HFW FFS!

Off to Ali’s this morning, via collecting a very PINK Barbie coat that the woman I collected a load of freecycle girls clothes from had emailed me to say she also had. I suspected Scarlett would screw her nose up at it and indeed she did but we collected it anyway as we already had most of the first bag to hand on to the next people we thought might like the clothes. Predictably Scarlett did indeed do nose-wrinkling – out of that whole load of clothes she dismissed anything pink as ‘too pink’ anything with slogans on as ‘too sloganny’ and pretty much only took the very plain t shirts. She’s very much a jeans and t shirt sort of girl my Scarlett :).

At Ali’s we have first refusal on the rest of the clothes to Ali for Freya – I think one or maybe two garments made it into their pile but Ali assures me the rest will find a very good and gratefully recieved home with someone who will be happy with High School Musical t shirts and tracksuit pants with ‘angel’ emblazoned across the arse! 😆 (sometimes I do wonder about the company she keeps ;)).We did get a bag of very lovely fleecy tops in exchange for Scarlett so that was a bit of a result! And you will be pleased to know Ali I have resisted the urge to visit the Boden website – but only just…. when she grows out of that lot please do bear Scarlett in mind 😉

A lovely time as always at Ali’s – we all feel very at home there. Scarlett did incredibly well with being largely ignored by everyone and entertained herself with the cats and some bubbles for a good couple of hours before getting fed up. Davies and Freya X boxed, which they both love and are pretty evenly matched I think for competing or playing as a team together. Ali and I had a good old chat and were clumsy together in the kitchen.

We left just before 3pm and I blasted the kids out with a KLF album I’d borrowed from work – on the way over it was INXS so I’ve enjoyed very retro car journeys today with the sort of music I was listening to in my very first car that I had a radio cassette player balanced on the dashboard of that I had to hold onto when I went round corners otherwise it would slide from one end of the car to the other. The opening bars of 3am Eternal took me instantly back to a nighttclub I got together with my first proper boyfriend in when I was 17. I could smell the dry ice and see my own arm, clad in about 20 jangly bangles and leather ties waving above my head to the music, feel the big clumpy DMs on my feet and the effects of the snakebite and black all over again in that split second.

And then I caught the eye of my nearly 9 year old in the rear view mirror and remembered I was 35 again.

So I turned it up a bit louder ;).

Back home the kids disappeared to make video clips on Davies’ phone – this is their current passion. Some of the video clips are quite funny, others are really only appreciated by children under 10 ;). We’re definitely planning a video camera purchase for one or other of them at Christmas though, they’d clearly get loads out of it at the moment.

Ady arrived home and we both got changed into different versions of what we were already wearing. My parents arrrived and we headed off. Ady has been registered on a website for free audience tickets to TV shows for ages and ages and regularly applies for all sorts of shows but has never before got tickets. In the last few weeks he got tickets through for both Big Food Fight and Argumental. The Big Food Fight was tonight and we were really, really looking forward to it.

The ticket said doors would open at 645pm and close at 715pm. We looked into prices for parking and train fares and as petrol is free and we would hit the congestion charge zone after 6pm paying for parking was cheaper than the train for both of us. Tne route according to satnav and route finders to the studios was 1hr15mins so we alllowed double that, left at 4 to be there for 630 giving 15 minutes queuing time to be right at the front for good seats.

Doubling the time was not enough and as we crawled along at a mile every 15 minutes we started to realise we were possibly not going to make it in time. The satnav clearly has some sort of bipolar personality and took us across the Thames, round a roundabout and then back over the Thames again on some sort of Monopoly board magical mystery tour. We eventually googled the studios on Ady’s phone, saw the OXO tower in the picture, spotted that and headed that way and parked in the first carpark we found in order to run to the studios. At 7pm we parked, asked the security guard where the studios were and then ran, YES THAT’S RAN!, in the suddenly started to pour with rain conditions clutching our tickets and the photo ID it said we had to bring.

There were two very camp blokes all dressed in black with clipboards outside the Audience Entrance area who hailed us with a friendly ‘are you here for the Big Food Fight?’ to which we gasped yes, Ady bent double and me taking drags from my inhaler while my hair hung sopping wet and my mascara ran. ‘Sorry guys, the studio is full up – we can’t fit anyone else in’ they said.

There were 3 more lots of people behind us, bearing in mind we were right in the middle of the half an hour doors open window and one of them asked how long ago they’d filled up to be told ‘a good hour ago’ 😯

So it turns out even if we’d been there in advance of the doors opening we’d probably still have not got in, maybe people were even there from the night before…

On closer inspection of the tickets it does indeed say in teent tiny small print at the bottom that the tickets do not guarantee entry and it will be first come, first served. So our own fault really, but easily done given all the blurb in much larger print about how you must not sell on the tickets, must bring photo ID, must ring to inform them if you can’t make it as they have a long waiting list along with details of when the doors are open from and til.

So now it’s pissing with rain. We have no coats. We have parked the car with a minimum 2 hour charge of £5.50 and we’re not about to meet Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall and become his close personal friends after all. And I think we both sort of expected that was what was going to happen. It’s largely down to Hugh we have bought into the self-suffish lifestyle. We joined the forum on River Cottage and signed the Chicken Out campaign petition and everything.

And also I needed a wee.

So we went to a nearby theatre and used the toilets and thought about what to do next. We decided not to try and find somewhere to eat in London as it was still a bit early for us but we didn’t want to pay for any more parking, it was pissing with rain so not an evening to be wandering about seeing the sights of London, we really can’t afford to find an alternative entertainment option and we were both a bit stunned after the fretting we wouldn’t make it, scraping in just in time, doing RUNNING and then having it all taken away from us.

After some discussion we decided to retrieve the car and head for home. My parents had taken Davies and Scarlett out for dinner so we knew if we came straight home they’d not long be back and we’d end up having to put the kids to bed while my parents either hung around (most likely) or left which would mean a 4 hour round trip then having to persuade excited children to bed and needing to cook for ourselves. So we decided to head for a Chinese that my Mum and I went to last year where I spent most of the time thinking ‘Ady would love this’. We got home, parked up and were in the restuarant eating a mere six hours after leaving home and travelling two miles down the road to a Chinese restuarant via Central London ;).

It was a set eat-as-much-as-you-like menu at just £14 per person so we decided to celebrate our tenth wedding anniversary a week early, make the most of the very rare childcare (they’d NEVER have the kids so we could just go out for a meal together) and stuff our faces with very delicious Chinese food safe in the knowledge that no way would any of the chicken be free range so HFW was being punished in the long run 😆

The food was gorgeous, we really enjoyed laughing about all the people who said we’d never last and congratulated ourselves on being buoyant in the face of being let down, finding the funny side of it and looking to other people like we might even be proper grown ups even though we both know the truth ;).

We got home at 11pm, pretended to my parents we’d stopped for a meal on the way home while still in London, heard about their meal out with the kids which sounds like it went well 🙂 (Davies tells me they made snidey comments about the state of my car though) and they left, safe in the knowledge that our evening hadn’t gone according to plan 😆