All out of sorts

Oh dear. All out of sorts today. Sobbed over the breakfast bagel. Grizzled into my coffee (not the usual decaf so this blog may speed up over the next few minutes and become unintelligible). Crying and low because I’m off on an all-expenses paid trip to Florida? Eh? Well, no. Crying and low because as I waved my boy off to school I could see him grapple with his emotions and bite back his own tears. He couldn’t wave because his arm was in a sling.
Why is it that something always happens just when you’re set to go away somewhere?
Yesterday I should have been packing but it was the last rugby match of the season and a tournament to boot. James loves rugby and is a hugely physical player. He tackles tough and hard and so often ends up at the bottom of a pile of boys. Boys who are getting bigger and heavier with bigger and heavier feet.

As a brief aside I’m getting really concerned about boys’ feet. A classmate of James’ has size 8s (he’s only nine years old). Having a chance conversation with the man in Clarks the other day he said that a sixteen year old came in with size sixteen feet. It’s getting a bit scary really.

But anyhow…..back to the rugby. Third game. Tough match. James took the legs of some massive child and thudded to the ground. Barrel of boys jumped on top. Eventually clambered out and came off limping with a line of stud marks across his thigh. But it was his hand that really hurt. St John’s Ambulance said take him to casualty so we shot off down the motorway and played tag with the various A&E departments. Went to Tiverton (‘it’s further but will be less crowded than Taunton’). Waited ages. Needed X-ray but not open after 4pm on Sundays. They put him in plaster and dispatched us to Taunton. Back up the motorway. Waited ages. They took off the plaster. Examined him again. He needed an X-ray (really?). X-ray inconclusive. Plastered him again and told us we needed to see the fracture specialist. In Tiverton.

Poor lad is distraught. While he had been quite sanguine about my going away when feeling well and with several cricket matches to look forward to, the prospect of my leaving when he was bandaged up and in pain was quite different. He sobbed. Came into bed with me and I sat and stroked his forehead. And felt like a heel. As I’ve said before, I never consider myself the archetypal maternal type but I love my boy to bits. So fiercely that it hurts and never more than when he hurts. It’s a cliché but I really would take on his pain and, while pretty cowardly in the main, would give up my life in a second if it meant he survived.
‘Get a grip,’ said Adrian, ever the pragmatist. ‘He’s hurt his thumb. You’re acting like he’d been given a week to live. At least he wasn’t stretchered off like that other boy, with his neck in a cast.’ True. More to the point, he wasn’t taken off with blood pouring from his mouth and a wobbling front tooth, like his team mate. Ever since I knocked out a tooth at a nightclub (don’t ask), I go cold at the thought of teeth flying. (I know, I know, this sounds like Hermione in Harry Potter - 'we could die or, even worse, be expelled' bit.)

But I live to worry and, having been ridiculed out of concern about his (possibly fractured) thumb, my ever-inventive mind turned elsewhere.
‘Mexican swine fever,’ I said, forlornly. ‘I’m flying to the US.’
‘Florida,’ said Adrian. ‘Not Mexico.’
‘Gulf of Mexico. Close enough. I could catch it and bring it back and infect the whole of Exmoor.’
He rolled his eyes. ‘Go and pack.’
Half an hour later I came down wailing again.
‘For God’s sake. What now?’
‘Nothing fits. Nothing goes with anything else. It’s a disaster.’
He bit his lip and I could see him mentally counting to ten.
‘I don’t think I should go.’
‘What? Because the boy has hurt his thumb; because of swine fever or because you feel fat in what passes for your summer wardrobe? Honestly?’
Honestly? I’m tempted to be flippant for the sake of a cheap laugh but truthfully I will miss my little boy. I had been feeling like a fraud about this trip as I don’t think of myself as a ‘mummy blogger’ but hey, maybe I am after all.

PS – will miss Adrian as well, of course….(hi darling! Know he reads this from time to time). Pic is of my two boys whittling (how right and proper is that?)

