Working hard

Last week the gritlets came up with the smart idea they would earn money.

Normally, I would immediately agree to this. Quicker than you could say exploitative child labour I'd have them stitching Claire's Accessory bags, or gluing the wiggly eyes on soft toys in the dead-eyed manner of a Special Economic Zone migrant.

Unfortunately, their idea is nothing so vaguely helpful as earning their crust via a scheming employer. No. They came up with an employment scheme called Helping around the home.

I am unhappy about Helping around the home. It is basically, 'we do jobs, you give us cash'.

Hmm. Sounds to me like extortion from my pocket when the grislets should jolly well pull their weight. Four of us are here, and when I last looked there were no staff, housekeepers, laundry assistants or 'women who do' hiding behind the curtains. Between the four of us we surely have the sense and ability to wash, cook, clear up after ourselves, and not set the place on fire. (I only set the dinner ablaze once. For goodness sake don't keep going on about it.) Daily assistance around the home, in my opinion, should involve no cash. Only the satisfaction gained from helping each other and creating a mutually supportive society. And then what happens next? When the employment experiment is over? More hazard. As in, I am not picking up my coat because you are not paying me to do it.

Obviously, I tried to put the griblets off their ghastly scheme. Primarily by turning every household job into a long-winded, difficult and problematic tendering process.

I listed six areas of housework and insisted written bids for the contracts were presented in a proper manner. Then I demanded each job be submitted to a further round of wrangling and bargaining. Because I am ruthless (and know how to divide triplets), I egged on Shark and Tiger to undercut each other on the Table Setting bid until both of them offered to work the entire week for one penny. Then I gave the job to Squirrel on account of the ridiculously unrealistic bids coming in from the competition.

But despite my best efforts to recreate the misery, daily grind and routine back-stabbing involved in office politics, the grimlets persisted.

Eventually I gave in.

They have just completed the week's employment. I incorporated into the end process a further smidgen of realism by means of a staff appraisal designed to identify areas where they failed.

Gratifyingly, it took all afternoon, and meant I could use phrases like performance-related targeting and action to improve client satisfaction. Now I am in hope they never, ever, want to re-run this experiment ever again. It has left one in a fuming temper, one not talking to me, and one locked in the bathroom. Thus I hope their next idea to earn their meagre pound is nothing to do with me, but is hiking round the neighbourhood, offering to wash cars.

Tiger. Won bids for dusting and vacuuming. Frankly, the vacuuming was terrible. She swung the Dyson round like a weapon, scowled all the time and sucked up next to nothing before finally demanding two pound fifty. I gave it to her gladly, just to get her out the way. (I might take a note of that strategy, actually, for when Dig comes home.) On the plus side, she enjoyed the dusting since it required the purchase of an extendable fluff-on-a-stick with which she could stab her sisters.

Squirrel. Won bids for table duties and tidying the shoe racks. Dreadful. It was like putting Chaos in charge of time-keeping. But her winning of the bids was political, so I can't complain.

Shark. Won bids for laundry in and laundry out. She made an attempt. Then I realised we were washing the clean clothes all over again while a pile of mud-stained jeans was crawling out the door looking for pedestrians to mug. Did the job myself when she'd gone to bed.

I want no holes on my return

One problem has consumed me, of late. It has changed my thinking, affected what I do, driven me half-mad with suspicion. Seeking resolution, I scour internet sites after dark, taking quiet comfort from similar tales of woe.

The children are alarmed. They watch me falling to the floor at a moment's notice. But I must do it. There I can better scrutinise the underside of the upholstery. They see me stop, then climb on furniture to stare at pelmets. They hear me, mid-sentence, pause with a distant stare, to examine -

Well, there is nothing else I can do. I know they are here. They drive me to frenzied activity in bedrooms, wardrobes, cupboards, stairwells, behind curtains. I need two varieties of nozzles under the sofa.

I know it is taking a toll. Whatever their need, mother's not here. I can only hope to spare them the worst, and try not to let myself be discovered, undignified, on hands and knees, scrutinising the back of a chest of drawers. They call me to come and look at their paintings and I groan, because I am on top of the furniture with a pair of rubber gloves. When they need dinner, I am busy, furtively squeezing mops behind radiators. Probably a life with foster parents will be more rewarding than this OCD mother.

