Bar Ram New

I came home looking very smug tonight.
“I bought a computer today!” I announced over the dinner table.
Mark looked up sharply.
“You mean, you saw one you liked on the internet?! he queried, cautiously.
“No.” I said triumphantly. “I mean I walked into a computer shop and bought one!”

Mark’s eyes widened in consternation. “How?! What?! “ he started “How did you know what to choose? You didn’t do it on colour, did you?”
“No!” I said, indignantly. “It’s plain black. I know colour isn’t the most important thing!”
“So, what is the most important thing?” questioned Mark, testingly.
“The most important thing is that it does its job properly.” I said, demurely.

In fairness, Mark has every right to be nervous. What I know about computers you could write on a micro chip, and still have room to jot down directions to the nearest computer shop. Which is pretty much where I went. My little notebook has been dying of exhaustion, and I knew the time had come to move on when I came in on a morning and switched it on, and then went to make a cup of tea and check the mail while it agonized about whether it could face another day. When I came back yesterday after a full half hour to find it was still undecided whether to start at all, I knew I had to act.

So I marched into the computer store, and made purposefully for the nearest bank of computers. I hadn’t quite reached them before a salesman accosted me.

“Hi there! Can I help?” he said, inevitably.
“I hope so,” I said briskly. “My notebook has died, and I want something else. I don’t know what I want. Something a bit bigger, maybe, and it has to be fast, fast, fast!”
I snapped my fingers to show how fast it had to be, and looked at him expectantly. He stood there smiling.

Eventually, he said:“I’ll just go and get Bob”.

Bob arrived.

“Hi there! Can I help?” he said, Matrix-like. I felt an itching at the base of my skull, and chose to ignore it, for the time being.

“Yes, I hope so” I said, and repeated myself, very patiently. He started to lead me closer to the promising bank of computers.
Then, upon a thought, I added: “And it needs to be Windows XP Professional.”
I don’t know what that means, but it is something that my IT team warned me that I always had to say if I ever went anywhere near a computer shop.

As if stung, he wheeled away from the rows of computers, and started leading me towards his desk, as if for interrogation. Unclear what I had done wrong, to disqualify myself from the lovely shiny new computers, I followed him reluctantly, looking slight wistfully and pointedly over my shoulder.

He sat me down, and fired up his own computer.
“Why can’t we go and look at those ones?” I said, pointing.
“They are all Windows 7” he said. “It’s been out for a couple of weeks now. We don’t stock any which don’t have it on any more.”
“That’s helpful,” I said. “So what can I have?”
He brought up a page of tiny little images of laptop computers on the screen before him.
“We can order these ones,” he said, encouragingly.
“That’s good,” I said doubtfully, checking my watch and noting that I had been in the shop for a full ten minutes without making any progress whatsoever.
I peered uncertainly at the screen. “So what do we have here, then?”

He opened his mouth and spoke words. They sounded like English, but I couldn’t be sure. They meant nothing to me at all.
“Whoa!” I said “You’ll have to slow down with me a bit. I do word-processing. I have no idea how it works. That’s the extent of my knowledge – I’ll need you to explain things a bit more carefully.”

“Well,” he said, slowly, as if I had just revealed that I had had a full frontal lobotomy, “How should I explain it? What do you know best?”

I didn’t even know how to answer that question, and while I was thinking what it could possibly mean, he expanded:
“Cars? Houses?”
I had no idea where this was going, but I thought I would go along with it.
“Horses!” I said brightly.
He looked crestfallen.
"Cars and houses are pretty much all I do,” he said, “I don’t really know about horses.”
“Let’s try the cars and houses then, “ I said, trying to ignore the itching.

“So,” he said, swinging into what was obviously well worn patter, “The computer machine itself is like the chassis. The operating system is like the engine. The memory is like the rooms in the house where you can store things.”

I wasn’t sure how much further this had taken us.
“OK,” I said, fighting frustration valiantly, “So – why would I want one of these machines more than another? What’s good about them?”
“Well,” he said, “Some are better quality than others. But that depends on what you mean by quality!”

