The Hairy Farmer Family

My mother-in-law said some very ominous words to me a couple of weeks ago.

‘You’ll have to move down here eventually, you know.’

She’s right; I will. John and I currently live on a hill a few minutes’ climb from the farmyard, in a huge, sun-filled house that we built largely ourselves, with a glorious view and fabulous neighbours. We made any amount of rookie mistakes building it, but it is nevertheless a place to which I am passionately attached, and I feel I will only be removed from here by someone who has just wielded heavy-duty bolt-cutters to good effect: severing me from whatever I have defiantly handcuffed myself to AND slugging me unconscious.

Which is a bit of a bugger, because A) we don’t own the house, B) John’s parents are fast approaching their seventies, and C) I always knew I’d married the job along with the chap. I currently do minimal stock handling and tractor cultivation work, as my in-laws are both still working and I’m not often required. In 10 years time: the dynamic will doubtless be different. I have no actual objection to taking on more agricultural work (although I always seem to be pregnant/trying to be pregnant during lambing time (sheep = toxoplasmosis = Eeep) and John will only install me in a tractor if he’s resigned to the anguish caused by my total lacksadaisicality in re: straight lines) but I’m trying to picture myself as a proper, fully-paid-up, working farmer’s wife, and the Venn diagram of the person and the role has only partial overlap.

John would be delighted if I were to return to work, I should add. Any work at all. I am a leetle choosier about what I undertake - which is a bit rich considering that I am sat spending his money while I survey a completely flattened and empty jobs market – and, again, I have been adopting a longer-term view concerning the type of role I might want to be fulfilling in ten year’s time. I have never done Long Term Thinking before, and I can’t help but think that I’m Doing It Rong.

There is a reason for all this looking and considering and cogitating and mulling, and it centers partly on Harry’s absence at school, but also on our current situation, which is a painful and difficult one.

John, you see, does not wish to continue assisted reproduction. And that is putting it gently. He would rather put his hand in a mincer. He has a son he is delighted with, a son he knows we were lucky to get, and now wants a family life that can go forward unshadowed by the caustic stress of repeated, harrowing and inexplicable pregnancy loss, misery, and financial pressure. He’s unhappy, and at the end of his personal road.

But. I want to continue. I, atavistically, want another child. If there is a way to peacefully roll over and surrender forever to this failure of mine – mine, mine - I simply don’t know what it is, or the path in me I must take to find it. I was not, it seems, made to go gently into that good night. For nearly 8 years, this, in differing forms and degrees, has been my struggle. I accept I am perhaps now, to some extent, characterised by it.

So, that, baldly, is where we both are. And our present, fortified, positions form something of an emotional scoured precipice, as you might imagine. Synthesis, real compromise: almost impossible. Either John, or I, must come to terms with their life taking shape quite differently to how they desperately want it to, and the potential for ugliness in word and deed has been strolling frighteningly close.

What can each of us bear? Both to suffer, and to forgo?

There is… dialogue. Counselling. Tomorrow: a short holiday, albeit with a cold-ridden, feverish, barking, just-been-calpol-ed-and-soothed-back-to-fitful-doze (AND generally-going-through-a-tough-developmental-temper-patch) child. And cake, of course. There is always cake.

The city’s manic, but my Love is sane.
He likes the hustle – doesn’t want to move.
My Love’s not only urban, but urbane.

I’d leave tomorrow – gladly pack it in,
but he prefers the lamplight to the stars.
We lie in bed marooned inside the din.

He has to stay in reach of Waterloo.
He has to travel in the outside lane.
I tell him that I’ve grown to like it too.
That’s love. You stack the loss against the gain.

Connie Bensley

Filed under: Parenting | 17 Comments »

It appears to be mid-January. Colour me surprised. Consider me beaned over the bonce by tempus fugiting, in fact.

I promised you some recipes… umm. Last year. Queen of Broken Promises, me. You did, in fact, nearly have one, but it didn’t survive the ‘Save Draft’ button-pressing. I do, as it happens, have items other than cake that I would like to blather about here, but, before I can say anything about anything else, the ginger cake recipe staked first claim.

Oftentimes with baking, I gaily hurl other ingredients in also, depending on what is going spare/free/off, and pleasantly surprise myself, so, do have the confidence to go off-piste and piddle about with stuff. You never know what won’t work until you poison yourself. John, who can cook rather a decent roast dinner, a very mediocre Dolmio spag bol and put pizza in the oven, has watched entirely too many episodes of Masterchef, and his subsequent culinary forays into hitherto unmapped zones of ingredient-pairings have been crammed with interest, braggart flavours, and, in my case, digestive anxiety.

My own reputation as a shit-hot baker has been fraudulently acquired, I sincerely believe, unless the only true way to improve your baking is by failing big and failing often. Every fourth thing out of my oven generally evokes a pained cry of ‘what the buggery FUCK did I do wrong NOW?’ as I scan the textural ruin/burnt bits/sunken middle in horror. We make guilty of our disasters the sun, the moon, the stars, and my malevolent bloody fan oven.

However: this recipe is remarkably well-behaved, to the point where I have never actually failed to deliver it, edible, to the plate once embarked upon it, even when ad-libbing freely. Your own mileage will, of course, vary; plus I am so vague in my specified cooking times that you will be able to blame me with impunity if it all goes thoroughly Pete Tong.

