Author: lolabump

…and wear it on my way to work. OK, it’s only a silly little quilted jacket thing but does symbolise the end of a notable period of warmth where a shirt represented adequate coverage for the day.

Not sure why the question mark–even the most hardened optimist would be unlikely to bet on Spring taking hold half-way through February. Still, it has been a gorgeous weekend and, over the last week, I’ve seen blue-tits, a dunnock, a long-tailed tit, and a pied wagtail; I don’t recall seeing anything but robins, corvids, and gulls since last year. Well, except the egrets and heron but they were a special case.

Did I mention that we put a new back door in? (Well, OK: got someone else to. I was a little unkeen to get it made and fit it myself.) It’s a white UPVC, fully-glazed thing. Most pleasing.

So, Saturday was lovely. Balmy and calm and mild. We jumped on the bikes and cycled into town via the river. Parked up on Trinity Street outside the craft market which we then proceeded to stroll around for a while before heading off to St Michael’s for a spot of lunch. Then we peered in the art shop’s window, went looking for books in the University Press shop, spent ages in Heffers, accompanied Isa to Boots, dove off on a secret mission (it’s Isa’s birthday next Saturday), and then cycled home via the Beehive where I picked up some rice noodles and a little duck breast to make a stir-fry for dinner. Lola has been collecting change and ‘found’ coins for a while now and had amassed some nine pounds. We encouraged her to spend some of this on the sticker book she wanted. Which she did, but then subsequently and on a few occasions got very upset that she no longer had nine pounds. Though she would not have given up the sticker book…

Sunday was a beautiful clear day and I took the kids down to the allotment (bribing them with snacks and use of my headphones and suchlike). The ground was too wet to dig, but I cleared the plot of last years bean poles, old tomato plants and other detritus. I know: shameful that this was not cleared earlier. The plan with the allotment this year is to turn almost all of it over to potato, as we are also taking on Tim and Sabrina’s allotment. Yes: bonkers.

Bored now–t’ra.

It is traditional, or perhaps it is simply a tired and self-indugent cliche, that I start these entries by bemoaning the dwindling frequency of my blogging. This time, however, I’m not going to do that. (Do you see what I did there?)

Anyway, tired oldbollocks aside, we’ve had a fantastic break over Christmas, thank you very much, with notable features including a hitchless Christmas day, a general air of relaxation (not easily obtained at this time of year), and a successful post-Christmas week of outings and walks.

Mum and Dad arrived on Christmas Eve eve and parked up their camper van for a five-day stay. They both looked well and Dad appeared unplagued by pain or complication, though he did suffer a day or so with a nasty throat. We talked, ate, played, drank Dad’s wines (each accompanied by its own story), and, after Christmas, played Mah Jong with the new (old) Mah Jong set Isa had given me.

The girls were lovely: very well behaved and very loving with their grandparents. They made us very proud.

Isa hosted a Christmas crafts morning the other day. We had Rosie, Teo, and Isla around to work with Lola and Neve making snowmen out of polystyrene and glitter and cotton wool and stuff.
It went pretty well.

Isa was pondering yesterday how we might do Christmas differently and avoid the terrible round of present-buying and other nefarious spending that we manage so badly and which promotes stress, guilt and whatnot.
The obvious solution is, er… Not obvious. Perhaps it’s all about expectation management (yes, I’ve had too much contact with project managers) and we should tell everyone next year that we’re not doing presents and that we don’t expect to receive any.

I must note this lest I forget. I do love the way Neve often refers to me (or, with appropriate adjustment, Isa or even Lola) as “my daddy”. As in, “Look at this, my Daddy!” or “My Daddy, can you help me draw a triangle”. It’s very endearing, somehow.
She can spell her name now or, at least, recognise all its letters. And indeed she spends a lot of time spotting them and pointing them out. “Look, my sister–that’s my letter!”

