The end and a new beginning

My lovely, lovely Ploggers. I have been Plogging for such a long time, over ten years in fact.

The Plog has seen me go from young, free and single aspiring stand-up comedian to married, suburban-with-two-children middle-aged woman with no job and several hundred thousand pounds of mortgage.

Shit, it sounds really bad when put like that.

Anyway, you'll be pleased (please feel free to substitute with "disappointed") to know that whilst this is the end of the Plog, this isn't the end of blogging.

Indeed, I have a new, shiny blog, just waiting for new adventures. Please come and find me at Nunn the Wiser.

There are already three exciting blogs to whet your appetite. Please bear with me for a few weeks whilst I sort out formatting and so forth, but I hope to Plog - I mean "blog" regularly from now on.

Thank you all for reading over the last decade. I hope to continue to disappoint you in the future.

The beginning of the end

Ploggers, an announcement will follow soon.

I am sure you are in a state of abject excitement and/or worry, but rest assured, you aren't rid of me quite yet. Not today, probably not tomorrow, but soon I think it is time to put this Plog to bed and start on adventures new.

Potential prospective Plogging plans are presently in progress. Please persist.

Load of old pony

I taught myself to bake in the summer of 2010. We had moved to the outskirts of London and shared a car. On Saturdays, TheBloke (TM) took the car and went to cricket for the day, often leaving at about 10 a.m. and not home again until 9 p.m.

Unwilling to do my daily commute on a weekend, to get to London-proper, and a bit stuck in the suburbs without a car, I tended to find myself at home, at a loose end (pre-kids, obviously), and would end up doing housework... and then feeling (unfairly) resentful when TheBloke (TM) came home, as he'd been out having fun all day and I'd been tidying and cleaning.

So I decided that I would find something home-based I could do whilst he was out. I bought myself a copy of The Hummingbird Bakery and started working my way through the recipes. I had a lot of disasters: a lemon meringue pie where the filling didn't set. A Victoria sponge where it was still raw and runny in the middle - so I tried to microwave it to cook further. A tart-au-citron where I forgot to add the cream, and therefore accidentally made a dairy-free version. An awful lot of cupcakes. Slowly I got better. I enjoyed the scientific process of seeing what happened if I changed the order of adding the ingredients. If I substituted this for that. If I did this for longer or shorter. There are so many variables.

Eventually I became quite good. Not great, but could reliably turn out a decent cake.

One thing I have never been good at - nor seemed to improve at - is cake decorating and/or presentation. Partly I am just inept at anything like that (my art teacher pre-GCSE, with a worried look in her eye, and conscious of the school's 100% pass rate, cornered me and made me promise I wasn't planning on taking art GCSE). Partly I think it's because I don't really care. I'm much more interested in what a cake tastes like than how it looks.

So this week saw the preschooler's birthday. As we have raised her with strong feminist ideals and encouraged her to enjoy superheroes and diggers just as much as anything else, she obviously wanted a My Little Pony cake. Well fuck me if I'm making Rainbow Dash out of Royal Icing, so I bought the figurines cheaply from eBay. Rarity looked green instead of white, but all else looked good.

As the preschooler has recently changed her name to Applejack Rainbow Dash, she asked for an apple cake. I made her a carrot cake, but substituted the carrots for apples. All good. Then decorating time came. I thought I would keep it simple. A nice layer of (pre-bought, pre-rolled) fondant icing, then some ponies stuck on top. It would be fine.

However, we all hate buttercream, and as I was using a carrot cake recipe, I thought I'd stick to our usual cream cheese and mascarpone frosting. It would be fine.

And it sort of was. This is what the cake looked like. It wasn't perfect, but for a four year-old's party, it would do.

I stored it overnight in an airtight container (OK, the microwave, but it wasn't switched on).

The next morning I heard TheBloke (TM) say, "No need to panic, but have you got any more icing?"

I gave a calm and measured response, "What the fuckity fuck have you done to my cake?"