Ann’s Quadruple Ginger Cake

I originally took the recipe from here, and tinkered a wee bit with the quantities and method. 

• 250g/8oz/2 sticks unsalted butter
• 250g/8oz brown sugar. Dark. Light. Soft. Demerara. Muscavado. Golden. Mixture. Whatever. It all works, it’ll just give you varying shades. I tend to chuck all the rock-hard lumps that have failed to yield to the sieve in my chocolate fudge cake recipe (another day!)into a pot and use them in a melting recipe like this, checking that they fully dissolve.
• 150g/5oz black treacle/molasses    <——–
• 150g/5oz golden syrup/pure cane syrup <—–  roughly 300g of treacly syrup is essentially what you are looking to get to here. You can use all treacle if you like; the end result will be very dark, particularly if you’ve used a dark brown sugar, and may well end up being effectively a Treacle Cake, unless you up the ginger-ante accordingly. I usually divide the sweetening honours, unless I have run out of either, in which case I mutter bollocks to it, and use whatever I can scrap out of whatever tin I find. 
• 300ml/10 fl.oz milk
• 2 eggs. Size, schmize, doesn’t matter. Whang ‘em in.
• 150g/ 5oz glacé stem ginger. At least. I hurl bushels of the stuff in. Chop it as fine as you can stand without dying of boredom. Save the syrup.

• 375g/13oz plain/all-purpose flour
• 1 teaspoon bicarbonate of soda/baking soda (Not heaped. Not quuiiiite scraped level. Sorta… a gentle hummock.) 
• 1 teaspoon baking powder (As above. Bicarb has a bit more raising Ummph, theoretically, in the presence of acid ingredients (which it…doesn’t have here, now I actually think about it) but it also has a distinct taste, so I pair ‘em together in the hope of finding the perfect compromise. Use 2 tspns of either one in a storecupboard pinch, and it’ll probably be fine.)
• 3 teaspoons ground ginger. At least. I put in 5, usually.  

Topping: 

• A handful of crystallised/candied stem ginger chunks, chopped about a bit.
• Left-over ginger syrup from the glace jar, mixed with an appropriate amount of
• Icing sugar/confectioner’s sugar.

Measure the butter, sugar, treacle and syrup into a saucepan and heat gently. Swish it about with a spoon from time to time. Don’t let it overheat.

Amuse yourself while everything dissolves by sifting the flour, ground ginger, bicarb & baking powder into a bowl, and smoothing it up the sides into an inverted cone.

Crack the eggs into the milk & whisk them about until they’re no longer lurking in lumps. When the saucepan ingredients have dissolved, remove from the heat, add the eggy milk into the melt & chivvy it about until it presents a smooth united front. You should be able to stick a finger in it without shrieking at this point.

Pour a smallish amount into the flour bowl, and start stirring in the centre, gradually drawing in the flour, a la Yorkshire Pud.

When it reaches a sticky paste, splosh a tad more syrup in from the saucepan, and stir again. Don’t be tempted to lob all the syrup in too quickly; the flour’ll be hell to work in properly.

When you’re done, add the chopped ginger. Don’t forget the ginger. Do not, for completely-hypothetical-instance, carefully pour your mixture (which will be fairly sloppy) into the tin and place it lovingly on the bottom shelf of the oven, only to wrench the door back open with an anguished moan of despair 5 minutes later, and try to lob handfuls of chopped ginger (lovingly sticky stuff, ginger) into the cake, through the fecking hot bars of the oven shelf above it. *ahem*

Oven Temperatures / Timing / Tin.

A dark art. If you are an anaesthetist, or a rower who spends their entire day manoeuvring to keep a rowing-boat in one particular spot mid-stream of a strong current, you will probably be good at baking cakes. The temperature/timing/tin triad is a hard thing to get right, as altering any one variable affects the other two. I, personally, cook this cake in a 7-inch round or an 8-inch square, greased foil or baking paper-lined tin (it’s a fairly liquid cake, so don’t bung it in a loose-bottomed tin without a lining or it’ll drip out) in a bastard contraption fan oven at 140c, for about an hour, probably a bit longer. (That’s Gas Mark 3/Convention oven 160C/325F.) I tend to just hang about nearby when it’s Time, clucking over it. Or I check it, forget to set the timer, wander off again, succumb to the internet, and burn the bugger; either or. I start having a look at 50-55 minutes, or when it starts to smell cooked, or whenever my spidey-sense screams ALL IS LOST!, whichever comes first. If you divide the cake into 2 smaller loaf tins, they still take best part of an hour, I seem to remember.

A waffle on baking in general: with rising cakes, I try not to open the oven until I know the cake must be set in shape (easier said than done, admittedly, and it does help if it isn’t your first rodeo with the recipe in question) so that the inrush of cold air doesn’t cause any significant sinkage. Dropping it on the oven shelf/floor or plonking it down too hard on the counter are also harbingers of doom, even if you HAVE (for completely-hypothetical-example) just burnt yourself inside a raggedy oven glove. Rise above the pain, good woman/chap! Or your cake… won’t.

Novice baker: there are approximately 1000 books that will explain this, but anyway: to see if a cake is cooked, insert a clean, cold metal skewer into the centre of the cake, hold it there a second or two, and then have a bloody good keek at the end. If you see smearage, the centre’s still wet. Pop it back inside again for about, say, 15% of the total recommended cooking time, and then have another g0 with your wiped clean skewer. Also, have a look around the edge, and see if the cake has shrunk away from the sides slightly yet. You can also assess springiness with a cautious finger-press: compare bounciness between the outer edge and the middle. If there is a soggy discrepancy in the middle: back inside. Cover with a double layer of baking paper if the top is already as brown as you’d like.