Well, well –been hit by another blogging hiatus, it seems. I’ll do one of those rambling catch-up entries that doesn’t properly satisfy any specific angle of curiosity. During which I must at least mention our trip to Southend, complete with inauspicious,  badlands beginning, as well as our girls’ loveliness, cleverness and whatnot, as expressed via:  Neve’s fun with words and her balance bike, Lola’s growing curiosity and enthusiasm for learning. Today is Saturday and the cold weather that was forecast has arrived. After nearly a week of not seeing the sun, or indeed any sky through the persistent, drizzly fog, a bitter wind blew in a wet frost and then continued to bluster all day, bringing rain, clouds, and biting air. To be fair (to use a popular and lightly irritating expression), it did start off sunny, with some kind of raw beauty thing going on which made a walk up a hill outside the Shelfords to see an Obelisk which I’d spotted marked on the map seem like a good idea. So, after I rang a chandlery in Dover and spent some time talking to an extremely helpful man called Paul about how I wanted to realise the hanging of the bunk bed, and then subsequently emailing him the spec and a diagram (they’re going to make up a piece with 12mm Hempex made up with hard eyes pre-threaded into eye nuts), we all put on our winter gear and set off in the car. By the time we got to the hill, the weather was starting to glower and the wind bit as we climbed the hill. We rounded the little wood at the top and looked down across miles of Cambridgeshire. Amazing what 50 meters[1] will get you. Behind us, the sky was blackening. Ahead, Lola had nearly reached the slightly disappointing stone monument. This is apparently a memorial to Gregory Wale, erected by his friend on his death. Neve had the nursery’s peripatetic teddy with her — he was staying the weekend with us — and we’d wrapped him up warm and brought him along so we could take pics and write about the adventure in his diary. Neve really loves nursery and looks forward to it with great excitement. I’m not surprised: it’s a great nursery with fantastic teachers and an impressive approach. Lot’s of play-based fun–painting, collage, water, sand, and toys–and lots of learning. She learns a phonetic letter a week; they have lots of books to look at; and every week, each child has to do what’s known as a talking box session where they take in their own, special box (Neve decorated her own shoebox) in which they have placed a few bits and pieces which they can then talk about for a couple of minutes. Last week, Neve took in: a tiny bag of fusilli, a tiny bag of penne, two cloves of garlic, and a tin of tomatoes. Yes: it’s her favourite lunch! Anyhow… Wasn’t I supposed to be wittering about Southend? Or Tottenham-by-the-Sea, as I renamed it. We all went down a couple of Friday’s ago because I had tickets for a Rav Davies gig on that evening and I’d thought it’d be fun to take the family and make it a weekend. I browsed the InterWeb for a suitable guest-house a couple of months back and booked a room. I took a day off and we gave Lola the day off school and drove off on Friday morning. We took the scenic route, taking mainly B roads down through Saffron Walden and on to Chelmsford then bearing left for Southend. There are some really lovely old, history-soaked villages and towns on that route and we vowed to return to some of them to peruse them better. We got to Southend in the early afternoon. The town had an abandoned, run-down feel–lots of graffiti-covered, dis-inhabited office blocks, a rash of Costcutters and other ghetto-predating franchises, and a population which looked far from franchised. We punched the guest-house postcode into the navigator and soon found ourselves outside a run-down semi in a grimy back-street near the front. The landlord was out, the gravelly-voiced, 50-a-day neighbour told us as she let us in to show us the room–she had just given him a lift to the pub, she let slip. The house was revolting. The carpet in the hall was crawling and the rooms were dire. We beat a hasty retreat. When we got back outside, we were presented with a dramatic scene, as various police vehicles drew up, while other police folk arrived on foot along with a handful of M&S security staff, all engaging in the pursuit of some unseen villain. Seemed a lot of police for a shoplifting crime–perhaps some assault was involved… We left them to it and wandered off to find somewhere to have some lunch, though we ended up walking along the front in a desultory fashion, keeping an eye out for possible hotels. It was a low moment. We obviously walked the wrong way first and ended up deep in chav-land. It started raining. Isa wanted to go home. Luckily, we stuck it out and walked off in the other direction, where we found a more salubrious feel and a number of hotels, including a big new corporate thing in which we ended up getting a room (the more traditional, picturesque-looking places up the road were all fully-booked).

Anyway, all this is very well but it’s not saying much about the kids who were having a fabulous time. Whatever we saw, they saw the seaside! And they knew we were going to have fish and chips! Neve spent the entire two days, except perhaps when asleep, with her helmet on and riding her balance bike, on which she is totally at ease. She was, in fact, much more at ease than we were given the existence of actual hills is Southend which Neve would happily start riding down while we chased after her in a panic.

Our hotel room was huge and new and had a view out over the pier and the other attractions on the front. The kids had great fun playing hide and seek around the room and playing on their double sofa-bed. After we’d settled in and I’d gone to fetch the car, we all went out for fish and chips. We found a place on the front and ate there, which was fine for the kids but it was pretty dire. We should have looked around more but we were a bit tired and emotional by then…

Later, I left the girls in the hotel and went off in the rain to see Ray Davies.( A really good show but I won’t go into it here.) To everyone’s great relief, the sun was out in the morning and we spent a happy day wandering along the beach, eating chips on the shore, and walking through the fun fair. The girls had a go on the big wheel and were delighted. Phew!

 

The Hoopers are reunited in Cambridge. I went to pick the girls up on Sunday night and, given that we weren’t in bed before 2am, took Monday off. Which gave us all a chance to get back into the swing of things at a relaxed pace. Very relaxed in fact, as we didn’t get out of bed until 11am — quite possibly the longest lie in we’ve had since the kids were born. After brunch, we got on the bikes and took the scenic route into Cambridge to look for a birthday present for Raffie. We wandered around Trinity Street and the market and then went into St Michael’s cafe for lunch. Soup and potatoes. Very nice. How long before we all go screaming bonkers mad again? 🙂