He hadn't done anything. Apparently there's a reason you don't use cream cheese icing - or if you do, keep it in the fridge. This is what greeted me on the morning of her party.

He was swiftly despatched to buy more icing. And I re-did it, whilst muttering obscenities under my breath.

So it looked like this again.

Anyway, it was all worth it when the preschooler saw the cake, immediately stripped it of all ponies ("I'm going to keep the figurines Mummy for ever and ever") and announced, "I don't like the cake bit. Don't put walnuts in my next birthday cake, Mummy.") I reminded her about politeness, and how next time she might not have a birthday, let alone cake, and then sat and munched my way through a two-tier apple and walnut cake.

It could have been worse.

Milestones around the neck

With the first child, practically weekly we would check the appropriate milestones for her age, delighting when she exceeded them ("Look! Her eyes are following us round the room and she's only three days old! This website says she's not supposed to do that until at least a month! She's clearly a genius!"), and fretting when they were missed ("She's nine months old and still hasn't clapped yet. I've taken her to literally 12 hours of music lessons. Do you think we should see a doctor? If she does have learning difficulties, surely it's better to get help sooner rather than later.").

At literally day 4 - our first day home from hospital - I suddenly had a panic that we weren't stimulating her enough during her (brief) moments of wakefulness. I insisted TheBloke (TM) printed out a whole load of swirly black and white patterns and adorned her Moses basket with them, so she wouldn't be bored whilst she was awake. If someone else told me they had that worry about their 4-day old baby - that it wasn't being stimulated enough - I would have thought they were completely bonkers.

This time round, I haven't yet had time to check the baby's milestones. However, I did read today that apparently she should be saying "Ma-ma" and "Da-da" in appropriate situations. Our baby does not say that. She has one word: "cat". She says this at the cat. She also says it at her sister, her father, me, and any random inanimate object she quite likes the look of. "Ca. Ca. Ca." All fricking day. So I checked the developmental milestones, and they don't provide any help on your child's excessive cat-mentioning at all. She also likes to chase the cat around the room (she crawls! Not sure what age they're supposed to do that, but she's doing it!) and ideally get a big old fistful of his tail fur or his face whiskers. If she succeeds in pulling any fur out, she eats it.

This is not mentioned as an important milestone in my monthly Bounty emails either.

Just like her sister, she is a late clapper. This time round I can blame myself as I have taken her to exactly 0 classes. By her age, her elder sister had been to:

- Baby swimming
- Baby music
- Baby sensory
- Regular stay-and-play at the Breastfeeding Cafe
- Soft play
- Socialised with other babies of the same age from my NCT group.

Second baby has been:

- Stuck in the baby corner of the stay-and-play whilst older sister does fun activity
- Left in the buggy whilst her sister charges around soft play
- Ignored in a high chair whilst older sister has little friends round. Sometimes they squeeze her a bit too hard. I like to think she's grateful for the attention.

Anyway, she's 10 months old today, and I'm very much now of the parenting school, "Everyone fed, nobody dead".

I'm thinking of writing a baby manual with that title. Though sometimes I forget to feed them too. Shh.

Study in studying

TheBloke (TM) has a working theory that I didn't have a childhood. Tied together with my friend Hazel's assertion that I was born aged 42, I think it's fairly safe to say that I was a tad on the square side.

TheBloke (TM) loves asking me questions like, "Well, what did you do for fun?"

The reply to that - like most children, I imagine - is, "I read books. I did my piano practice. On Sundays - if I'd finished all my homework - I went to Tesco."

He guffaws with delight. "Have you ever climbed a tree?" he goads.

"Why would I want to?"

"Well," he says, "it's fun. Did you ever ride your bike down a really steep hill?"

"No," I say. "That would have been dangerous."

"That's the point," he says.

"I did love that Friday feeling though, when school finished and the weekend stretched ahead of you," I muse.

"Aha!" says TheBloke (TM). "Now we're getting somewhere."

"Because," I continue, on a Friday night Mum would take me to the library, and then it was choir practice."