(Don’t leave the half-cooked cake cooling/sinking on the worksurface whilst you mess about cutting the right-size shapes to cover the top, mind: you must suffer for your art by replacing the cake, frantically folding your paper shapes, reaching inside the hot oven and negotiating the oven shelves in order to place them neatly on the cake top, and then realising you have cut them far too big to fit in the tin, at which point, if you have a fan oven, it will probably snatch the paper from you and plaster it to the back wall of the oven)

ANYhoo. You will proudly remove from the oven a bee-OOtiful ginger cake, cooked to a turn. No cracks, or other minor blemishes. Umm. 

Cool in the tin, and empty onto a plate.

Now for the topping: chop crystallised/candied ginger thinly and scatter it nicely across the cake top. Empty the glace ginger syrup into a bowl and incorporate sifted icing sugar until it turns into a delicious bowl of slow-moving icing loveliness, and drizzle it over the cake with a fork; the icing’ll anchor the crystallised ginger to the cake and stop it tumbling off if you heap enough on.

And this is where you expect to find a photo of the finished article.

But I’ve never got around to taking one, because I’ve always got my jaws sunk into it before the icing has set. 

<picture of empty plate>

Filed under: Parenting | 28 Comments »

I feel I should include some sort of *aROOga!* alert here at the beginning. I am keen not to inadvertently pop anyone’s festive bubbles, simply because my usual Christmas cheer seems to consist, this year, of undiluted Scrooge. I usually emanate something genuinely fairly cheerful, but the whole dark aura of despondency thing has got me by the heel, and my upbeat public persona is a thin veneer that breaks down quickly at home. It’s no one thing in particular, but among the reasons scrabbling hardest to the front to be heard are A) money – its lack, and its difficulty to earn, and B) although I do love carols, feeling, as I usually do, such (as May so beautifully put it) peace and hope in the dark places, Christmas delivers hard and bitter agony for those who have suffered a loss. It is difficult not to be constantly, painfully jolted into recollection that this year, I, too, had a boy child due Christmas Day.

And, of course, when one is already feeling a bit downtrodden, all the daily petty irritations loom far larger than they should. Your son casually breaks the old glass Christmas baubles he’s been told countless times not to go near, because they are Mummy’s special things. Buses pull off just as you scurry breathlessly level with them, every bloody time. You are late. You have been given two parking tickets by womblecocks heavy-handed wardens that you just cannot afford. You have a cough that belongs in a badger colony. Your extended family situation in re Christmas and Boxing Day logistics, is not unproblematic. Your son brings a heavy 15ft curtain pole down on himself, breaking it in several places, despite being told countless x2 times not to tug on the blasted curtains. You think you’ve ovulated again, and spend days minutely scrutinising blank, disappointing peesticks. You’ve felt too stressed and anxious to attend some Christmas parties, and may have given offence thereby. The three nights that your period pain is bad enough to keep you awake and savage-tempered until dawn, are the three nights your son wakes for the day just as you doze off. The thing most wanted is the thing left on the supermarket shelf. Your already-on-final-warning serpent’s tooth son gets volcanically over-excited after a Christmas party and, for no reason he can proffer, bites you hard in the goddamn arm.

So, as I do whenever I am feeling bludgeoned and battered, I simply take refuge inside the covers of a trusted book, and pretend that none of it is happening. I’m in there, not out here, because out here they’re all out to sodding well get me.

My lost post from last week (main PC died, taking my emails and patience down with it. Laptop/Wordpress: mutual hatred.) was primarily a rambly one about Harry’s nativity and a good recipe for ginger cake. I will sac up and re-type the ginger cake one over Christmas (I promised the lovely Wombat!) but I suppose I had better just mention that Harry’s King portrayal was notably chiefly for its unorthodoxy. The kings were due on at the very end, and he fell asleep on the side-stage bench in both performances and had to be removed by his TA. The first afternoon, he dropped his box of myrrh (glittery, fancy… and empty; immediately upon receipt of it, he had ripped the lid off and displayed the box to the audience like a smug magician’s assistant) as he negotiated the big step up onto the stage – prompting much head-down-tail-up furraging by several horses and shepherds. He then proceeded to perch on the Very Edge of the stage, with his back to the audience – from which precarious position his long-suffering TA (this reminds me, I must deliver her Alcohol) removed him again. Despite arriving onstage a mere half-minute before the curtain, his attention span failed after some 20-odd seconds – whereupon, he proceeded to lie down on his back, at the front, legs towards the audience, pull the (itchy, ‘mittedly) tunic up above his waist, and wave his legs in the air. Well apart, and in the air. Thus exposing to oh-so-public view a pair of (dry, unusually) red dinosaur pants.

GOD.

There IS a photo of this moment, but I am Not Allowed to post it. It does rather detract from the whole dignity-of-the-individual thing. 

