Tag Archives: Little Con

Little and large

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It’s always a bit risky, hanging out with a seven year old, as I found out to my peril when I took my niece to the Lake District last week.  First off there was the constant need to tell her to hold my hand and not run around on pavements near busy roads.  Then there was my pleading with her: “Please don’t touch A SINGLE THING in this gallery!” where the pieces ranged in price from ninety to several hundred pounds.  Of course, she was impeccably behaved in the establishment until the time came for us to leave when that certain thing inside all seven year olds compelled her to almost put her index finger through a canvas.

I’d buy her food, which she wouldn’t eat.  Then she’d ask for crisps and sweets.

In another shop, I had to give 80% of my attention to her while I was trying to make a purchase.  The woman at the till had that air of resignation that betrayed six weeks of children messing up the display of items on the shelves.  “They’re back at school next week”, she sighed to me, eyes and soul looking to a distant happy place.

It was Little Con’s clumsiness and total lack of social awareness that was both simultaneously charming and infuriating.  In Grasmere, the duck food dregs were, despite warnings from myself and “Auntie April” emptied out over the river, where the dusty fishiness was caught by a breeze and blown into the faces of the people sitting at the table adjoining ours.  What can you do except apologise?

Her piece de resistance came in Keswick, our destination for our stay in that most beautiful of English regions.  Walking down the high-street, I’d noticed a beautiful Giant Schnauzer.  His coat was black and silky and he walked with his companion human with the air of a young dog; slightly excitable, very interested in all the smells and sights of his surroundings.  Among the group was a an adolescent on a push scooter.  He had dwarfism.  As we walked past, my niece did a double take, spun round and started pointing.

“YES! Ha ha ha ha ha!!!” I said, trying to drown her out as she was shouting “There’s a dwarf on a scooter there!”

“Yes, Connie, he’s a GIANT schnauzer, that’s what Rocky wants to be when he grows up! Isn’t he lovely?”, I said with false joy in my voice. “Ha ha ha!”

“But it’s a DWARF on a scooter!”

Jesus.

My embarrassment was my fault.  A grown up would’ve spoken to the guy and just explained that she’d never seen somebody with dwarfism before and, her being little, got a bit excited.  You know, struck up a conversation so that Con could talk to him and realise that he was normal, just with reduced height potential.

That’s the thing about being a grown up: the awkwardness that comes from being around others for fear of being judged or causing offence due to a slip of the tongue, or just being ourselves? So long as being ourselves doesn’t mean that we can deliberately be complete arseholes of course.

We lose that joy from skipping down the street, or just bursting into a run (no matter how ridiculous we look) just for the sake of it.  The extent of my silliness is limited to pulling faces at other motorists in traffic queues, or complimenting them on their choice of headwear.

 

Dinner for one

Being single can be pretty OK, but the disadvantages far outweigh the positives.  As a frexample: beetroots.  I wanted to cook roasted veggies with some sausages for my tea.  For this, I needed carrots, parsnips, red onions, sweet potato, garlic and beetroot.  With the carrots, onions and garlic already at home, I needed parsnips, sweet potato and beetroot.  But you know what?  You can’t buy individual beetroot at Sainsbury’s, they only come in massive bunches.  It’s the same at all the supermarkets. Everything is set up for families, with us singles being pushed to the bottom of the pile as per with everything else in life.

You live on your own, you pay 25% less Council Tax than the family of five next door, despite them using so many more services than you.  You pay the same for water as those who use so much more than you. And now you find yourself paying for the school meals of kids whose parents who earn multiples of your own salary.  As a single person on a modest salary, I find myself being a net contributor to the tax system to the sum of £12,000 per year (there was a calculator on the BBC website a couple of months ago, so I doubt this figure is correct).

It would be nice, therefore, for the fucking supermarkets, restaurants and cafes to cater for us singles by allowing us to not buy a bunch of twenty fucking beetroot, or enough runner beans to feed a family of four, etc, etc, etc.

Still, I really do appreciate the concept of boxed wine.

Living in the love of the common pervert

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You know, you write a perfectly innocent post about enjoying long walks in the local woods with your canine companion, then your blog gets some Google traffic from people searching for “Secret life of doggers” after Channel 4 show a documentary of the same title.

People are clearly perverts. I’m outraged that my fine and morally fibrous musings should attract such attention.

Dogging
I’m not at all sure of the etiquette, but if it means you pick people up for sex while walking your dog, then I’ve got no hope; not with my furry little companion. He’d probably try to have sex with whomever caught my fancy… and then empty his anal glands on their trousers. I assume that people who are up for that sort of activity might be acceptable of all sorts of eventuality, but I’m certain that that would be a step too far.