TheBloke (TM) laughs. I am fairly sure it is with me, rather than at me. Fairly sure.

Well, fast forward a few days and we are at the very lovely wedding of very lovely Hazel herself. TheBloke (TM) decides to use this as an opportunity to tease me in front of my school friends.

"Hey, Erica," he says. "Laura didn't have a childhood. She has never climbed a tree!"

Erica replies. "I have climbed a tree."

I am surprised by this. "Why?" I ask Erica.

"I don't know. I think I read about it in a book once."

TheBloke (TM) says, "At least she climbed a tree."

"Don't start," I say. "Erica is famous for being the rebel amongst us, as she was the only one who ever got a detention. It was for skiving school... and she was discovered hiding in the local library."

Erica cannot deny this.

TheBloke (TM) then tries several other of my friends and comes up with the fact that we are so square that between us we had:

- Orchestra
- Christian Union
- Church youth club
- Guides
- Further Maths club
- Extra curricular literature club
- Computer club
- Chess club
- Handbells club*

and very little underage drinking. At which point he gives up.

He should have known better than to pick a "who's squarest" battle with the alumni of Miss Harvatt's Academy for Very Studious Girls. Though honestly, I think I might have won.

* OK, admittedly five of these were mine.

Groundhog Day the musical - a review (no spoilers)

My brother is a lucky person. To be fair to him, he sort of makes his own luck. He's gregarious, interested in people and will talk to absolutely anyone. On the other hand a) I wouldn't really go anywhere out of choice where there would be lots of people and b) if forced, I would likely corner the one or two people I do know and then leave early. We are different in that way. But my brother has the knack of finding the person who can lend him (for free) a penthouse apartment in Tokyo, or a few hours in a recording studio, or directed his favourite childhood show... and will then invite him for dinner. All these things have literally happened to him.

Well, on Friday, I think I got a bit of his luck. I'm not sure how his day went. Perhaps he had my evening... a quiet night in with some Netflix and a home-cooked meal and a baby that needed tending every six or seven minutes. I don't care. Because on Friday I got lucky. Not like that.

I'd already been quite lucky in that I'd managed to score £10 preview tickets to the new Groundhog Day musical at the Old Vic. I was even luckier that my parents were able to babysit that day, and luckier still that when we arrived at the theatre, the man at the box office told us that this would actually be a dress-rehearsal instead of a preview... so our tickets would be free.

Yes, folks, I got free theatre tickets to what will soon be the hottest show in London - and an extra bonus that before the show started, the director, writer and songwriter came up on stage to introduce the show.  Apparently it was touch and go as to whether it was going ahead tonight - but Tim Minchin's parents were over from Australia and in the audience, so it had to happen! I hadn't realised that Danny Rubin (who wrote the film) had also written the book for the musical, which relaxed me a bit. Groundhog Day is probably in my top five films of all time, and whilst Tim Minchin is an incredibly safe pair of hands, I was a bit anxious about how respectfully the material would be handled. Whilst Matilda is a brilliant musical, I don't think you could really argue that it's incredibly faithful to its source material. For a purist. Side note: Danny Rubin (admittedly viewed from the Gods) looks about 30 years old, so must have written the film when he was about five. This freaked me out a bit.

Minchin always felt a perfect match for Matilda - that perfect combination of hard truths, pulling no punches, but with true sentiment right there in the middle. How would this work with Groundhog Day though? Minchin (rightly) asked that we don't spoil the show for others. In this day of social media, that's a big ask, but this review won't contain spoilers. However, if you see something in it that you feel you'd rather not know, let me know and I'll review. Review the review. See? We're getting all Groundhog Day already.

The set was incredible. The staging was some of the cleverest I've ever seen. There were special effects, which whilst not difficult to work out how they were done, earned a round of applause from the audience. In another production, the set and staging alone would be enough for me to tell you to go and see it.