Harry is getting on fairly well at school, and, although schools are never perfect, I feel sure that we made the right choice in terms of Which One. Harry’s difficulties have led to him being quite socially immature, but as he is an extremely physically affectionate child (when not biting like a double-dip recession, the bugger.) he consequently has become the school baby. It’s a very small school, and the older children are encouraged to mentor the younger ones; hence, he has had an influx of Christmas cards from the older children, especially the girls, all of whom, apparently, adore The Cute. He certainly cannot cross the playground at hometime without cries of ‘Harry! Gimme a HUUUUUUGGG!’ coming thick and fast. The playground is beginning to take the shape of People I Know A Little as opposed to A Crowd, and the place just feels right, somehow - which is one less thing for me to worry about. It IS a very ambitious school academically, though, so there is a good deal of emphasis on early reading and writing – which, of course, Harry’s particular difficulties mean he struggles with. However, he has one-to-one individual TA support (which am I dreading him losing next academic year. He does need more monitoring than his peers) and although he still isn’t toilet trained, and we’ve had a initial hiccup or so with the school not realising that a sore-legged Harry was choosing to sit in wet pants for hours rather than change himself (and the daily grind of washing 5-10 lots of urine soaked clothes does, occasionally, get me proper down) he is happy, engaged, and taking great enjoyment in his schooling. More, currently, I do not ask.

Except the chance to do it all again with another one. I am stood on a precipice of Difficulty.

I am distraught by what has happened, upset by what has not happened, and fearful of what might happen. As I move towards and beyond the due date that is not, the thought of more pregnancies entirely suffuses me with cringing terror and dread; the thought of no more pregnancies consumes me with panic, grief and misery. There is no room left in me for laughter. 

I do, however, very much wish you and yours all the festive cheer and peace that is, just now, neatly eluding me. I am a durable type, and will recover some customary bounce soon. Merry Christmas, all!

Filed under: Parenting | 16 Comments »

I have just lost a 1500 word post. Gone. Disappeared without a sodding trace.

Storming off to cry and hit things now.

Arse.

Here, have a photo. S’all I got.

Filed under: Parenting | 21 Comments »

Picture me, if you will, hurtling towards you at high speed, flushed, breathless, tripping over the furniture, scurrying around obstacles, grasping an over-sized pocket watch, late, late, late for my important date with the Internets.

There was some talk of every three days, I believe. *hollow laugh* I was born on time, and I’ve been running behind ever since.

There was something reminiscent of the best-laid schemes of mice & men about last week: Harry had a night terror that kept him awake whilst still-petrified-asleep for nearly 4 long hours in the Monday morning small hours: always a morale-breaker. I surfaced groggily at GOD o’clock knowing that I had three nativity costumes, two large birthday cakes, and several small Christmas cakes to produce; I also had to source & purchase turkey, rolls, stuffing and cranberry sauce for the school Christmas Fayre – highlight of the festive season. John kicked off the whole Gang Agley business by prosaically announcing that Catholic Hen (whose overnight lair I had searched for in vain) had not shown up for reveille – ergo, had become fox food during the night.

I dropped an over-sleeping, exhausted Harry to school an hour late, and trudged morosely up the hill with my morning coffee to play Hunt The Feathers, and to my slack-jawed astonishment, there was a tiny, bright yellow chick darting busily among the flock. The fox had evidently missed this tiny fluffball, which was completely unphased by its brush with near-extinction, and looked like a natural survivor to me, although it must have been perilously cold. As such, I felt I owed it something, and promptly fell to considering how I could keep it alive. I provided food for it, but needed heat and secure shelter, pronto. Naturally, the only power lead long enough to reach the hen run belonged to the farm, and my poultry heat lamp had a broken bulb. D’you know how many of my local shops DON’T stock suitable bulbs? Particularly when there’s a chick with no feathers freezing to death in the rain? And then, of course, I had to actually catch the bugger.

Wick little things, chicks.

I left for work at 5pm. So, that was Monday.

Tuesday morning, I spent on the phone, trying to either locate a companion chick, or give my chick (resplendent but lonely in a cardboard box) away to a home with other chicks. Waste of a Tuesday morning, ‘pparently. Our chick is destined to be une fille unique. She is also destined to be a damned expensive hen by the time the foxes consume her, as they inevitably do all my poultry sooner or later.

In the meantime, I am feeling short on babies.

So I have named her Gertrude.

Wednesday, I spent running around local supermarkets like a rat in a shrinking cage, shrieking into my mobile at store managers, trying to buy turkey crowns – with remarkably little initial success - and exuding free-flowing stress at everyone I encountered about my Badly Slipping Schedule.  

Thursday, I baked my bottom off. I forget when I went to bed.

Friday morning, I excelled myself and actually got to the Post Office. Fridge magnets are On Their Way, and I thank you sincerely and profusely. Holler if they don’t arrive.

Friday afternoon, I helped to set up the school Christmas Fayre, which felt like I was being useful right up to the point I was asked, ’Where are the rolls?’, because the answer, disappointingly, was ‘Fuck. Still in the shop.’

Friday evening: the Christmas Fayre, complete with Santa’s grotto, and Harry’s performance therein, videoed at my request as I was stuck on a stall.

I know I promised John to conceal Harry’s identity on this blog a little better, but really, the image quality on this video is about on a par with the Paris Hilton sex tapes. I was mildly aghast at the absence of pleases, thank-yous, and the cobra-like speed at which the present left Santa’s grasp. It starts well, mind; the first 2 seconds are priceless. 

And yes, he has a Knights’ Castle. Don’t tell him.

