If you’re going to San Francisco

Be sure to wear some flour in your hair!

Had to be done eh Ali :).

Had a great day today. Ady was working from home so Davies was able to stay home with him while Scarlett and I nipped out to Argos to collect a new answerphone I’d reserved online. Way, way back in the olden days when our very first answerphone (that I believe was a Christmas present from my parents circa 1995) died we were living in Manchester and had two salaries and money to burn (well credit cards anyway) and a house with three floors and so many rooms we had to make up names for them (drawing room, sketching room, colouring in room, parlour, that sort of thing) and we bought a full telephonic system with five – count ’em five – handsets including one that was a clock radio type thing. We had one in the lounge, one in the kitchen (which genuinely was so far away from the lounge you’d not have heard the phone ringing from room to room), one for upstairs, one for the basement and one for the middle room which we used as an office when either of us was working from home. When we moved back here we laughingly did set them all up but actually wherever you were in the house the ringing of five phones in stereo deafened you as you could hear them all so we dwindled to just one upstairs and one down. But actually they are a bit crap. The answerphone doesn’t have a speaker so you can’t hear it to screen calls, you have to play the message back after the person has finished leaving it. My Mum, bless her, has never quite got the hang of this and still thinks we can hear her if we’re home so every message she ever leaves is ‘Hello? Hello. Helll – ooo – ooooh! Can’t you hear me? Are you there? Hello. It’s Mum. Nicola? Are you there? …….. No? Are you there? No then. Ok. Well. Erm. Hello?……’ But the phones are crap other than that, they are really quiet handsets so it’s tricky to hear the person you are talking to, the rechargable batteries in every handset have died so within five minutes of a phone call they are beeping the low battery warning at you. So Argos had a special offer answerphone and one additional handset and we’ve got them. They’re lovely. All slimline and silver grey. And they have polyphonic ringtones and speaker answerphone (we’ve been playing with it by going into other rooms and ringing ourselves on our mobiles) and everything. Love ’em. :).

So Scarlett and I went to collect the phone and also to the shoe shack place to try and find her some Birthday Shoes. Tarly currently owns a pair of pretendycrocs which are now her ‘chicken shoes’ that she slips on to go and visit the bantams and her knee high burgandy boots. Which are cool and look great with jeans and skirts and solve the not wearing socks or tights or other foot based underwear issue but are unlikely to look gorgeous with a party dress really. Also she has been hankering after a pair of sparkly red shoes for ages. Not just any red either, it has to be ‘scarlet red’ (oh that felt odd only giving it one ‘t’). And the sparkles, they’re quite important too. So I said I’d get her some for her birthday and as she’d need to be with me to try them on anyway she could have them as an early present to wear to her birthday party (like Davies had his sonic screwdriver early for his birthday party. I tell you this, dear reader not because I think you are remotely interested but because it has been uttered every single time the idea of an early birthday present of red shoes – sparkly scarlet red shoes – has been mentioned we have had to justify why she is ‘allowed’ to get them early) so we went to try and find some today. Now the shoe shack place had indeed got sparkly shoes, in pink, white, black, gold and silver. But not in red, let alone scarlet red. They did have the most hideous pair of very sparkly pink Bratz shoes with, I kid you not, a 3inch heel. And they started at a size 7. Which is approximately what Tarly was when she was about 3 years old. Fucking mental!

So we came home. We’d already made birthday cards for Lula (not Lulah as in Buttercup, our other friend Lula who despite having blonde curls and brown eyes and being called Tallulah really is a whole year older than Lulah and doesn’t have an h) and Davies had been left designing a front cover for the local HE newsletter for a competition entry. So I dropped Tarly home to do hers, collected my 24 parcels and headed off to the post office. They are all starry and celebrity-like at the post office now and could barely tear themselves away from their manicures and protein shakes to serve me but we managed to have a chat and I kindly wrote out my own proof of postage to save ruining their nails before they’d dried and of course being no stranger to the celebrity lifestyle myself (did I mention my husband is on telly) I had a lot to chat to them about. Came home, collected Davies and Scarlett and Lula’s cards and pressie, cooed over Scarlett’s picture, bunged them both in an envelope and got them posted off and we were off. On the way we called into Matalan and Asda on the sparkly scarlet red shoe hunt but had no luck. I did get Tarly’s birthday pressie from Davies though (a pink watch with cats on it), her Christmas Eve pjs, a couple of Doctor Who figures that they’d wanted and promised to try and pretend to forget they’d seen me buying and some novelty hairclips and earrings for me to wear to work for the Festive Fun night next week (but oh, I won’t spoil hearing about that until next week ;)). Then we went to collect Ali and Freya.