But not this time. The first song alone had me sitting on the edge of my seat, almost in tears. And I am a hard case. (I could sit on the edge of my seat without inconveniencing anyone behind me as we were literally right at the back of the upper circle. I don't care. The tickets were free.)

Three or four songs will become classics. Probably the only gripe I have for the whole show was that it needed a song at the very end, as there was no proper curtain call. The first song repeated at the end would have been perfect. I would be surprised if this isn't in the pipeline - after all, it was the dress rehearsal we saw. Actually, I do have a second gripe, but it's not really a fair or reasonable one. I guessed that rights issues might cause a problem, but I feel I should warn you, there's no Sonny and no Cher. Phil Connors does not wake up to I Got You Babe every morning. It's no biggie really, but it is an iconic part of the original and I did notice it missing.

What really, really impressed me about the show is that whilst it remained faithful to the film - with many lines word-for-word ("sweet vermouth on the rocks with a twist", anyone? Although no sappy prayer for world peace this time.), it reimagined the situation for the 21st century. Gay couples snap selfies. One cameo character unexpectedly has a beautiful, clever and devastating feminist ballad. The familiar Groundhog Day cameo characters are fleshed out, and as an audience we are challenged to think about why perhaps they don't get that depth in the original. Brave and humble rewriting from the person who wrote the film in the first place. The world has moved on. And so, eventually, has Groundhog Day.

Moreso than in the film, we see the turning point in Phil's psyche where Phil sees the prison of endless days as a gift; this volte face is attributed more to Rita in the musical than I remember in the film (which I will rewatch very soon!). It makes more sense psychologically that she is the catalyst that allows him to delight in endless time and use it productively.

As I mentioned earlier, there was no staged curtain call, just all of the actors coming and taking a bow and then leaving the stage. The house lights came up, but they got such a standing ovation - five minutes or so at least, that the cast (and crew) were dragged back on stage, some of them clearly already partly out of costume. The director left us with the words, "Pay for your tickets next time!"

Do. Book now. It's brilliant. I will see it again. And again, and again.

Euro-trashed

I have struggled to put words to this. I haven't felt like this in a very long time. And, for now, it is exactly that, a feeling.

It feels like I have been dumped. It is exactly like that. It pervades everything I do. I can be having fun with the preschooler in the swimming pool, or throwing the baby in the air to make her giggle, but a black cloud hangs over everything, making nothing very much fun at all. You go through the motions. Every song - ridiculously - on the radio seems to have echoes, from Queen's Another One Bites the Dust to Razorlight's America. Just like when you've been dumped and the Corrs (I'm not proud of this) are singing straight to you.

The preschooler doesn't, of course, understand why we are sad.

She doesn't realise the doors that have been closed to her; the ability to study in a European university, to become an astronaut, to take place in cultural exchange schemes without needing a visa and a wad of cash we don't have. She doesn't realise the business we have built with the idea of handing it to her and her sister one day, may be worth nothing in a few years' time.

A mixed-race friend has already been the victim of being told that the country is being "taken back" from her. I am not sure who is doing the taking - Farrage? Johnson? (Yes, let's not call him "Boris", that informal, lovable buffoon's address. Johnson is dangerous.) I am not sure who it is being taken back from. (Cameron?) Cameron and Johnson were at school together. They both represent the elite - I cannot see how this was a protest vote for the working classes, to award power to an almost identical elite white male.

I cannot name one European law, with the possible exception of fishing quotas, that has damaged the British economy. In many, many circumstances, the British lawmakers have felt that the EU law hasn't gone far enough, and indeed have enhanced it.

In the meantime, I find myself almost debating with people who genuinely believe that leaving the EU is going to get rid of brown people (because brown people come from Sweden, don't you know?), that they should complete their ballot paper in pen because pencil was going to be changed, and that tinfoil hats will shortly be back in fashion*. I am almost debating because facts seem to have no bearing on a generation who is going by gut feel. You can't argue with gut feel.

They say they aren't racist, but. They start a lot of sentences with, "I'm not racist, but."

