Long time ago at B&Q

We went to a party last night – a 60th birthday party of a friend we worked with at B&Q years ago, I recall us going to her 50th and I don’t think we were both still working at B&Q then. In those 10 years it feels like we’ve done rather a lot, moved to Manchester and back again, had two children and so on. Thing is, most of the guests who were at that 50th and again at the 60th are still in pretty much the same place as they were ten years ago. So we felt rather claustrophobic, itchy to move on and stand and shout ‘we’re not like you, we’ve moved on!’ at them as they stood around recounting anecdotes from 12 years ago with a wistful ‘remember when’ look in their eyes, harking back to the ‘good old days’ which we feel as though we enjoyed at the time but were happy to leave behind and view as a stepping stone to better days ahead. Of course this could also have stemmed from the fact that actually we had more money to buy drinks at that 50th than we did last night. And whilst in all our current social circles we are quite happy to come clean about why we don’t get involved in buying rounds or stay propped up at the bar drinking glasses of wine which cost one and a half times what a whole bottle costs in tescos all night we couldn’t bring ourselves to admit that last night. But we went, we wished Happy Birthday to the birthday pensioner :lol:, we showed people pictures of the children on our mobile phones, exclaimed shock at how old the children of friends are now and did lots of ‘I just don’t know where the years go’ with everyone else, promised insincerely to catch up properly in the new year with at least three sets of people and when the party really started hotting up around 9.15pm I drank someone’s abandoned white wine and we snuck out while everyone was dancing to High Ho Silver Lining. 😆 So we were home before 10pm!

The rest of the day had been slow but nice enough. It was my lay in in the morning but I didn’t get back to sleep after Ady and the kids got up around 7am, instead I laid in bed and finished reading the end of a book I hadn’t quite finished the night before. Written in a similar style to Sophie Kinsella’s Shopaholic series but with a central character who is a kleptomaniac shoplifter – cheap chick-lit tat in many ways but a real page-turner just the same. A laid back morning when I finally got up and then I walked into town, did a quick charity shop trawl (got a jacket for 3 quid which I can’t decide whether pulls off cutting edge cool or just makes me look like a mad hippy. I was looking for a long black velvet skirt but had no luck) and then into the library to work.

I met the two Saturday staff, both quite colourful characters, who I will no doubt be mentioning further in blogposts of the future 😉 but I mainly worked with an older lady I have met before but not really talked to much. She must be about my Mum’s age and has a daughter and son the same age as me and my brother and a 10 year old granddaughter. Inevitabely third question in came my answer ‘oh, they don’t go to school, we Home Educate’ (Q1 do you have children? Q2 how old are they? Q3 which school do they go to?) and off we went with the whole question and answer rounds. I spend so much time in the company of other Home Educators that I genuinely forget that we do something odd and different most of the time. These questions were a mix of the usual ones combined with a sort of envy / admiration and a real interest in the whole thing. One of the best conversations I’ve had about HE in a long while actually. Everyone at work so far has been very interested and supportive of the whole thing but I guess they can’t be anything but really can they? I imagine me and my bizarre ways are the talk of the staff room on the days I’m not working though, particularly as I’ve been very upfront about what we do and how we do it, refusing to take the easy road of agreeing that I do indeed ‘teach’ the children.

It was really, really quiet yesterday making for a very s l o w four hours, which all the staff were at great pains to assure me is not normal at all for a Saturday afternoon, so I look forward to the January rush on returning and borrowing books as everyone’s new years resolutions are to borrow pilates videos, go on a low-carb diet or increase their literary education. 😆 I did catch up with Pamela, someone I worked with at the job I did when I was pregnant with Davies, stayed in touch with for a while afterwards and then lost touch with when we moved away. She was intending to go travelling and then study theology at university last I heard of her. What she’s actually done is 3 years volunteering in a project in Canada, lots more travelling, some working with excluded from education children and is back in Lancing again for 6 months before heading off volunteering again to Canada. She spends lots of time in the library accessing the internet so I imagine our paths will cross plenty more times in months to come but she was another person on my list of folks I wondered what became of so it was nice to have a brief catch up with her.

