Splash down

The holidays have officially begun!

The two week winter trial of stamina, perseverance, patience and cognitive functioning kicked off this afternoon in fine style.

As promised after school kicked out the girl and I headed off to the outdoor skating rink amid a mild gale and spitting rain. Thankfully for me the rink is set up among the sheds and potted plants of a large local garden centre and is pretty small and just for fun, or so they say.

The last time I laced a set of ice skates I was still in my teens, still had all the bone a person should have and had no metal plates and screws holding me together. The girl asked for one of those push along seal skating aids, I took a look at the £4 fee and grandly told her that she didn’t need a seal, she had me. I then did an impression of a seal. The girl was not impressed but the young man in the ticket booth said it was a fantastic seal impression.

As soon as my skate hit the ice I knew I was in a bit of trouble I had completely overlooked the fact that ice is slippery, ice with a few millimeters of water on top because, hey, this is southern England in December what do you really expect, is I find even more slippy. I am often unable to keep my balance while standing in shoes on a flat carpeted floor. This was not going to end well I realised.

The girl and I started to do laps while clinging for dear life onto the fencing. The girl, having learnt her passive aggression from the master made comments about how good the seals where, look that Dad is pushing two seals at once and I could have held onto it too it I had wanted. I still refused to pay £4 for the use of one. I would shortly regret that decision.

Pictured: Better than me

After a few laps I started to get a little less terrified and risked letting go of the fence, I even encouraged the girl to let go. I even tried to give the girl tips on skating and that, that was my big mistake. A combination of misplaced hubris and inattention caused me to suddenly find myself flat on my back in the corner of the rink where the standing water had formed a rather large puddle. I then couldn’t get up. I had to scoot over to the fence, through a puddle, on my backside and then try to haul myself up to standing while still wearing ice skates, still being on ice and still being me.

Pictured: Wet and saggy

Apart from being wet through things actually went great and the girl and I had a wonderful and fun time, we even did three whole laps without holding on, for one of those we even let go of each other. We came off the ice and went for hot chocolate (girl) and soup (me) and then spent a little time window shopping before heading over to the farm shop to stock up on some amazing pork pies (scrumpy, black pudding, cranberry and stuffing. I couldn’t pick so will be eating pork pie until 2015 without complaint) for our Christmas morning breakfast. I tried not to think about the fact that once I was off the ice the reason for my wet backside would not be as clear cut to the casual observer and tried to simply be thankful for dark jeans, the loss of any sense of shame that occurred with my first birth and the fact that apart from the gale it was quite warm.

So I have started the holidays with a bang (splash?) and had a lovely time with my girl. The children are off to play with a friend tomorrow while I unfortunately attend another funeral. We then have a normal (as normal as it gets round here) weekend before we hit the home straight before christmas. It is the riding school Christmas party on Tuesday so that is likely to provide a wealth of material. At least this year everybody knows not to applaud the end of the musical ride lest all the horses bolt again. They did bolt in unison though and many thought it was part of the show, well until somebody fell off and the real stampede started…

living dangerously

The girl broke the cardinal sin this morning, the holy of holy.

She woke me up before my alarm clock. Worse still, ten minutes before the alarm clock was due to blast my fragile consciousness from its slumber.

The only word that can possibly pull me from my sleep and winch my eyelids open began the break through my dreams, in which I was being allowed to sleep a little longer.

‘Mummy’ the voice danced along the edges of the fog that passes for brain activity and I slowly started to connect the dots and realise this was my daughter trying to gain my attention. Slowly my eyes began to crack open like a roller shutter on an off licence the day after the local thug has been sent to prison. Words are not a really possibility in those first moments of wakefulness, only the prehistoric grunts of our ancestors ‘Urghhh?’ I questioned, the girl knows all too well exactly what information that grunt contained, the burry shape I was starting to see as my eyes protested the business of focusing for another day, took a step back and it was at that point that I knew with the automatic sense you develop quickly as a parent that this was no emergency. Nothing was hanging off, there was no blood and nobody was in peril (apart from as a consequence of the pre alarm awakening).

My eyes had now resigned themselves to their role in life and I could see the face of a girl arranging herself to attempt to appear to be suffering greatly ‘Mummy, I have a sore throat.’ she stated somewhat clearly for someone afflicted with a sore throat. I could only croak the response ‘And?’ given that my sense of compassion wasn’t yet on the clock.

I was now sadly more in the land of the awake then the asleep and deliberate movement was now much more of an achievable possibility, I sat up a little and raised an eyebrow still waiting for the reason I had been deprived of the pleasure of hitting snooze on the alarm clock. I set my morning alarm ten minutes before the time I really do have to let go of my dreams of dreams just to allow myself the giddy pleasure of hitting snooze… on a school day.

The girl was going to have to come up with a very good reason why she felt it so urgent that I knew she had a sore throat 20 minutes earlier than her first opportunity in the normal order of the day. ‘My nose is runny as well’ she stated not helping her case one little bit.

She was unable to give any kind of answer to the question of what she expected me to do about it let alone a satisfactory one and she was also unable to justify why she had felt it prudent to wake me up to give me this information. I sent her back to bed but for me it was now awake and it seemed, also suffering from a sore throat and blocked nose. So rather then get up and have a head start on the day I got up and got a head start on Facebook. The kick in the teeth came a quarter hour later when I called up that it was now time to get up. The boy appeared rubbing his eyes a few moments later but no sign of the girl. When I went to investigate I found her in bed, asleep.

I have naturally disinherited her. Not that there is really much of anything to inherit but it’s the principle of the matter.