Friday evening, late, my best friend came for her belated birthday dinner and we didn’t go to bed until gone 2am.

Saturday, I was starting to flag, but I boxed up a cake I was fairly happy with,

put on a posh frock and went to a posh restaurant and ate exceedingly posh food for a lunch that seemed to go on until dark. Poor me. 

Sunday, I fell over in a weakly twitching heap, and concentrated on constantly edging away from John, who had a Pukey Thing going on, and I am famously nervous of Pukey Things. I also made a King costume, tweaked a Mary Costume, made a headdress, and started on a turban. Finished at 2am. I was then woken by John, who is Not Himself still, every hour until the alarm went off.

Today, Monday, I started my new job. I have a vivid red t-shirt that says Bookseller, and I have been getting to grips with the till and the geography of the ground floor bookshelves. I find the minimum wage element quite depressing, but there are certainly worse places to work.

And… that is all. I am All Caught Up.

Tomorrow! (Or possibly the next day.) I am going to give you recipes for three cakes that went down well at my charity coffee morning - as promised to Wombat, who tried at least one of them, and pronounced it tasty.

Stay tuned for Chocolate Fudge, Coconut Lime, and Ginger. They do not read like recipes you find in proper recipe books, you’ll be unsurprised to hear - this is baking à la HFF Wifey. I’m sorry you’re too far away for me to feed you cake in person, so this is the best I can do.

If you likes ‘em, the collecting tin is – ahem – here. There’s an archaicly insulting fridge magnet in it for you. *winks*

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I’ve been having a wee bit of a melancholia, culminating Saturday morning in the simultaneous arrival of yet another crushing delivery of germs, an invoice for my (failed) IUI, an eye-watering Visa card bill, and, triumphantly, my period. God daym.

Saturday afternoon I took Harry to a kids’ birthday party where he got a bit rough-housed, and complained that the kids in question were using ‘words I don’t like’. (This will in no way have involved any type of expletive, most of which he views as just another piece of parlance. Which is entirely My Bad. Words Harry doesn’t like often include ‘give’, ‘can’t', ‘share’, ‘wee’, ’tidy’, ‘hurry’, and ‘bed’.) Partners in despondency, on this occasion I cut our losses and brought him straight home.

I felt vaguely better after spending the rest of the afternoon pottering about in the garden, although I faffed far too much over the most feral of my hens, who has, with catholic abandon, injudiciously produced 5 chicks in the midst of November. Bird-brained animal. I couldn’t help but muse that, given my catastrophic ineptness with live bearing, it would be nice to have the opportunity to try sitting on a clutch instead. Knowing my reproductive luck, I’d probably suffer from some ridiculously obscure eggshell disorder, and… yeah. I’ve been feeling bitter lately.   

I’ve been working at a lot of toddler groups the last couple of weeks, and it’s not helped the whole Miscarrying Rage thing much. So many children. So many bumps. Outright jealousy has not played an overt part in my mindset hitherto, although the undercurrent was there, but I have lately found myself looking at these women with bewildered, acid resentment of their ability to effortlessly, bloomingly reproduce. At will. Without undue fear of mishap, misfortune and misery.

How the hell must that blithe expectation feel? Pregnancy minus the core underpinning of abject terror? I watch their composed serenity, their glow to my umbral shadow, and feel the unreasoning flare of my oppugnancy, in vicious, flailing antagonism toward what I perceive to be the buoyant ignorance of the oblivious blessed. They have what I have not. I am rancorous, furious and barren. I am desperate, and full of malice and spite. I am dismal, sorrowing and pitiful.    

Which is all a bit heavy, considering I only went there to sell them a bloody card.

Sigh. I didn’t quite mean to strike out so far in this direction today; it’s just that as further fertility treatment slides from my broken fiscal grasp, I fall correspondingly deeper emotional prey to the unchancy vaguaries of my own reproductive so-called cycle, in the nebulous hope that the entirely organic conceptual surprise that was Harry, might re-occur. After 5 ovary-wearying years, I fear very much not, yet I’m going down fighting like a mad thing. *pause* I am a mad thing. And I’m a mad thing fighting for two, because John has lost all hope and enthusiasm for this, and wants to concentrate on the son we have.

Our son. Our sun. Our King! (Yes, there will be photos. How could I not give you photos?) 

Harry scampers round the playground; diminutive, dishevelled, and delectable. He is fabulous fun just at the moment, and gloriously good company when on form. I want another one, just like him. A healthier start in life would be preferable. But I am a reproductive beggar, and beggars’ choices are famously narrow.

Despite the internal emotional maelstrom – which I daresay is not awfully discernable to The Outside, given my dementedly upbeat public persona – the weekend before last, I embarked upon my annual charity coffee morning for Bliss, the premature baby charity.

My primary reason for so doing, is, as I have written before, an expiation of what I obscurely feel to be my indebtedness. Payment for that very small sun indeed, whom, at first, beamed such a muted light. Dulled by seizures and overwhelming, sweeping apnoea, tethered to us and his life by the ridged ropes of a ventilator.

Body and soul, he was far, far away from me, trapped inside both a plastic bubble and the dark oblivion of critical illness… and he came back. Came back fighting. Fought the ventilator, fought the drugs, fought me, damnit. The single determined survivor of my murderous, Medea-like uteri, he protested, fought and struggled his way into blossoming, vivid beauty. It could so easily not have been. The baby next to Harry also protested, and fought, and struggled. And died.