He smiled encouragingly. I gripped the table, and tried very hard to see anything meaningful in the tiny images in front of me.

“It’s very hard,” I said, “To choose between them when they are so small. Is there anything similar in the shop that I can look at?”
“Maybe,” He said. “Which one did you like?”
“Well – we appear to be at the cheapest end of the list here, “ I said. “Is there a reason for that?”
“I assumed that’s what you would want.” He answered simply. “Most people do.”
“Well, I don’t have a budget as such." I said. “It will probably come off my tax, and I am more interested in something that does the job properly.”
“We could go and look at some”, he said, not moving.
“Great idea!” I said, moving.

We went and looked at some.
“This one is an ACER.” He said. “It is smaller than the one on the screen, and it doesn’t have the same processor or memory."
“So why are we looking at it?” I asked, really losing the plot.
“You said you wanted to?” he answered, equally baffled.

I took a very deep breath, and smiled winningly.
“Here I am.” I said, encouragingly; “A woman without a budget. Who doesn’t know what she wants.”
“Would you like a bag?” he asked, sweetly.
“Shall we sort out the computer to go in it first?” I answered, through gritted teeth.

It took time. Lots of time. It took more patience than I had, but somehow, I emerged, way later, with a new computer. Well – not actually with it – it has to be ordered, and things have to be done to it - but definitely the legal owner of a new computer. I think. We’ll see. I should have just chosen a pink one and be done with it.

If You Love Someone, Lego

And another year goes by, and here we are again, at Joshua’s birthday. Six this time around, although it hardly seems possible.

Regular readers will know how acceptably distracting I find the kids’ birthdays, and how much I enjoy sourcing obscure kipple from the internet with which to adorn the birthday table or decorate the birthday cake, (which, of course, I am not allowed anywhere near. )

This year, it was a Lego party. Josh is into Lego in a major way, and so it seemed like a great idea in September when Mark suggested it. Josh greeted the notion with wild enthusiasm; I found some strange Japanese Lego invitations on Ebay, and we were away.

Until half-way through last week when Mark looked at me with a mildly troubled expression, and I asked him what was wrong.

“You know it is Joshua’s Lego party on Sunday?” he queried tentatively.
“Yes?” I replied, absently.
“Well – what exactly is a Lego party?”
I paused for thought. The finer interpretations hadn’t really occurred to me.
“I don’t know.” I said eventually. “We are going to have to invent it from scratch. It must involve games to do with Lego.”
“Sherlock.” He said. "It was more the nature of those games that was foxing me.”
“Well, how about ‘Lego Bobbing’?” I suggested. “It would be like apple bobbing, in a bucket, except with pieces of Lego.”
“I think the combination of threat of drowning and threat of choking on small pieces of coloured plastic will probably make us even less popular than the year I nearly frightened all the children to death with my Darth Vader outfit.” answered Mark, dubiously.
“Hmmm. Fair enough.” I said. “Well – how about Pass the Lego Parcel”?! They get bits of Lego falling out of the paper as well as a sweetie or something.”
“Better.” Said Mark. “Not that exciting, though.”
“No – but – they could collect up all the pieces and then make some kind of model with all the bits that they have collected. Ooh – how about a treasure hunt for other bits? And..how about games where they have to pick up bits with a knife and fork, or push bits along with their noses, or...”
“Right.” Said Mark. “I think I can see that the creative juices are flowing. I can relax now. Lego party will happen.”
“Of course!” I scoffed. "It’s not even a quarter of a challenge!”

The fateful day came. I was still busy scurrying around the Village Hall hiding the little pieces of plastic treasure when the guests started arriving.
One little boy made a bee-line for me.

“Hi!” I said. “Go and play on the bouncy castle!”
“What are you doing?” he demanded.
“Oh, nothing much!” I said lightly. “Run along and play now.”
“Why are you putting Lego under that chair?” he insisted.
“It’s for a game later. But don’t look – or you’ll spoil it.”
“Have we got to find it?” he said. “But I already know where it is.”
“Well you won’t know where the rest of it is, because you will be jumping on the bouncy castle!” I said very firmly; shepherding him in the appropriate away-from-Lego direction.