They quote misinformation. I honestly think one problem is that the older generation, not having assimilated Google quite as much as the youth, haven't been able to discern between quality journalism, and any old nutter shouting on a blog (myself included). Facts have not stood in the way of this debate.

Our currency has plummeted. Travel overseas - even before the borders come into force in the EU - is now prohibitively expensive. The Brexiters, to give them their due, did say that they expected it to plummet before rallying.

It will plummet. It will then rally briefly as it will take a hell of a lot of people employed for a lot of hours to rewrite and implement every policy in every company, right down to printing labels, redrafting HR policies and restructuring businesses...

... and then we will see the worst depression of several generations.

The majority of the people who voted for exiting the EU (that is, the over-55s) will likely die before they see the economy rally, if it ever does.

Britain has committed economic suicide. It has also defined itself as isolationist. For a country that manufactures absolutely fucking nothing and relies on imports almost exclusively, that's beyond stupid.

It also feels a less welcome place.

We have options. TheBloke (TM) has dual citizenship - admittedly to South Africa, which is hardly known for its stable politics, economics - or indeed lack of racism. But for the first time in my life, the idea of emigrating isn't off the table.

For most people though, the drawbridge is up. You may, may (but probably haven't) stopped more people coming in. But really you've stopped yourself getting out.

So yes, I feel exactly like I've been dumped. And being told to "get over it" or "let's still be friends" isn't helping right now. Right now I need to get drunk, eat too much chocolate, be a bit sick and anxious, listen to some Gloria Gaynor, and then, once the hangover subsides and I start to feel strong enough, only then will I start to be able to see what shovel I can bring to the shit heap. How I can help.


* I made this bit up.

To sleep, perchance to dream

It has been so long since I've Plogged, that I can barely remember how to do it. My "writing" these recent days is limited to (I flatter myself) pithy 140 character Twitter observations, or amusing captions for baby photos on Facebook. Just typing this short paragraph has exhausted me to the point of potential swooning.

I have lots of excuses for not writing, but my main one is I NEVER SLEEP NEVER. I NEVER NEVER SLEEP. It has got to the stage where I am no longer absolutely sure whether conversations I have are dreamed or real. I have incredibly boring dreams about turning on the baby's mobile, or buying plants at Homebase... and the next day am totally unsure about whether or not it actually happened.

For all I know, I'm not actually writing this right now. It could be just a dream. It is a very disconcerting way to live your life. For example - flying. In dreams, you can fly. Wheee. Try that when you're not actually asleep and it ends up a sticky mess on the pavement.

Same goes for trying to have sex with Benedict Cumberbatch. Dream world: fine. Real world: restraining order, and awkward conversation with my husband.

Of course, the eagle-eyed of you will have spotted a dichotomy here. If I never sleep, how can I dream? Good point. I don't. I think this is why dreams are so vivid/dull - I am basically hallucinating.

Does this sound fun, people? In other news, have you considered contraception?

Card bard

Mindful that the second child's baby book is usually a lot emptier than the first's (though possibly not in our case, as I was pretty slack first time around too), I thought we should do something different just for the second child, so we invested in some cute-but-slightly twee milestones cards. They look like this.

There are various milestones included in the pack - smiling for the first time, sleeping through the night, first steps and so on. It got me thinking that there's definitely a gap in the market for new parents too.

So I have created some prototypes:

I think I would probably have used this card every three days at best in the early days. When you finally do get round to it, it feels like the most luxurious thing you've ever done, and a bit like spending three days in a spa does to normal people. I imagine. I have never willingly been to a spa. It looks a bit boring.

This just isn't going to happen. Babies are instinctively trained to exterminate potential siblings and will start a mammoth meltdown at the tiniest hint of an erection. That sentence sounds incredibly wrong. Long story short, I think TheBloke (TM) may have escaped a vasectomy in favour of enforced abstinence.