I feel I owe a personal restitution; a weregild ransom, blood-tribute for my live, whole, coruscating, luminous son. 

Deluded, idiot I, because what price a child’s life?

Somewhere, deep in the malaised core of our NHS, someone knows the answer in pounds and pence. Our most vulnerable neonates are fighting budgets as well as for life, and it’s going from bad to fucking ridiculous. Specialist nurses reduce infant mortality drastically, and a third of neonatal units are making cuts to and downgrading their nursing workforce, when more were desperately required a year – two years – five years ago. Ten years ago. A baby requiring intensive care in the UK still cannot reasonably expect to receive the same standard of nursing that adults can,and are dying in greater numbers accordingly, despite the Secretary of State for Health claiming that they have made “tough choices on public spending so that we can protect the NHS and ensure that the sick do not pay for Labour’s debt crisis”. Sick babies are paying. If I do ever manage to gestate to viability again, my odds of a premature birth are incalculably high, and I will watch my child fight both the woefully inadequate start that will likely be all my uteri can provide, and the horrifying shortages in care provision.

So, tough it out, babies! If you can hang on in there doughtily while we push Bliss’s SOS campaign under the noses of government as noisily as we can, that’d be… useful, yes? 

 I’m sorry; again, I didn’t quite mean to run on so much. Recurrent miscarriage and dying babies: topics upon which I Officially Become Cross and Type With A Series Of Big Hammery Thumps. 

I have a stress headache induced purely by my own angst now - fule! - and Harry has started coughing a lung up and is shortly going to wake and complain, so I am going to pinch the words I wrote last year when I asked for donations, on the basis that A) they are still absolutely true and B) times are still awful hard.

However! Before I do so, I have a small additional incentive to dangle in front of you this year, because I have felt so writhingly and infusedly humbled by your past generosity, knowing that I could offer you nothing but my most heartfelt thanks in return. I have given the matter a little thought, and, given that I live immediately outside Stratford Upon Avon, I have duly purchased sets of magnetised Shakespearian Insults and Love Quotes, intended for your refrigerator door. They have the benefit of being light, thin, and, in many cases, bracingly rude.

I have looked carefully at Royal Mail’s airmail costs, weighed the magnets, weighed envelopes, sourced lighter envelopes, and I reckon that, even if you live in Darkest Peru, the very most it’ll cost me in postage to send you a vituperative/sentimental bijou for your fridge is 76p. Email me your postal address at hairyfarmer@tiscali.co.uk when you donate (There is a minimum donation set by the Just Giving website of £2 [approximates to USD$3.17 / AUD $3.11 / €2.3 / 0.00178456 gold ounces] and if that’s what you’re comfortable sparing, then please, believe me honestly, truly grateful, and more than grateful.) and I will happily despatch a magnetic message full of love… or slander. Entirely at random! I promise faithfully not to sell your postal address to JunkMail.com. You can, in fact, absolutely trust me to lovingly regale or abuse you with no strings attached. 

I know a small, colourful patch of Shakespearianity on your fridge isn’t much of a payback for levering open your battered purses in these times of financial anaemia, but perhaps you might (and particularly whoever gets the ’she is spherical’ one) feel, when you see it every day, that there is a bit of my heart (the bit that isn’t permanently screwed up in either reproductive grief or anxious maternal blatherings) that is simply devoted to thinking kind thoughts about you, the possessor. It is already true for those who have already donated, sometimes anonymously, these past two years, but it would be nice if I could give you something tangible to actually invoke it for you this year. Nothing says ‘I love you’ quite like ‘Thou Smell Of Mountain Goat’, no?

….

I was humbled beyond belief last year when so many of you, whom I have mostly never met, donated online. I was completely mentally tripped-up by the notion that my odd little corner of the internet could have generated so very much unforeseen good will, generosity of spirit, and sheer human kindness. Many of you found me here because you do not – yet – have children, and yet you gave your money to Bliss – a charity that helped us, Harry, and his medical team –  because it was a cause dear to my heart, not yours. 

I cried. I cried for days.

I do not take your support for granted, and I know - don’t I just! – that times are hard, and the wolves are likely snapping as closely at your fiscal sledge as they are at ours. But if you are able to hurl off an undeserving peasant give (from each according to his ability, from each according to his need, type-of-thing) then I would be… well. I think the word is verklempt.

http://www.justgiving.com/DarthToddler

Thank you.

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We’re reasonable people. It’s his first year, we thought. There’s dozens of kids. He still doesn’t speak so clearly as he might. We figured: one end or other of the donkey, perhaps. (Likely the back end if he persists in delightedly locking all the school toilet doors from the inside and crawling out underneath…) It’s a non-speaking part, yes, but he can bray with the best of ’em. Or fart, whatever.

Or a stable cat; he can climb like one. One of a cherubic flight of angels if someone has a daft sense of humour. Or maybe - just maybe - a shepherd; the kid knows his sheep, after all. We’ve been quietly eyeing up potential stripey tea-towellage in case parents were supposed to provide costume.

I think the phrase I want is… goat rodeo.

There are no, repeat no worries about getting Harry into character here, but with this King in charge of following yonder star, the production will head in unexpected directions.  Possibly the emergency exits.

I’mma bring popcorn.