There is one thing I have learnt about kids and treasure hunts. They are much better than you think they are. We do Easter Egg hunts in the garden from time to time, and get loads of kids round.
The first year, I just scattered chocolate eggs in brightly coloured foil all over the lawn. The game was over in about 15 seconds. The next year, I secreted some in the foliage of plants, and the cracks of walls. The game was over in about 30 seconds. The third year, I buried them, and the grown-ups had some peace and a cup of tea.

The Lego quests, in their various guises went satisfactorily, and after a while, each child had enough to make it worth their effort at having a go at making some creation or other. There was peace – for about ten minutes.
“We are going to have a prize for the best one!” announced Mark
“And Mark is going to be the judge!” I piped up quickly. I am hopeless at things like that. Very surprisingly, given my job, I cannot bear people to lose. Correction: I cannot bear children to lose. It can actually be very satisfying to watch grown-up losers.

The creations began to take shape.
“Very good!” said Mark, moving around the table. He stopped at one little girl’s careful effort. “That’s lovely – is it an Aardvark?”
I thought this a bit of an ambitious shot in the dark, but even I was not prepared for the answer.
“No” she said, patiently. “It is Elvis’s guitar”.
“Ah – I can see it now,” said Mark, disingenuously.

Models were completed; prizes awarded (to everyone); cake was produced; candles blown; songs sung, and the whole event was over for another year. All very satisfying in a mildly terrifying kind of way. If these birthdays do not slow down, I will be writing, in what seems like a week, about his Eighteenth. I wonder if Mark will let me do Lego Bobbing then.

Some Achieve Greatness…

It is funny how the definition of success changes as you get older. Before I met Mark, I had no doubt that the achievement of my life would be to take Silk. Not to go to the Bench – I have never had the smallest desire or inclination for that, but certainly to have “QC” after my name. Probably to write a novel or two. Definitely have fields full of horses. That was about as far as I had got before Mark came along.

He put ‘Marriage’ on the list, where it had never been before, and then, some time later, he started pencilling ‘Children’ on the list, and I kept rubbing it out, until it was too late. And then ‘Children’ went to the top, and stayed there ever after.

Now my definition of 'achievement' is a good night’s sleep and a hot cup of tea.

It is fascinating watching the kids start tentatively along exactly the same path. Joshua brought home his Book Bag from school the day before yesterday, and I got out his current reading book, together with his notebook of comments from his teacher. In it, she had written:

“Super, super reading. Fantastic!”

I cooed with pride and pleasure, and started ruffling Josh’s hair, and praising him, and he pushed me off because he wanted to watch his cartoons, but I could tell he was pleased. But he doesn’t necessarily see his reading as an achievement or success – it is just something that other people expect him to do, and, so far, he doesn’t see the point of it at all. Motivation – that is the force driving any success.

Now, Josh’s idea of achievement is making the equivalent of a Transformer out of Lego, with guns and lasers and radars on its head. He’ll bend your ear all day about fantastic that all is.

And the other thing he is very proud of at the moment is his jokes. Josh hasn’t really mastered the art of the humble joke just yet, but he is doing his very best to work on it. His current, frequent attempts at comedy are abstract, existential and usually surreal, and decidedly lacking in the punch-line department. Example:

Q: “Why did I put my Lego Starwars figure in a hot-wheels car?”
A: “Because he was tired of living in my wardrobe and wanted to fly!”

Cue gales of laughter: from Josh because he genuinely thinks it’s funny, and from me because I think it is funny that he thinks it is funny, and from Eleanor because she thinks anything is funny if other people are laughing.

Or try this one from the other evening, where Josh began to make the connection between jokes and toilet humour and rudeness:
Q “Why did the car crash on top of the tree?”
Q “Because I was going to do a wee in it!”

Much cracking up ensues. It is, in truth, very sweet to watch the mixture of anticipation and uncertainty on his face as he tries to work out if you are going to think it is funny or not, and the prolonged elongation of the “punch-line” until he feels that it is probably funny by now, and the heartfelt desire that he obviously has to make people laugh.