Arrested development
Somewhere between the ages of 18 months and 42 years, a vital developmental switch just didn’t turn on for me. This “you’re a girl, so you should like pink, wear dresses and play with dolls” thing was never activated in me. It must be a recessive gene or something, but when my sister was messing about with Girl’s World and worrying about makeup and shit, I just didn’t get it. My schoolfriends had dolls and I was utterly bewildered by their fascination in these bits of plastic that were quite frankly weird and often scary.

I was confused: why would anybody play with a doll that was supposed to be a baby, which by definition is crap and useless, when you could play with Eagle-eyed Action Man and throw him from the top of the stairs and watch his parachute open. There was Lego: you could MAKE stuff! There was paper and coloured pencils and pens and you could DRAW stuff. What the hell could you do with a doll that mimicked a baby? Oh, of course, you could pretend to be its mum, because we all recognised that our mums had the best lives going: household budgeting; meal planning; childcare; cooking; cleaning; more cleaning; educating; pastoral duties; ad infinitum. Jeez – who in their right mind would want to be a mum?

So no, I never wanted that, ever.

Something strange has happened to me over the past year though: I’ve really grown to like the Barbie cartoons and films. They’re really good. At last, at the age of 42 and a bit, I have discovered the magic of Barbie!

Of course, I can thank my niece for this, and my iPad. When the little one stays over, she creeps into my bed the following morning. This morning I woke at 9am to find her next to me.

“Can we play on the iPad now please?”

“Yeah, sure, here you go. What do you want to do with it?”

“Can we have a look at YouTube for Barbie?”

“Absolutely!”

And so, I had an extra two hours of snoozing, all thanks to Barbie.

Praise.

To do
I have a to do list. My life is one big mañana, but I need to get my act together. It’s easier to do stuff that’s obviously manageable, so here goes:

  • Cancel my TV subscription with Virgin. I never watch anything other than Channel 4 (because I’m a pervert). So I’ve bought myself a little indoor aerial and I’ve ordered a freeview recording, rewinding, pausing box thing that’ll pay for itself in three months.
  • Make an appointment for a contact lens check up. I wear these bastard little gel things occasionally, rarely in fact, but I need to go for a check up to ensure that the four times I get to wear them each year isn’t damaging my eyes
  • Laundry
  • Bury Jeff the weeping fig – he’s finally given up the ghost. I think I’ll replace him with an aspidistra
  • Unfriend Kim Jong Un on Facebook. That little fucker is just an attention-seeking twat and it’s the best way to deal with him

    • I need sleep. All this inconsequential sex in woodland car parks has wiped me out.

    Do it like a dude

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    The few most recent times I’ve spent with my niece, she’s proclaimed that I’m “SO like a BOY!’. I’ve asked her to explain and she’s said that it’s because I don’t wear dresses and skirts and don’t wear makeup and because I like gadgets. I’m 42, I don’t think I’m supposed to be playing with Barbie dolls, but I think I can see where she’s coming from.

    She said it again tonight and I responded by telling her that it’s just different and the world would be a boring place if we were all the same.

    The time will come when we’ll have the talk about girls liking boys, boys liking girls, and the accursed sexual deviants who need electric shock therapy to stop them liking people of the same sex. Growing up in the seventies, it was never talked about: girls liked boys, boys liked girls, and people like Larry Grayson were just made up for telly. When I was Con’s age, maybe a bit younger, I had a friend at school and we were very close. She once said to me that when we grew up we could get married. I can’t remember it freaking me out, but I can’t remember my exact response, or how I felt, if I felt anything at all. Maybe it shows that kids of that age don’t really care about anything like that until adults put their own vicious ideas into their heads. She remembers Ali though and knew that we were together, but a year or so on with me on my own, and with the influence of other children, her natural acceptance of what “just is (was)” might be tainted by what others say.

    “My Auntie Tina is… a SPINSTER!”

    Gawd.

    Curiosity
    Talking of stalking, I’ve been visiting my local pharmacy on a regular basis over the past year or so. When I haven’t been popping in to pick up my own prescriptions, I’ve been going there to pick up my mum’s heroin supplies. Each time I go, the pharmacist catches my eye and I’m left thinking, is she or isn’t she? And I’m not talking about Harmony hairspray here.

    In those situations, you do things like look at her shoes: flat, but that makes sense (it always makes sense to me, whatever the situation). Is she wearing any rings? No. What about those glasses? They look a bit like mine. Dress sense? Always trousers, with a feminine top, but nothing particularly girly. Fingernails? SHORT! Makeup? Never.