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Three days-smays. No-one’s counting! *ahem*

The linen on our bed was changed yesterday (that refreshing bi-annual event!) as Harry had up-emptied some of his chocolate milkshake on John’s half of the duvet. I was busy and had vaguely considered leaving it (it wasn’t my half, after all) to dry but I did eventually drag off the fitted sheet and duvet cover and cart them downstairs. John put fresh linen on at bedtime (leaving the bed unmade-up is a cunning ploy on my part: J almost always retires upstairs first - to be confronted with the inescapable prospect of mild domestic drudgery for the next 3 minutes if he wishes to sleep between sheets) and the world continued to spin on its axis. The mischievous sprite who jerks the strings of my life, however, had taken note of the fresh – white – linen, and promptly nipped out from behind the cosmic skirting boards and sliced open a blood vessel in Harry’s nose.

I heard a series of puzzlingly wettish-sounding coughs around midnight, shortly after I’d peed him (place 95% asleep child on potty, murmur gentle get-on-with-its, wait for tinkly sound or urine smell, replace child under duvet) but his chest is currently sounding like a badger colony, so I thought nothing of it until a small, very red figure appeared on the bed, uttering vague complaints, clambering clumsily over John’s drowsy form towards me. Erk. And double-erk.

I am not prone to nosebleeds; I think I’ve had 1 in the last 30 years. Harry’s never had one before, and it was an absolute humdinger. I concealed my alarm under march-into-bathroom-hold-nose-sit-on-towel practical type-activity, but he was choking and frantically swallowing blood as the fat, splattering drips came faster and faster, and I began to furiously consider how to stanch the tide. My knowledge of ENT anatomy - never a well-padded entity to begin with - fled from me completely, and I found myself feverishly wondering if he could somehow have accidently severed a tonsil with his tongue, dislodged a sinus by coughing or be inexplicably haemorrhaging from his… his… epiglottis?

Harry - sleep-dazed and confused - justifiably considered current events to be sucking hairy donkey balls, and, becoming tired of standing over the toilet watching his life-force pour from him in a steady cascade of tiny haemoglobinal water-bombs, hurled himself at my kneeling, naked form, and gripped determinedly. Which stemmed his distress a little, but now meant that the red river was dribbling down my back. The bathroom already resembled a worryingly flamboyant crime scene, and although I am unfortunately quite accustomed to sitting dejectedly in a bloody puddle, I made the discovery that even the inhabiting of bloody puddles can have a sliding scale of desirability and I had found the bottom, no pun intended.

Well, we all survived (although Harry’s official school photo (today, naturally) looks slightly red-hued-of-nostril); John had been busy changing Harry’s liberally bloodsmeared bed linen – two beds in one evening! – but I kept him sleeping with us on the off-chance he started fountaining again, and what with one thing and another, the attractive new polka-dot pattern on our duvet didn’t become apparent until morning.

I fear John is about to set a 3-times-in-24-hours personal best in bed-making.

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Clean my house. This is a mammoth rolling project, always several years behind where it should be. I comfort myself - everytime a visitor has to pick their way to the toilet over the abandoned baby gate, heaped sacks of dog & hen food, a straying feral hostess trolley, 3 brooms, a bucket, a ragged boilersuit, and whatever toy du jour Harry has strewn underfoot – with the knowledge that people rarely die wishing they had spent more time dusting.

Organise my annual Bliss charity coffee morning. I am thinking Sat 5th November. I need to do rather more than think, and pronto.

Practise my guitar, banjo and ukulele more. Actually, just some would be an improvement.

Bring the tortoise in for the winter. She has been in once already, and was boomeranged straight back out again to enjoy the indian summer. She is a teenage, sulky tortoise, and prefers reptile junk food from a pet shop to actual Fresh Greens, so she is probably buried half-way into the ground, unimpressed with the unfairness of life.

Sew name tags in Harry’s school uniform. Then buy more school uniform and sew some more. The washing machine and its operator cannae take n’more, Captain.

Clip my supersized spaniel, who has somehow managed to grow into a hybrid of Cardinal Richelieu and a mike wind jammer.

Squeeze the pirate treasure map, that I unearthed for the school conker fayre, back into the garage.

There is already a quart of junk in the garage’s pint pot, rendering the operation fraught with annoyance. Dad made the map, painted the ship and roughed out the island shape and a couple of features; I spent a recent long evening adding various badly-executed extras. The parrot in particular drew unconstructive criticism,

and I have to admit that its beak is really not quite the thing.

(For the same conker fair, I seemed to be responsible for introducing Maggot Racing to the roster. A fellow parent made a stupendous race track;

I named the runners. Greb Coe & Linford Chrysalis were prompted by FB and random googling, Red Rot, Fester Piggot, Usain Revolt and Crawler Radcliffe were all, alas, my own work. I am unsure quite what a loss to tabloid journalism this makes me.)

Turn the bulging bag of Bramley apples from our tree into frozen apple pies.

Doctor the hens. I am winning the Scaly Leg Mite battle, but the cockerel is looking decidedly sorry for himself in the plumage department, and I have no idea why. Also, work out why some of the hens are refusing to be shut up at night, preferring to lurk in the undergrowth instead. I have repeatedly told them that the fox has A Working Nose, to no avail. Black hen – the only one to boast an actual working personality – toppled dead from her perch last week, and was only the second hen of the ManyManyLots I have owned, to have died of seemingly natural causes. Foxes, dogs or rank bloody stupidity have polished off the rest. John thinks I am Just Not Meant to own hens. He may be right.