He is an innate show-off. He tickled everyone by grabbing the microphone at Mark’s 40th Birthday party, and gibbering meaninglessly into it for a couple of minutes, before we grabbed it off him; just because everyone was watching him and egging him on. He may very well have a career in stand-up, but, on current showing, he is going to have to employ a writer.

But I set myself an all time new standard in personal achievement yesterday. Nothing to do with work or the law, and definitely not funny. I had to go and have an endoscopy. It was precautionary; to try and rule out some nasty potential reasons for some unexplained symptoms, and I had refused to even think about it from the moment the doctor suggested that this was the route we were going down.

At the appointment, she had mentioned the option of sedation, and I told her she could leave out the other options, because the highest level of anaesthetic that she was prepared to give me was the lowest level I was prepared to accept. General was preferable. Specific and targeted was non-negotiable.

When I arrived at hospital yesterday, this was the stance I strongly maintained. Explanations of how the long thin bendy hollow thing with a camera on the end was “passed gently” over the back of the throat was enough to have me gagging all on its own, and my reasoning was that anything for which the NHS readily and voluntarily offered sedation probably needed it far more than they were letting on.

But then I watched as the patients ahead of me were wheeled back into the recovery room, semi-comatose, and took the best part of an hour to recover, and I thought about how Mark was going to have to drag Josh away from football and tear back over to the hospital with all three kids in tow, to frog-march my woozy body back to the car. And then I asked the nurse whether I would be OK to work the next day, and she looked at me like I had asked her whether I would be all right to tight-rope across Niagara Falls. It was a definite “No”. And don’t even think about driving. That did it.

Tentatively, I asked what the alternative to sedation might be – never having bothered to get that far in previous conversations. It was a rather non-comforting, back-of-the-throat numbing spray, which had nothing whatsoever to offer in the relaxing and calming department. I gritted my teeth. Literally.

If you have never had an endoscopy, I am not going to spoil the suspense here. Let’s just say that my gag reflex is in perfect working order, and my ability to overcome it has totally ruled out any future career as a sword-swallower. It is a combination of so many sensations that the body just knows are all wrong and bad for it, that I think it was that which helped me get through it in the end. I was so distracted by which part of it was the most unpleasant that I just lay quivering on the trolley with a big fat tear rolling off the end of my nose. By the time I had made up my mind what I hated about it the most, it was over, and the doctor was drawing the bizarre contraption back out again.

The good news is that there was nothing untoward going on down there after all. Barristers and stomach ulcers are synonymous, so that was extremely welcome tidings. But in exactly the same reaction that people have to Barristers when they win, my immediate thought was why I had ever put myself through such an ordeal in the first place. But, of course, you never know until you know.

Clara is about to embark on her latest, greatest achievement tomorrow. She will be weaned onto yummy baby rice. May she never subject her tummy to the years of sugar abuse that her Mother has been guilty of, and may her innards remain as God intended them: dark, secret, and unseen by the human eye.

Stress Diet

I bumped into Des today. Des drives a luxury Audi for Chambers – it’s sort of the Chambers’ taxi, if taxi isn’t too demeaning a word for the black, shiny yacht of a vehicle that he handles. I was driven in it before I had Clara; when I was nine months pregnant, and looking, and sounding like a lame elephant.

Tony our practice director gave me tea and sympathy for half an hour one afternoon, when I was feeling more than sorry for myself, and in the twinkling of an eye, set me up to be personally chauffeured to my London destination the next day, to take some of the strain. He completely omitted to mention that he knew the car would be available, because he was due to be in it himself, and that he took the train instead. I found that out later.

Anyway, it was a luxurious experience: I immediately became used to it, from having the door held open for me, to being driven up to the main entrance of motorway service stations and handed down from the car, to gliding along the motorway at unimaginable (legal) speed, so smoothly that one could balance tea on one’s knee.

