maternity tunic that doesn’t allow me to breastfeed in public. (On second thoughts, I should probably have bought two dresses. I am extremely short on clothes.) I chose a colour scheme for our new interior walls in two seconds flat with Helpdesk Man, although I am now having second thoughts. Colour is not my strong point.

Also: we watched Green Lantern. My word. It was awful. Usually halfway through a terrible movie I can relax into a resigned torpor and just go with it, but not this time. Even five minutes from the end, I was casting longing glances at my sewing machine. It was almost as boring as this one time Helpdesk Man bought cable ties.

Also, I have discovered a new principle of life: there is no foodstuff which cannot be used as a term of endearment for one’s baby. Helpdesk Man and I have been testing it out, and it’s utterly true. Miles is my wee pumpkin muffin, my tikka masala, my little pierogi, my wee scrap of biltong, my fat wee haggis, my little can of beetroop, my schmear of cream cheese upon a bagel, my little stack of hotcakes, my fat moussaka, my wee chipolata sausage, my tiny crock of kraut, my suet duff, my little dob of wasabi, my boysenberry, my snickerdoodle, my little TV dinner, my hybrid tomato, my little garlic naan… I could go on. I defy any of you to come up with a foodstuff that doesn’t work. Venison pasties? Pan-fried dumplings? Carpaccio? Sashimi? See? It just cannot be done. Gape with awe.

This is Miles.

.

You will notice Miles is a catfish.

Miles mocks you with his eyes.

No, I jest. He likes you.

Miles don’t take no guff, though.

Miles fears no Commies.

Miles fears nothing.

Yet this tough exterior cradles the soul of a poet. Sometimes, for instance, Miles feels a pang of melancholy in the produce section, because he gave up brassicas. For Lent.

Miles is a delicate soul. Sometimes things that amuse coarser mortals shock him to the core.

Then he silently judges.

Take, for example, his large, tiny sister.

His sister has body art and drives a motorbike.

She is pretty hardcore.

Miles recoils from some of her lifestyle choices.

But he still likes her.

Today, in view of the impending house-move, I cleaned out the pantry. This is an event filled with wonder and horror at the best of times, but this time it was particularly exciting. For one thing, Flatmate Man had left behind a number of items, allowing me to play the little game of “Did I buy this two years ago and forget, or did Flatmate Man leave it here as a long-game practical joke?”

For another, I cleaned out my vitamins. I was just going to biff them, but then I thought they might do some good on the garden, returning much-needed if slightly stale nutrients to the soil. I’m not entirely sure what effect breastfeeding-incompatible women’s multis, expired St John’s Wort and thermogenic slimming tablets (it was an angstier epoch) will have on a tomato plant, but I watered them in well and added some four-year-old sheets of nori by way of a mulch, and we shall see. My plants get a fair dollop of human food as it is - coffee, swished-out cream cartons, the odd bit of breastmilk I left in the fridge. I was tempted this year to dig placenta powder under one of my pumpkin seedlings, just to see if it would outperform its fellows, but it seemed like a waste.

Yesterday I went to the new house with Father and sundry aunts. We explored the orchard a little further than I had before. It is pretty awesome. There is a bath lying dead by a tree, and an old green wringer-type washing machine, and what looks like the fuselage of a small plane but presumably isn’t. There is a shed full of awesome apple crates that I want to pinch and make into a bookshelf, only I can’t because they’re used for, you know, storing apples. There is a fig tree in the back yard, and the beginnings of a fence put conveniently close to the veggie garden, so I can grow my runner beans up it. There are plum trees and apple trees and a white lamb and a brown one. It will be nice, I think.

What colour would you want to be, if you were a lounge in an open-plan area next to a kitchen in a cottage? We have to paint over a very bright green, and the only thing Helpdesk Man and I have come up with is cream, which is hardly going to set the Thames on fire. Thoughts? And does anyone know of any really nice posters based on either typography or classic literature, to go on the wall?

Also: tempest prognosticators. I want one.

My life at the moment is dominated by gardening. A motley collection of seventy-odd pots is lining my deck, and I have developed a routine of taking them to the new house once the seedlings have sprouted, planting said seedlings, tipping out the dirt into the new flowerbed, and returning the pots home to start the cycle again.

It’s fun. Sweet peas and sunflowers, which germinate quickly, are particularly gratifying. Nigella takes longer, but looks pleasingly feathery; gypsophila and dianthus have uninspiring seedlings, but will presumably pretty up later on. I’m not entirely sure my Californian Thai Silk poppies are planning to make an appearance at all.

Planting the garden is also fun, at least when I can do it in the cool of the day and Helpdesk Man is around to hold the baby. I am trying to follow the advice of the gardening books from the library and plant in drifts, but the assembly-line process of seed-raising has made things a little patchier than intended.

In fact, the more I read about garden design, the more I realise I am an utter gardening yokel. The writers of garden design books are a scathing bunch, and do not suffer folk like me. To start with, I should have aimed for three structural plants for every interest plant, and relied much more heavily on perennials. Good advice, if a bit late for this year, but I trotted off to the Warehouse and got six white geraniums, and took a few cuttings from some pink ones a friend had as well. Then in the next book I read, the author described geraniums as a “shapeless heap of leaves” - apparently they are the stretch pants and ill-fitting hoodies of the perennial world. So that was depressing.

Then in the next book, I learned that persons of true taste and refinement select only wild, heirloom-type plants, in which the flowers are in naturally-occurring proportion to the foliage, rather than modern bloom-smothered hybrids with doubled flowers. I like doubles, but apparently they are garish and bland, suitable only for redneck philistines who like “a lot of colour” in their gardens. Colour, it turns out, is the first pleasure of the vicious. True devotees of nature revel in textures, a combination of Spires and Umbels, and especially grasses. One whole book, the author just kept on bringing up grasses. Apparently wild grasses are “indispensable” to any garden – she waxed particularly lyrical about the kinds which all bend in the same direction in the wind, which gives Movement to the planting, because heaven forbid one’s planting just sits there. (I suppose that’s how triffids were originally marketed, though, and they did well.)

There’s more. One should not plant too many species - “rip out half your plants and double the rest”, is the advice, which I can see now is good, but I’m not about to follow it after all the time and money involved. One should not combine hues, tones and shades (which are all different things – who knew!), lest the planting be unbalanced. One should use native plants wherever possible. One should plant for year-round interest, so something is always in bloom or providing structural beauty due to seedheads or interesting branches. One should plant veily tall plants in front of others, so the viewer cannot see the entire garden at a glance. One should echo the architecture of the house in the design and materials of the garden bed edging. One should blend the garden in with the surrounding environment. One should use a colour wheel. One should choose one’s colour scheme based on the time of the day at which the garden will most often be seen (reds are bad in the evening, apparently). One should not over-use hot colours, especially in a small garden. One should divide one’s garden into “rooms”. One should always – or never, according to another author – have a large, plain section of lawn.

It’s fascinating, but somewhat intimidating. With this year’s selection of (horror) annuals only half planted, I’ve already started planning next year’s garden, which will be Better and Classier and More Mature. Lemon-yellow “Moonwalker” sunflowers, large drifts of English lavender (perennial, ha!), and something shortish and dusky pink at the front, interpersed with occasional ornamental alliums. Do you think?

In the mean time, I planted three rows of broccoli seedlings out. And the snortlepig, who was helping me, asked if she could “smulch” them. There are whole piles of smulch just lying around, presumably made from the corpses of apple trees. And today after we finished planting the piggie and I picked some forget-me-nots, little purple flowers and pretty feathery grasses to take home. There will be benefits to living in the country.

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.)