Ady and the children picked me up and we sat reading books for ages before I went to get ready to go out. My parents arrived to babysit and Ady and I headed off to our party, returning again within 3 hours. I was tired (standing in a library for four hours with not much to do followed by standing in a pub for three hours with even less to do if you have no money for drinks and are too young and sober to dance to ‘Brown Eyed Girl’ is pretty tiring work frankly!) so I went to bed.

Today was my turn to get up but due to both children going to bed late, Davies appearing in our bed mid-way through the night having had a bad dream (he has a bad dream every single time we are not there to put him to bed. One day, when he is about 22 he might end up having a whole night away from us, until then if we’re not there til the bitter end then we will be there in the middle of it!) it was gone 7.30am before they were up. Watched TV with them then they moved onto Xbox and Barbie.com. I nipped to Sainsburys arriving shortly after they opened for various bits and pieces and home to make some cheese scones for lunch, the next batch of mince pies and mull some wine. Ady went off to collect logs with Dad and arrived back home at the same time as Jan, Jonathan, Catie, Megan and Jasper arrived.

Hence followed a lovely couple of hours. Catie and Davies disappeared almost at once, Megan and Scarlett with a little bit of work from Ady and Jonathan played in Scarlett’s room with all things pink and fluffyfull while Jan and I had a mini-catch up and Jasper stood spotting all the various ‘star’ s in our house (which is rather a lot actually at this time of year :lol:). We had lunch, drank mulled wine, ate mince pies, chatted, dressed up, played and made a mulled wine, milk, cheese scone crumb and squeaky toy plastic crocodile toy potion which both Tarly and Jasper seemed to consider delicious but the rest of us declined to try. 😆

They headed off and the rest of us returned to computers and xboxes – Davies played project zoo for a while and then got interested in the blox game I was playing and showed a great mind for logic while Tarly did lots more Barbie.com-ing and typing her name.

I’d slowed down as I drove past the local (just round the corner) church this morning to check the time of their carol service and discovered it was tonight at 6.30pm so I’d asked the children if they wanted to go. I was in the school choir right through school and always participated in the carol concert usually held in one of Worthing’s big churches at Christmas. I adore carols and have been meaning to take Davies at least for the last four years or so. We’ve never actually been inside the church round the corner, I’ve been in the church hall for one toddler group once and various voting opportunities over the years (it’s used as a poling station). So we wrapped up warm and just before 6.30 we walked round the corner to the church.

It was certainly not full and I would imagine that tonight was a far larger congregation than normal but we were warmly welcomed and despite twinges of ‘we shouldn’t really be here’ guilt I felt good at that least we boosted numbers, boosted the collection at the end and gave both the children a real first taste of what religion can be about. It wasn’t a great service but it was probably ideal for taking two fairly restless children to. They were given tea lights in glass jars to hold and then bring to the front and lay infront of the nativity scene which they enjoyed, they both liked the carols but were very restless during the readings. I think if I had had just one of them with me I could have managed them better as by explaining that the readings were people telling the story of Jesus’ birth got them listening again but they were faintly squabbling over which one of them I was talking to and Ady was only really shushing whichever one I wasn’t talking to at the time. It was nice enough though and there were several very uncooperative children there which made our only slightly restless offspring seem just fine. Tarly did give both Davies and I the giggles at one point by listening really nicely to the reading about the baby Jesus being born in the stable which was punctuated by a small child in the congregation wailing. She asked who was making the noise, I whispered back that it was a baby to which she asked in a very loud voice ‘is that baby Jesus crying now then Mummy?’. Not quite as good as her saying ‘that’s not a real baby!’ at the Pennywell nativity last year or calling out that ‘three wise men’ is a song by James Blunt but enough to have me and Davies trying really hard not to snort with laughter just the same. 😆

Tomorrow we’re looking forward to catching up with Lucy, Richard and Rebecca, it feels like I have not actually seen Lucy properly for ages and I know we have loads to talk about, both being employed women and all now.