Away.
I am going to London for a week and haven't been for about three months which is unheard of. There seems no reason to be there as I don't want to see anyone and the horrible crowds drive me mad and I can't stand hearing other people through the walls. We live in building hell as our street is full of huge houses which over the years have been turned into smaller and smaller flats. We are also now in one of the trendiest parts of London so each new owner is more assholey and keener to make their new home cutting edge than the last. I can't remember when our crumbling 'old-school' flat didn't reverberate to the sound of crashing and hammering from some time in the morning when you would normally be asleep. It makes it so much worse to have lived there in the golden age of charming undiscoveredness when most of the street were friends and asked each other to their parties. Most of the flats were rented then and full of retired academics for some reason. The street window box competition was the high point of the year. All so totally, totally gone now.

Also, then, I was the only person in the street with children. Now there are spoilt, screamy young children in THREE of the flats in my building alone. Fuck off from the stairs and stop whining, for god's sake. The most irritating live on the top floor and have literally never gone up or down without some moaning scene outside our door about how they want to be carried because it is all too much. The parents believe in low-voiced wet reasoning with them - while a sharp slap and a fireman's lift are obviously the only answer. My fingers itch to deliver it myself .. the former .. or maybe the latter if it was down to hell.

I daren't even consider my blood pressure while I am there. How has everyone become so smugly, arrogantly selfish about making noise? It is normal in the summer for parties to be held on the roofs, five stories up and unfortunately all flat in the middle. I would say the music carries clearly for half a mile at least but no one could give a f.ck. Last year the people next door were partying with all the balcony doors open at 5.00 am when I snapped and woke my son. He climbed dangerously over the divide and went in, found the owner and asked her to turn the music down. Baying cries of 'WTF? F.ck off. It's just a party. etc.'. filled the air combined with blank incomprehension that anyone should be so selfish as to spoil their fun.
Large amounts of the time while I am in my own flat I sit there feeling besieged and longing to kill. This is not some middle-aged weirdo breakdown as all my children feel exactly the same and spend much time writing vicious notes to neighbours or ringing up the local council. This, as I said, is since the area has filled up with richer people .. quite a few of whom are 'celebrities'.

When, when is the wheel going to turn and my street become so last year that they all bugger off and ruin another part of the city? It had better be soon or I am buying a m@chine g.n through Am@zon and may well be unafraid to use it.

- posted by Iris @ 1/05/2005 10:59:00 AM (0) comments comment

 
Stuff.
So ........ a New Year. I think I feel better today than I did at this time last January but I'm not going to look. I especially didn't write anything on New Year's Eve because of the weird freakiness of the falling spreadsheets or whatever happened the year before when my entire blog disappeared into cyberspace at midnight and Badger had to come in secretly in the darkness and retrieve it all. (You know that I will never forget.)

Christmas was also better because all my children were here and not like last year when the older one was in India and we had had spiteful e-mails rows because she only revealed she wasn't coming back in time after she got out there. Though each year now may be the last as any minute she is bound to settle down with someone with a close and loving family who will also be shattered if he isn't there festively. Last year her place at the table was taken by Tim, a stuffed dog which I bought when we all oddly started longing for a real dog at the same time. There is no way that I am going to be tied down by a dog rationally but every so often I find I am soppily perusing the animals for sale section of the local paper ... No, no, no ... Tim, in a golden paper crown, had a strong and cheerful presence and, at lunch at least, totally made up for her absence. This year it seemed churlish to exclude him so he was there again - and again worked his magic as we got through the entire meal without a snappy word.

We even managed to find acceptable presents for each other; mainly because both the girls either bought their own in clothes form or wrote down specific details of i-pod accessories etc. My son surpassed himself by ending up thinking of NOTHING that he would like. Luckily I got a lift into the local town where a strange paved alleyway of hippie shops still exists; one of them oddly (as it is illegal) devoted to all things epod-related*. Where I stocked up with many things including a ceramic g..b* shaped like a clump of mushrooms (highly amusing), a string of leaf(!)-shaped fairy lights and other adolescent related paraphernalia. Although he is actually already too sophisticated for this crap, he and his friends also already see it as sophisticatedly ironically unsophisticated - even though just two years ago it would have been sophisticated. Scary.

My husband gave him a cl@y pigeon flinging device and lots of clays so they can shoot them at home and not pay millions of pounds at the lesson place. (We live in the middle of nowhere so we can). And I bought a flat-pack wooden go-c@rt which he could make himself (as if) and produce his own 'family heirloom'. I was obviously desperate at this point but bizzarely on Christmas Day afternoon I was moved to actually unwrap it (he hadn't bothered and I hadn't minded because it was really boring) and started to screw it together and was instantly joined by all three children. After some low-level fighting and not finding the right screwdriver and forcing it into place with a large hammer they were all vastly jolly and took it out into the darkness. And sped down the (steep) drive laughing and screaming just like in the picture on the box.

Oh .. AND ... it snowed.



- posted by Iris @ 1/04/2005 11:06:00 AM (0) comments comment

 
Fear.
WTF is the matter with me? The minute I sat down to write something my stomach clenched up and I felt peculiar. For god's sake.

Anyway - even though my plan is to be up-beat this year, (always a signal for much low level dreariness to ensue), I am going to write today about the tsun@m1.

I much enjoyed an interview with T0ny Bl@ir on TV last night conducted by a senior journalist who obviously hated him. TB is tactlessly refusing to interrupt his holiday and the journalist had to fly out to Egypt to speak to him. 'We are all wondering why you decided not to return when you normally like to take a major role on sad occasions, like that of P... Diana's funer@l. Where you were very much to the fore and even coined the expression 'People's Pr1nc3ss', the journalist said through gritted teeth. TB had the shifty, flicky-eyed look of GWB and waffled about being in constant phone communication. He obviously isn't sure what the most popular position to take would be or how much money to give and is waiting for it to become clear. The BBC is afraid of the government at the moment as their charter is coming up for renewal but managed to write on teletext, 'PM continues holiday while money pledged by the British public exceeds that promised by government'. Ahhh .. small pleasures.

One thing he said though was, 'There can hardly be a person in the country who does not have some connection with this tragedy'. 'Really?', I thought, 'Is that possible?'. But then maybe that IS true. Those regions are incredibly popular with Northern Europeans and the first choice for students and Gap year travellers. All my children have been out there on several occasions and we are personally linked to THREE different people who were actually there. I will now list these as a matter of interest:

The son of our close friends in this village was in Sri L@nka on his honeymoon and they had just gone upstairs to their hotel room when the wave struck and filled the first two floors.
The girl who rents a flat from my husband in London had gone out on a boat trip and thought the sea was unusually choppy. When they returned their holiday village was destroyed.
My younger daughter's old schoolfriend - who now lives on a small Tha1 island permanently, working as a diving instructor, and who the children stayed with last Spring - had not gone out that morning. But all her friends who had are missing.
One of the men who was definitely swept away was the husband of a woman I used to see across the room at parties all the time, years ago.
And on the exact same day a year before my older daughter was living in a wooden house on a beach in Ind1a where there is now no one left alive.



- posted by Iris @ 1/02/2005 10:13:00 AM (0) comments comment