Decide whether to invite Harry’s arch-nemesis (‘A says he doesn’t want to play with me anymore! But B and C still like me…’) for a playdate and making-up session… or give way to the set of altogether more juvenile impulses I had when I saw him push a hail-fellow-well-met-all-past-sins-forgotten-Harry sharply away this morning. The (unspecified, but that I suspect was triggered by an over-tactile Harry) incident yesterday that led to A’s dudgeon was, I am told, absolutely six of one and half-a-dozen of the other; a fact which I cognitively fully accept - before suppressing it firmly under the visceral maternal rush of channelled Tiger. And I could weep: until yesterday, Harry’s scales of reference were completely innocent of any like/not like divisions, and he’s never held a grudge longer than an hour in his life.

Worry about Harry’s first school coach trip to a museum 25 miles away next week. Harry should have been christened Lord Lucan, and I was sufficiently worried about the possibility of him straying to speak to the school; they promptly asked if I wanted to go too, and I accepted with alacrity – but when I had heard nothing and asked again last week, they had apparently decided that I needed a CRB check, which takes weeks. I am a little put out by this uncommunicated change of mind; however, I have highlighted the fact that he is a Vanisher, and feel I can do no more, short of stalking the school party behind dark glasses and a large paper. He will most likely stick to his friends like glue, in any case. Probably. Hopefully. Perhaps… I’ll have another word.

Chase the Paediatrician’s secretary for correspondence.

Chase Warwickshire County Council for speech therapy, as Harry will doubtless fall through the widening cracks inflicted by budget slashes otherwise.

Send my father, who has just texted that they can see the WHOLE bay of Naples from their hotel room, a highly abusive reply.

Go for a wee.

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I have just been released from a most unpleasant Entire Hour in the dentist’s chair, and am virtually incommunicado-by-mouth as a result, sporting stroke-victim facial muscle control and a Fudd-level of lisp. Good times. The anaesthetic is wearing off rapidly, and I am feeling sufficiently sorry for myself that I have actually sat down in a comfy chair – while the sun is out, and I am surrounded by dozens upon dozens of things that I could usefully be getting on with. All of which are niggling me, damnit.

Firstly: the IUI that kind of wasn’t. Didn’t work, The End. I’ve had the period, but not the clinic invoice, just to aggravate matters. I am sinkingly despondent about failing at this new, earlier stage, feeling that the greasy pole of pregnancy (double-entendres not really intended) has now treacherously become coated with an extra, uber-slippy slathering of lard – and grown loftier into the bargain. I have fallen painfully from half-way up it 5 bone-wearying times already; this time, I couldn’t even get off the ground.

I know that, statistically, I was overdue for this. I have become pregnant from every previous cycle, even cancelled ones. I’ve even managed it on my own a couple of times – for a given value of ‘own’. A 100% assisted-conception success rate is not sustainable. Yet… at no point did I seriously expect this cycle not to work – for a given value of ‘work’, and I am experiencing difficulty talking myself out of a burning, indignant impression of having been thoroughly cheated. I also hadn’t thought it possible that my sense of reproductive failure could pervade my psyche any further, but au contraire, madame! I live and learn, evidently.

Telling myself that this is a flukish result is only useful reassurance if we extend the data to include a Next Time and try again; this is a horribly sharp pain in the wallet, and a costly way to disappoint yourself. I am, as I have previously mentioned, not currently in possession of very much of an income (although I am an expert in mighty wielding of a visa card) but until I know that a second child is irrevocably off the agenda, I feel miserably incapable of a re-focus in any direction labelled ‘career’ or ‘serious earning’. I recognise the need to work now that Harry is at school, but I want something with zero stress that I can walk away from at any time – hence the seasonal bookseller post. The only snag there is that Seasonal + Temporary ≠ living costs, let alone ongoing IUI costs. Which is a bugger. 

I also can’t rid myself of the sense of how pregnant I should be by now, which is something I managed to cognitively sidestep on miscarriages One to Four. Five is biting me hard in the bum, particularly as every drop-off and pick-up at school is essentially a running of the pushchair gauntlet – all Harry’s contemporaries have either an elder sibling or a toddling younger version of themselves. I’m not resentful, as such, merely… reminded. Every day, I am reminded of how fucking ridiculously easy it is for everyone  -for a given value of ‘everyone’ - else to have the children they want. There are no ‘should’s in this life, God knows, but I do feel most terribly robbed - and I can’t help but contrast their Haves with my Have Not. I do not forget to see the Have I managed to hang on to – who has spent a very happy weekend playing with Shannon’s kids – and if he is the only child we are going to have, then I will close the door on this, re-adjust, and be happy. But until I succeed, or fail utterly, then even this sublime Autumn weather, my favourite time of year, is a visual glory that triggers a sense of beautiful, restless poignancy, as opposed to actual contentment.

And to top it off (I’m not a barrel of laughs today, I appreciate)  my anaesthetic (all four syringefuls) has worn off, and holy-molary, I feel like I’ve been punched squarely by Tyson. My jaw is only tenuously attached to my face, according to my reviving nerve endings. *shudder* Thank God I didn’t let him take my wisdom tooth out while he was there: he wanted to. I have that to look forward to another time. And I feel, in this life, that I need all the bloody wisdom I can get.

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