I saw Des again today, parked outside Chambers, waiting for some other lucky soul. I walked over to him to say hello, and ask how he had been. He very politely engaged me in conversation in that way that you do when you haven’t got a clue who you are talking to. Eventually, I said: “It’s me, Des! Sarah! Remember you took me to London when I was pregnant?”
His eyes nearly fell out of his head, as it dawned.
“Of course!” he exclaimed. “But….I didn’t recognize you! You look so different! Your bump! It’s gone!”
“That happens.” I confirmed. “Right after the baby was born – it just….vanished. Weird, I know.”

He’s not the first person, though. I am starting to clock up a significant number of comments that I don’t look like I have just had a baby. People say it as though it is a reflection of my innate virtue and something to be very proud of. I can’t see it that way. Short of the trusty iron tablets, I have made no changes to my diet whatsoever throughout the entire experience, save for a little more, or a little less alcohol, depending upon where in the journey we were.
(Now that breastfeeding is all over and done with, I push gin around in a portable drip).

I make the same response every time: “It’s the Stress Diet”. I’m going to publish the secret. It is very short and simple. You can eat anything you like, but you have to introduce extraordinary amounts of stress into your life, and run around like a headless chicken from the moment your eyes pop open. You can do it vocationally as I do, or you can do it through disastrous relations with extended family, as I do; or you can do it through a general tendency to be irrationally dissatisfied with any service you receive from any quarter at any time for any reason, as I do. If all else fails, you can buy cobras and release them into your home, and close your eyes while they slither off and hide.

Any which way you do it, you are bound to die young, but you will have not a spare ounce of fat on your bones when you do. And to some people, that is very important.

The kids are not on any kind of diet. One of the things Des regaled me with as we were driving down that time was the fact that he was struggling to get his young daughter to eat anything other than sausages, French fries ( not chips) and chocolate mini-rolls. I thought our kids were little light on the five-a-day, but I guess everything is relative.

Josh is now well into the age where bribery and coercion work wonders in the vegetable stakes (as in: “No carrot: no pudding.”) Eleanor has gawped uncomprehendingly at such subtle subterfuges until recently, and the inability to make the logical link has made it seem cruel to carry out the threat with her. But she is now just at the stage where the connection is formed, and so we have introduced the nightly cabaret of Eleanor’s Melodramatic Melt-down over our barbaric insistence that she eat a pea before she gets icecream.

No-one does Outrage like Eleanor.

The beauty of it is that she throws herself into her tantrum with such force that she burns out the first reason for launching it within a few minutes, so she switches to another motive for her devastation. Sometimes, she has to get inventive. Yesterday, the reason for the wild abandon was that she “Wanted to cry”. Which was easily solved. The day before, she got really creative, and referred back to our story book from earlier in the day about a hungry baby crocodile, called: “I Really Want To Eat A Child”. She hysterically rejected her meat, potatoes, carrots, and peas, and when I asked her in exasperation what she wanted to eat…..well……you can guess the rest.

It seems hard to believe that we will be weaning Clara soon. I feel like I have only just had her. And she will doubtless do as her siblings have done before her, which is to munch her way enthusiastically through all the mushed up carrot, courgette, sweet potato, beans and the rest, while we fondly kid ourselves that we are developing her taste buds, only for her to roundly reject the whole bang lot, as the work of the devil when she becomes old enough to express any kind of opinion at all. Which will be very soon indeed.

Back With A Vengeance

So, I am back to work. I know – it scarcely seems possible. Clara is thirteen weeks old, and maternity leave is over. I say “leave” – I am not exactly clear what it is that got left. It makes it sound like a long summer holiday. ‘Twas not. The clerks tried to put a call through whilst I was in labour on Monday 8th June: I kid you not at all. I was advising; taking phone calls and emails the following week, and Clara came with me to court when she was 9 weeks old. (She didn’t make many submissions: we’ll be working on that.)

So, when I got in the car to drive to Chesterfield on Monday 7th September, it didn’t really feel like “back to work”, so much as “back to work for the whole week without being able to go home”. That’s right – first case, and it was just far away enough to make it pointless driving home again each night, so one minute I was in the bosom of my family 24/7, and the next… I just disappeared. *pouff!* Like Kaiser Soze. The kids loved it. Especially Clara. Not. And I was, of course, completely wild about it myself. Still – money is money, and at the Bar, you make it when and where you can.