Ali managed to navigate us to Eira’s where we discovered that it was all permit parking only for many miles around (well at least the first couple of streets) and Ali did a slightly convoluted charade of knocking on their door before reappearing with a permit. We went in and a good time was had by all. The children did some playing outside for a while – there was Lula and Tialys (her brother) and another little friend Mai who Scarlett and Davies play with lots at MM so it was a nice little group. We were supplied with copious amounts of tea and I got to be nosy at looking at someone’s home which I love doing – lot’s of nice things to compliment Eira and Ade on and even the vegan food was very nice (clearly I had raw pork chops in my glove box to knaw on straight away as we left to compensate). The children wandered back in when they were hungry and after assuring Davies and Scarlett that the food was indeed food, just not as they knew it and in unfamiliar guises I think they both ate something :lol:.

There was then a fairly crazy game which inspired the post title – mounds of flour with smarties stuffed in which the children had to get out to eat with their hands behind their backs. All six on the same tray. Which of course meant that there was an initial nit exchange moment:

followed by much sneezing and consumption of Nestle products

which fairly inevitably degenerated into a flour fight 😆

They were ‘calmed down’ with a riotous round of Simon Says followed by cake 🙂

Then the plan was they all sat and watched BFG. I got totally distracted by the fact the BFG was voiced by David Jason in full on voice over Dangermouse voice and couldn’t really get past that to believe in him as BFG. Also the animated version of Sophie looked rather a look like Velma from Scooby Doo – ginger bob, glasses which had me thinking it was the same animated actress 😆 which got Ali speculating that Dangermouse and Velma had met in a cartoon bar (we decided on Moe’s Tavern from The Simpsons) while neither of them had a current project and deciding to get together on the Roald Dahl classic adaptation. Davies and Scarlett wandered off fairly quickly and Eira set them up with some craft activity. Eira is fab, really great with children and they seem to naturally flock to her too.

We left there around 4pm ish I guess, complete with goody boxes made by the birthday girl herself and containing all sorts of treasures 🙂 It was a lovely afternoon. To keep the children, specifically Davies, who is being A Bit Tricky this week, occupied we had a singsong. We took requests from the back seat and started with Twinkle Twinkle. Davies wanted ‘American Wine’ which we realised was American Pie so Ali and I sang a few verses with the children joining in at the chorus (or in Scarlett’s case the line ‘this will be the day that I die!’ which is the only bit she knows :lol:). Then we did some Christmas songs with lots of embellishing and fiddly bits. Oh it was fun :). Once they got out the car Davies told me I am always more silly when I’ve been with Ali :lol:. We put music on in the car then and listened to some Ramalamadingdong which happened to be what was on the disc in the cd player.

We called into Tescos on the way home. We’re clubbing together with my brother to get my parents a digital photo frame for Christmas and Tesco had one on special offer yesterday. They’d sold out of them but we did get a fine pair of scarlet red sparkly shoes (yay!), some equally sparkly tights to wear with them, some PJs for D’s Christmas Eve pressie and some bits for dinner tonight. Also I’d promised a McDonalds for dinner if they behaved which I think Davies lost about four times over but redeemed himself sufficiently for on the way home and all round Tescos. No never means no in my house, it means ask me again later when I’ve calmed down from shouting and you might get a yes after all :lol:.

A fairly quiet evening, children ate their McD infront of Simpsons and went off to bed, we watched QI and ate pizza and now, as I am working in the morning, and because I want to lie in bed looking admiringly at my new slimline silver grey bedside telephone I’m off to bed myself.