    Of course because she’s the resident pharmacist, her certificates are up in the place, so I know her name. But even worse/better, I noticed her behind me in her car one day – she actually drives into work on part of the route that I take, coming from the Whitefield direction. I know what car she drives, roughly what time she passes near my house, I could wait for her to pass…

    STOP IT RIGHT THERE!

    “We met over a box of citalopram. It was the slightest brush of her fingers against mine as she handed me my medication. Then our eyes met and it was then that we realised… we were wearing the same glasses.”

    I have no idea how to strike up a conversation with people. I don’t know when I’m flirting and I certainly don’t know when people are flirting with me. There is no hope. A spinster I shall be.

    Growing pains

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    I’ve been looking after my niece again this evening. The initial plan was for her Nanna to have her overnight, but the little girl plays tricks on poor Mother when she stays over. For some reason, she always wakes in the early hours and asks Mum to go and sleep with her in the spare bed. This results in my mum being kicked by the wriggler and not getting any sleep.

    Little Con’s latest thing is waking in the night with achy limbs, the dreaded growing pains. I remember how awful these can be from when my long bones were growing – they didn’t grow that much, admittedly, but still enough to cause night after night of the most horrible pain in my thighs, knees and hips.

    I prepared badly for tonight: no Calpol. I’m sure she’d be fine with a cocodamol should the need arise. She did have a nice warm bath before bed though, so I’m hoping that might go some way to help.

    Despite her constantly telling me that she doesn’t like spending time with me, she seemed to enjoy tonight. I’d bought her a new colouring book and a bribe Barbie comic in an attempt to get into her good books. Despite this, she stopped at one point, fell silent for a few seconds and said “I miss Tia”. Tia was her cat that had to be put down this week after a brain tumour or other such lesion manifested itself. It’s a hard thing to take for a little one and there’s that period of missing the animal and then worrying about forgetting them, especially when the only photo of the cat that her mum had was one that she’d taken on her mobile phone after it had been euthanised. The cat used to be sort of mine (another pet that my ex ex wanted before she wanted the dog) so I had some photos of her that I’d managed to take when she wasn’t skulking upstairs. In all honesty, it was the oddest cat I’ve ever come across and I wouldn’t be surprised if it had a brain tumour growing from the time that we acquired it. But Little Con loved her and it’s a shame that one so young has to learn about death.

    Death.

    After my recent skirmish with death, my health situation still isn’t resolved. My current concern is whether this super high dose vitamin D therapy is going to cause a massive increase in my calcium levels that actually push me into a coma or cause me a cardiac arrest. I spent most of the day feeling utterly dreadful (dizziness, ataxia and other weirdness). This was despite falling asleep at 8pm, then going to bed at 10pm last night and oversleeping until 8.30 this morning.

    What I also did last night was install an application on my phone called Sleeptalk, which is a noise-activated recording device that picks up and records all the sounds while you’re asleep. Intended as a bit of fun to see whether you talk in your sleep or to assess how bad your snoring is, I set it going then was in the land of nod by 10.30pm.

    Listening to the playback this morning, it became apparent that I need to do something every night: remove the little dog’s collar. I’d forgotten to last night and there are about twenty or more recordings of him scratching or shaking and jangling his collar and nametags loudly. I didn’t stir on any of these occasions, but the noise must cause some disturbance in the pattern of my sleep.

    I didn’t talk in my sleep, but there were a couple of moments where I could be heard turning over and “owing” at the pain in my back. And then there were the two occasions when I had to drink about a litre of fizzy water (then go for a pee) because I was so thirsty. My thirst got me worrying about side effects of hypercalcaemia then I let rationality back into my brain and blamed it on the huge anchovy pizza that I’d had for my tea.

    Waiting for the knock on the door

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    My niece is brilliant at the moment. So much so that I want to bottle her up and keep her as she is forever. At five and a half, she’s a bundle of fun and a chatterbox sponge that just soaks up information. And she’s currently fast asleep in my spare bedroom.

    I don’t like children as a rule. They irritate me, make too much noise and mess, and they either don’t listen or they answer back when they do. Over the years I’ve come to realise that it’s not the children I dislike so much, well it is, but it’s the parents of unruly chimps that are the main focus of my ire. Class isn’t an issue either and I don’t discriminate between the offspring of middle class yummy mummies any more that I would dolescum breeders those parents at the lower end of the income scale; I just find them all generally disagreeable.

    It’s like dogs and cats. I have my little pooch, who I love, and I’ve had cats that I have absolutely adored. I can see myself always having a pet of dog or cat persuasion, but when it comes to other people’s pets, I’m not that fussed. So when somebody thinks it’s appropriate to send me e-mails with pictures of cute cats in them, I tend to delete unread.

