Hello everyone,
Thanks so much for visiting my blog. I've actually moved to Wordpress where I hope you'll see a vague improvement. There's still work to do but I'm getting there...
www.postcardsfrompramstead.com
I hope to see you there!
All the best.
Tuesday 17 May 2011
Monday 9 May 2011
Is it a bird? Is it a...?
"It's a plane! Bye bye plane!" are the boy's favourite words, accompanied by squeals of genuine delight, open-mouthed amazement and vigorous waving.
A while ago we looked into moving to west London so I could cut down my commute and have the luxury of getting up after the radio breakfast shows have started (much as Radio 4's Farming Today really addresses my daily crop rotation issues). We rambled around Richmond, chugged around Chiswick and tootled around Twickenham. But for all that these areas have some gorgeous areas and actual, semi-affordable houses, there was one big problem: the planes. Try as we might to ignore them, the picnic at Kew Gardens where I could only hear half of H's musings thanks to the home-bound holidayers overhead sent us scurrying back to NW3 and early starts.
No planes here! Or so I had conned myself into believing until the boy started speaking and pointing; pointing out that, in fact, we do live under the flight path. There are hundreds of them, all day long. The boy can hear a lone aircraft over a boiling kettle or the Hoover, looking at me with excitement for confirmation that it is indeed yet another aircraft. I sometimes wonder if he conceals a pair of binoculars in his mop of blond hair as he can spot a pinprick of a plane in the widest of skies (and clouds are inevitably a source of some disappointment).
I bought him the sweetest airplane mobile the other day which he adores (and makes bedtime marginally less traumatic -bonus!), fueling his obsession yet further. But as a car-free household that struggles up the hill each week with the recycling, buys local/fairtrade/organic/whatever and is a mere 10 year wait away from being owners of our very own allotment, I'm not sure how we've produced a16 month old that would vote for a third runway at Heathrow...
Sunday 8 May 2011
Wednesday 4 May 2011
Four Easters
If you've ever seen the film 'Four Christmases', you'll have a vague idea of how my Easter panned out. Now I'm no Reese Witherspoon and H is no Vince Vaughn (thank God), but their frantic attempt to get around all four sets of divorced parents to celebrate the holiday is grimly familiar. H and I were both born to entirely incompatible couples who, in their own good time, saw the error of their ways and parted company.
They've all now found the yin to their yang and have remarried (some more than once, but we'll gloss over that). When we were younger, the emotional upheaval was more than made up for with double the presents on birthdays and at Christmas, extra pocket money and other guilt-induced treats. Now, however, it's just an administrative nightmare. I'll leave you to imagine the logistics of the top table at our wedding; it was so long that it may have spanned different time zones (a sure-fire way to keep any potentially warring factions apart, at least).
Once we were married I had to face the fact that I could no longer just enjoy Christmas and Easter with my own (two sets of) parents but had to join H's (two sets of) parents to celebrate with them as well. It was bad enough when it was just the two of us enduring the lonely drive up the A1 on Christmas day, but with a baby it's so much worse. For a start, Little Boy has increased our popularity tenfold; he is most definitely the star of the show and everyone wants a piece of him. He's the first grandchild, so I get it, but I can think of better ways of spending our bank holidays than criss-crossing the north of England with nursery rhymes on loop. There are times when I think it would be rather nice to just hole up somewhere cosy and receive guests like a monarch of some sort. That said, we had a lovely Easter. It's almost always worth the effort and at least we don't have to worry about cooking. And we drove home with double the amount of Easter eggs than we should have. Some things never change.
They've all now found the yin to their yang and have remarried (some more than once, but we'll gloss over that). When we were younger, the emotional upheaval was more than made up for with double the presents on birthdays and at Christmas, extra pocket money and other guilt-induced treats. Now, however, it's just an administrative nightmare. I'll leave you to imagine the logistics of the top table at our wedding; it was so long that it may have spanned different time zones (a sure-fire way to keep any potentially warring factions apart, at least).
Once we were married I had to face the fact that I could no longer just enjoy Christmas and Easter with my own (two sets of) parents but had to join H's (two sets of) parents to celebrate with them as well. It was bad enough when it was just the two of us enduring the lonely drive up the A1 on Christmas day, but with a baby it's so much worse. For a start, Little Boy has increased our popularity tenfold; he is most definitely the star of the show and everyone wants a piece of him. He's the first grandchild, so I get it, but I can think of better ways of spending our bank holidays than criss-crossing the north of England with nursery rhymes on loop. There are times when I think it would be rather nice to just hole up somewhere cosy and receive guests like a monarch of some sort. That said, we had a lovely Easter. It's almost always worth the effort and at least we don't have to worry about cooking. And we drove home with double the amount of Easter eggs than we should have. Some things never change.
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