But it must be done. I am focused upon it. I must secure my borders. It is true that in the last month I have only seen two of the enemy, flopping lazily about the air as if nothing in the world could harm them. Well I can, and I have a hammer.

I would not ordinarily mention this normal domestic circumstance, because there is very little education in it. Yet it is an achievement of sorts, so in the daily diary it goes. And I think I am winning. I have shook, washed, exposed all to sunlight, scoured, wiped, vacuumed (three times over) and am turning slightly purple thanks to overdoses of oil.

But I have no idea what the children are doing. They are doing godsknowwot. These days they keep their distance from me, in the garden, probably, hiding up trees. I distinctly remember a moment when I banished them from proximity to any fabric, and they made off into the garden in a hurry, maybe in case I removed all their clothes.

Now, I must be off, to slide under their beds with a pointy vacuum cleaner nozzle and peer at their bedboards.

It is the only way, if I am to rid my house of the enemy.

Any Old Iron

I am DANCING. Look at MY YARD. Can you see the piano? CAN YOU?


HAHAHAHA!

Two blokes with a van come down our back lane ringing a bell, singing Any Old Iron.

I sang along with them while I loaded up two beds, one tumble dryer, a drawing board and A PIANO.

Stinky carpet Tuesday

Do not mess with me. I am one strong kick-ass woman. I will have you by the medallion and upend you in your rose border before you have time to readjust your tufts.

And those were the final words the carpet heard before I sawed it into twenty-four pieces and dumped it in the tip.

Excavating the cardboard and papier-mâché layers

Readers with insufficient occupation for their waking hours - those who are now following the great grit garage turnout - will surely be delighted to learn that the archaeological excavation of the site has revealed, hidden under the plant and animal residue, evidence of a primitive cardboard enthusiasm c.2006.




Could be ritual artifacts connected with ceremonies of the craft altar, otherwise apprentice pieces, possibly incomplete replicas of Iron Age shields. I may seek a professional opinion from the British Museum.

More exciting, if your heart can bear it, is the discovery, in the next layer down, of the papier-mâché moon surface c.2005.

This is the very one chewed by a rat. The rat, I hope, suffered mortal injury hastened on by a smooth-operating rat killer from the council.

With her softly spoken voice and quiet demeanor, she could have been the sort of middle-aged woman offering you tea at your local village fete. You would have accepted it too, until you saw the contents of her blue, unmarked cloth bag, filled as it was with the chemical agents of death.

After blitzing the cavity under the floorboards where the destroyer of my papier-mâché moon surface project was hopefully cowering, she quickly departed, advising the children not to chew the carpets or skirting boards.

Anyway, because I did not give in to the rat, and was driven in pursuit of a papier-mâché moon surface suitable for five-year olds to use for their Playmobil space rockets (while I covertly taught them astro-physics from a Teach Yourself library book), then here it is, reassembled after the rat, completely finished with multi-sized craters and paint, and proudly displayed for the final time before it is placed in permanent archival storage at the Museum of Rejected Artifacts (the tip).


Rescue archaeology is sad, but it is a necessary part of redevelopment, is it not?

Now, having emptied the space next to the inexplicable metal tank in the garage, I can fill it up again. This time with some home-made shelving*. Storage room, appropriately enough, for the means to make exciting new papier-mâché craft items and paint lovely new cardboard creations.


*Well, not exactly 'home-made shelving'; I merely placed some timber through those metal thingies.

Incidentally, those metal thingies cost me three pounds down the tip two years ago. Unfortunately, they also cost me an additional one thousand pounds against my car insurance, thanks to me reversing at speed into the driver's door of an Audi just after I had loaded my lovely new shelving into my boot, assured of a bargain.

I still maintain he was in the wrong. He was not parked in a designated bay at all, but had pulled in by a plasterboard heap for his own convenience. Stupid prat. He probably deserved to have his driver's door smashed in.

Very useful shelving though. And proving that everything round here comes with a history all of its own.

And apologies about the landfill

It is true what people say. One of the biggest problems of home education is the way you compulsively hoard junk.