I found myself in the position earlier this week of needing a poo. The baby also wanted to spend time with me and was wailing on her playmat. Reader, I positioned her Bumbo facing me on the toilet so she could see me whilst I shat. This, reader, this, is parenting. (And for non-parents, this is a Bumbo.) I look forward to be able to holding up this card. My three year-old still likes to walk in to "watch". If this is her only entertainment, maybe we ought to spring for the Disney channel after all.


Oddly, ever since I answered the door to our postman with one knocker out, we now seem to get a second post as well as a third and fourth. Not really. He actually changed his route and we now have a female post person. I haven't scared her with my tits yet. I did however answer the door to the Tesco delivery man last week not only with my bra on total display, but with my jeans fly unzipped as well. I expect they have a list with people like me on it.

At 10.45 p.m. last night, I told the baby to fuck off. I am not proud of this, but it happened. She stuck around anyway though, and we've made up since.

Everyone complains about babies sleeping. I saw one woman online complain that her 12 week old baby wakes up at 5 a.m. Ours wakes up every 20 minutes. Every fucking 20 minutes. During the day, during the night. (Hence the "fuck off" at 10.45 p.m. last night.) I cannot have a night off because I'm breastfeeding. This is all fine. This too will pass. But I am looking forward to holding up this card with the smuggest well-rested face in the land.

But, in the meantime... Small victories.

Rebirth

A parent I bumped into recently said that going from having one child to two is like going from owning a dog to running a zoo. There certainly seems to be the sort of volume of poo I'd expect from a medium-sized animal sanctuary, so perhaps he wasn't too far off.

Yes, we have a new baby, with all the upheaval it entails. And it's been so long since I've Plogged that I barely know where to start. So how about at the very beginning?

This time I had a planned Caesarian section because I could not face full labour followed by an emergency Caesarian section like last time. Major surgery is never to be undertaken lightly, but it was the best choice for us.

Here are some things you might be interested to know about a planned C-section.

• They are much, much scarier than an emergency C-section because you are totally drug-free and compos mentis. In an emergency, choice is taken out of your hands and you just kind of go with the flow. 
• They still use forceps if they get stuck. I really didn't know this.
• They have the radio on. Our daughter was born to James' Sit Down whilst surgeons rummaged in my tummy.
• If you have a bastard surgeon, they will stick the surgical dressing to your pubes. This isn't a problem at the time, but two days later when you try to remove the dressing, you'll realise that your pubes are a mass of glue and plaster and you will vow to hunt your surgeon and his family down. You can't just pull off the dressing with a sharp rip because you have a massive wound. So you have to pick it off slowly, one pube at a time, whilst your partner stands outside the shower room with your screaming newborn.
• Your surgery might get bumped. I anticipated being bumped by an hour or two, or possibly a day because of emergencies. Then they tried to bump my surgery by ten whole days, until I cried down the phone at my midwife, who pulled some strings. Had I had to have been pregnant for another ten days, I think I would have tried to perform my own C-section, using Ikea kitchenware.

I have two weird and pointless skills in life. The first is knowing - usually to the second - when the oven timer is due to go off. The second is being put in the worst hospital bed in the country.

Last time I gave birth, the woman in the bed next to me used her hospital pay-for TV, but unplugged the free headphones provided, so the whole ward could hear her programmes; she then pumped up the volume, and fell asleep. She then snored so loudly she drowned out the sound of her own baby crying, waking up only occasionally to pop downstairs for a fag.

This time, I had a similar chav in the bed next to me. She was incredibly passive-aggressive, phoning people at all times of the night to boast (quite rightly) about how her own baby didn't cry at all, but everyone else's babies were - and I quote - doing her fucking head in. What she didn't mention was the reason everyone else's babies were crying was she would fall asleep and snore so incredibly loudly, she would wake up every single baby on the ward. They would then start crying; she would wake up, and make another passive-aggressive phone call complaining about the crying babies. It would have been funny had I not been desperate to sleep.

Too long, did not read?

- A planned C Section is better than an emergency one

- I attract chavs

- We have a new baby. She looks like this.