    This post went missing for a couple of days between starting it and rediscovering it just now. Needless to say, my niece did come knocking on the door in the small hours. I fed her some Calpol and she came to bed with me and the little dog. She wriggles. He snores. They both have a tendency to kick me in the face while they’re asleep. It’s not the best night’s sleep imaginable, but I wouldn’t miss it for the world.

    I’d like to have her as my own, but her mum would object and so would she. When all is said and done, and despite my sister’s lack of patience with her, they adore each other. But I’ve got Nick Junior!!! And an iPad!!!! It just doesn’t compete with that unbreakable bond between them.

    Mother
    Connie, my mum, is in a bad way. She’s getting on and bits are wearing out: she has a pacemaker; she’s diabetic; hypothyroid; arthritic. A total knee replacement a eighteen months ago never brought any relief to the pain she was suffering in the joint, she complained that it was even worse than before the surgery. She insisted repeatedly that it wasn’t right with the surgeon, who sent her for physio, she pleaded for help from her GP (who could only refer her back to the hospital). The climax of her troubles has been emergency admission to hospital after the whole leg became swollen this week. The joint is infected. It may have been infected since the very beginning. The joint will probably have to be replaced, once the infection is cleared, but if this isn’t possible, the options are: remove the joint and fuse the leg, or amputate above the knee. I’m certain that we won’t be heading for a worst case scenario, but it’s still extremely concerning.

    That aside, her stay in hospital has provided some entertainment. The use of morphine sent her off her tits last night and it transpires that she doesn’t even recall me being there. I was there all right. Oh yes, I was there while she tried to talk to Rocky, spoke to people in empty beds, told me that the beds were moving towards her and repeatedly asked her neighbouring patients when they were having their surgery, despite them all being in a holding area awaiting discharge or onward movement for further treatment. Unfortunately, I wasn’t there when she had a fight with two nurses who were trying to put her on a commode, because that would’ve rounded off a perfect day for me. “My husband is here, he’ll stop you. What are you doing to me?? How dare you!” It’s fortunate that staff were understanding of her drug intake, so they were firm, but fair.

    I hope she’s going to be alright after all this. I don’t mind the prospect of looking after my parents, they’ve looked after me long enough, but the prospect of her losing her independence fills me with dread.

    Children, look after your parents, give them a worry free and happy life, insist that they take care of themselves. What the fuck am I on about? I’ve never been a cause of worry for my folks. I was a lovely child who brought them happiness and pride. I’ve always insisted that they take better care of themselves. And look at how they repay me, by falling apart in front of my eyes. I think I need to write a letter of complaint to whoever’s in charge.

    School dinners

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    When I spend time with my parents, conversation often turns to the youngest (human) family member, my niece, Little Con. She’s recently started her second year at primary school and I asked my mum (Big Con) as to how she was settling in with her new teacher, classmates, and the like.

    “She came home starving the other day; hadn’t eaten a thing”

    With our family, food is everything. I can trace this to a few things:

    • My parents being children during the Second World War (Mum’s family were in Liverpool and living on rations and whatever could be grown in allotments, Dad’s family were in the south of Italy and literally had to go and dig in the forest for food after the Nazi occupies had taken all the village’s provisions);
    • My Dad being Italian;
    • The acknowledgement that our combined tempers become unbearable when we’re hungry (we’re a pretty irascible bunch at the best of times)

    So the news that Little Con “hadn’t eaten a thing” all day at school was tantamount to national disaster.

    Con used to take a packed lunch to school with her, but her mum recognised that a hot meal during the day might be better for her powers of concentration as the intellectual effort was increasing. But things aren’t the way they were when we were at school. When we were at school, you lined up in the dining hall and you were given a plate of whatever was on the menu that day -no choice. The dinner ladies patrolled the tables to ensure that you ate everything (including the odd bit of gristle) and that you drank plenty of water before the main treat of pudding completed what generally a good meal.

    I understand that primary school children are given a choice these days, but they don’t know what the choices are until they reach the end of the dinner queue, by which time it’s too late to go back and they end up with a crappy sandwich that they don’t want.

    Choice and young children do not mix, this is developmental fact. This is something that parents and people responsible for the care of little ones need to understand, especially when it comes to providing food to kids who rely on school for their only hot meal of the day.

    I’m going to write to my Little Con’s school and tell them what’s what:

    • Hot meal every day, including pudding
    • One meat (if necessary), one veggie option
    • Chips no more than twice per week
    • Lots of veg
    • A healthy mix of flavours
    • No choice
    • No processed shit
    • SAS trained dinner ladies
    • Death to any parent who complains

    And now as I hit the “publish” button, I see what a cock up I’ve made of my bullets.