Junk. Lots of junk. Junk like the five tennis balls you cut in half and turned upside down to make craters for the Playmobil simulation of the 1969 moon landing. Junk like 56 splintered chopsticks now fashioned into Native American journey sticks and rattling on the back of the door, minus their yellow feathers. Junk like the dented tin cans with holes punctured into them, which once you were pleased to call Persian lanterns, but now the glitter and plastic jewels have dropped off, actually reveal themselves for what they are. Dented tin cans with holes bashed in them hanging from the kitchen ceiling.

If that wasn't enough, there's the stash of toilet roll tubes you're keeping under the sink and you've forgotten why. But keep them, because they might come in handy. Along with the industrial plastic sheeting snatched from the back lane, the 2,488 pieces of wood in various sizes, and the gigantic bat you made out of tissue paper, willow withy and light up LEDs.

Save it all. You never know. Tinkertop might suddenly declare she is interested in Physics. Then you will somehow have a perfect excuse to rebuild the 1969 moon landing craft, and use the tennis balls, toilet rolls and the tin cans. So long as the spacecraft is piloted by a gigantic bat with glowing eyes made from busted LEDs.

Of course there is an antidote to all of this.

You could hire a totally impartial whirlwind* for the day, like I did.

The whirlwind has no sense of your emotional attachment to things, like that egg carton. The egg carton that became a boat to carry away the newly married unicorns to the clouds where they were to eat pink meringue and write billet doux, hopefully to each other. The egg carton that kept all the happy children absorbed for three days until the divorce. The egg carton that is now stained with soil and smells a bit iffy, maybe like cat pee, but is still a heart's treasure and a memory of happy days.

But see that piece of thick orange foam? The whirlwind has no idea about your hopes. That you have saved that orange foam in the hope that one day you will create from it a giraffe. The giraffe called Gerald; the one that delighted the children so much five years ago when he declared on page two that he could not dance. Then he spent the next 12 pages cavorting around. The orange foam made perfect sense. You could shape that into a puppet Gerald. Only you never got round to it. But you just haven't given up hope.

The whirlwind knows nothing of this fond brain-touched madness. Not of the objects that hold expectations, contests, desires, fears, hopes, rewards, loves, betrayals, joys. No. She just dumps it all in the bin. Powered by this unconcerned attitude to the family treasure, she simply starts at one end of the room and sweeps through it, emerging at the end with 14 bin bags. She completes in ten minutes what you have failed to do in ten years.

That was a bit of a shock, I confess.

But now I look at my floor. I can see floor! And shelves! And wall! It is like a revelation! We actually live in a house and not in a burrow down the local tip!

Then I pause, and consider that the egg carton is not exactly the Elgin Marbles, and that I do have 250 photographs of its production from concept to completion. And now I come to recollect the incident, it ended in accusing tears, resentful words, and the confiscation of all the unicorns, faithful and bigamous.

And now I think of all the things coming my way over the next ten years. Things to fill up my life and my heart and my house. Things to cherish. Things like the decorated cardboard box that will hold the photos that one day might be scrapbooked; the pink button collection that will be destined to be made into jewellery along with the satin ribbon, but we never got round to it; and the sequined size 8 Topshop skirts that must be saved. You never know. One day we might mend that broken zip.



*The whirlwind is called Michelle. I recommend her. She is teaching me great principles of parenting. She is deeply impressive. She is also scarily fast if you set her on the clearyuppy. Keep the kids moving. If they stand still for ten seconds, check the skip.

Elmer the elephant must die

I am coming to terms with it. But I know he is no longer loved. He was shoved under a trailer in the garage in 2004, and his face has been peed on by cats. But I am lingeringly attached. In bringing him to life, I broke my sewing machine.


I know the Roman amphorae must go too. They are made from carpet rolls, wrapped round with newspaper, modelling wire, and fastened with modroc. Then painted. Roman amphorae were painted pink, orange and blue, obviously.


It was a crap idea. It doesn't stay the course. They only looked good for the first two years then the plaster started crumbling and dropping off. Next time I will use papier mache. And we will make a really big one.

Then there is all the plastic junk. Freecycle might be their destiny. Although I will weep over the double swing. I have fond memories of little girls laughing. Then Nanjo getting stuck in it, and having to be levered out.


This is a hard backward path, this clearing up behind oneself.