White nights

I didn’t sleep last night. Instead I spent virtually the entire night tossing and turning. I also read my way through nearly the whole of Jodi Picault’s latest novel, a curiously uninvolving tale of ghosts and love, made deeply syrupy by huge gobbets of quite inappropriate magic realism.

Every so often my eyelids would droop and I’d gratefully turn off the light and turn over. Squash the pillow and snuggle down. Then turn the other way. No, it wasn’t going to work. On went the light again and back to the ghosts (who did very unghostly things like snogging and digging, poking red rose petals in people’s pockets and misdirecting phone calls). I have the strong suspicion that JP has read some Alice Hoffman and decided she could do with a bit of magic. Wrong, JP, wrong. Leave it to Alice, love.

Down drooped the eyelids, off went the light again. Turned over and…
‘Aaaaghhhhh!’ A shriek broke out next to me.
‘Aaaaghhhh!’ I shrieked in reply.
On went the light and James and I both sat bolt upright staring at one another in terror. At this point I have to explain that James has been sleeping in with me for the last fortnight because his arm has been in a cast (following the day when five boys went to play at one boy’s house and two ended up in casualty while another went home with a bloody nose.) What can you say? Shit happens.

‘It’s not right, you know,’ muttered Adrian (about being cast into the desolate wastes of the spare room, not about the War of C*** Cottage). ‘He’s nearly ten.’
But, to be honest, I’d rather have James (snores; grinds teeth; hogs bed but is reasonably small) than Adrian (snores loudly; thrashes; hogs bed; talks total utter nonsense and is unfeasibly large).

‘What are you doing, Mummy?’
‘I was reading.’
‘But it’s four in the morning.’
‘I know.’
‘Why are you reading when it’s so late?’
‘Because I can’t sleep.’
‘Poor you. Why?’

Why indeed? Is it because I’ve been well and truly credit-crunched? Is it because, for the first time in my life, I don’t have a zillion things to cram into a day? Is it because we have spent our way through an extraordinary amount of money renovating the house – and yet still have walls with huge holes in them, ceilings balancing on rotten rafters and something unspeakably nasty in the cellar? Could it be acute anxiety over a whole phalanx of friends going through hell right now? Or simply that I had one too many cups of coffee or one too many glasses of wine? Or both?

‘I dunno. Sometimes it just happens.’
‘Rotten luck. Can I read for a bit too?’
‘Sure.’
So we lie there, like an old married couple, me harumphing over JP, him reading The Ashes.
‘I’m tired now, Mum. Hope you get to sleep soon.’
So do I.
‘I will. Night, hon..’

I’ll fall asleep at 4.30am. I nearly always do. I know my insomnia like an old enemy – we go way back. I started not sleeping when I was pregnant with James and never really regained the knack of peaceful slumber. At its worst, I would go for weeks, and sometimes months, without more than two or three hours sleep a night. But for the last year or so, it’s been better and I’ve forgotten just how truly miserable it is when the hours tick by and the hopes of a reasonable next day to follow start to vanish.

I remember once staying at the Lowri Hotel in Manchester in readiness for a live TV interview the next morning. My alarm call was booked for 6.30am and I was tucked up in bed by 10pm. At 1am I remember thinking, ‘Well, it’s fine – five and a half hours would be OK.’ Ever the optimist, a couple of hours later, I was reasoning that I could get by with three hours. My magic witching hour of 4.30 came and went. When it was down to ‘Well, an hour would help,’ I knew I was clutching at straws.

Insomnia sucks the joy out of life. It wrecks your immune system, destroys your sense of humour and turns you into a paranoid, grumpy, spotty haggard old crone. So forgive me if I am not witty and sparkling and amusing today. I have missed blogging and felt that, if I didn’t write something, anything, I would lose the knack forever. What seems funny in the moment loses its lustre if you don’t catch it pretty darn quick and all the curious little incidents of the last month I had been squirreling in readiness of a blog or two have grown boring and tarnished.

So, a sorry little blog today. Will try harder next time.