I had already demonstrated the cardinal principle of Bar work – Feast or Famine – in a series of emails to the Clerks, that went something along the lines of:

“I am back in six weeks, and I notice that my diary is a complete desert for the rest of my life. Could you start to have a think about it please”,.

“ I am back to work in five weeks, and I see that my diary is still a total wasteland forever. Could you start ringing everyone I have ever worked for, please?”

“I am back to work in three weeks, and I can’t help but notice that my diary is still distressingly quiet for the remainder of my career – can you poach work from my dear colleagues and give it to me instead, please?”

“I am back to work in two weeks and……………….OHMYGOD! You are expecting me to do WHAT??????!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! When the HELL am I supposed to fit all that in? Do you think I read papers in my SLEEP! I don’t GO to sleep! Are you INSANE?!?!?!

And so forth. Nothing new there, then.

[DELETED.]

Prodigious Prodigies

Relative order is restored to the Barristerbees household. I hesitate to say calm. After a short but energetic struggle, the sisters have, for their own reasons, no doubt, decided that compliance is tolerable.

Eleanor submitted to toilet training when we had the bright idea of letting her choose some new pants to buy. She chose, inevitably, the pretty ones with the kittens on, and then – well: you can’t wee on kittens, can you? Let alone do the other thing. Never mind about Mummy’s carpet, or Daddy’s knee or Daddy’s side of the bed; ( I may have been a little relaxed about letting her climb in without any waterproof protection, but I wasn’t stupid enough to let her go on my side.) No consideration for any of those, but the kittens are sacrosanct, and thus, pottyfication is complete.

As for Clara: that boiled down to her, Mark, a bottle, practically the whole day, and a pair of ear plugs. (Seriously). I had to leave the house, I was so emotional. When I came home, she didn’t need me anymore. Well, not for that reason, anyway. I like to think I am more to her than a pair of milk-laden appendages.

Then, nothing remains but to get into competitive conversation with other parents about how fast; how young; how thorough; how straightforward, etc, etc. I actually hate all of that. I have never been able to see the point. Parents who are bursting at their seams to let you know that Priscilla was dry by two months; walking at three months; talking at four months and eating Battenburg and Marmite for tea by five months. So what? No-one crawls into Reception, and no-one goes to University in nappies unless they have a neurological disorder, so what is the problem? Just a chronic lack of patience on the part of their carers, and a distasteful exercise of judgmentalism on the part of the rest of the world. It would be interesting if someone did a study to find out if the kids who poo in the place where Society expects them to, and eat anything other than mush by the age of eighteen months go on to be World Leaders, or just assistant salespeople in furniture superstores. Who cares?

And yet….and yet…….if I am brutally honest, no parent is immune. If I am to avoid mendaciousness – I am not immune. Clara is positively, indubitably the most intelligent and beautiful baby ever to have lived, except my first two. At ten weeks, she has not only conquered the complex bottle, but she is actually talking. No – seriously. Oh, sure: “goo, goo, ga, ga” to you…… but to me: whole sentences of profound intellectual significance. We share tens of minutes of conversation most days, and although part of me knows she is just experimenting with her vocal chords, and repeating exercises that won her enthusiastic attention the last time she did it, the other part of me hears only a world famous actress reciting her lines; a barrister (God – no) mitigating passionately (Hell, no); an International diplomat single-handedly coaxing in World Peace, etc, etc.
Hard to tell at this age.

Eleanor, on the other hand, is more transparently revealing her virtuosity. Not in the first field you might think of – paleontology, as it happens. She picked up one of her brother’s dinosaur sticker books the other day. She began to pull all the stickers out and stick them all over Clara’s wardrobe. So far, so two. I was sitting feeding Clara at the time, so it was natural to recite the names of the dinosaurs as she did it; (no great feat of scholarliness on my part – I was reading them out of the book on the floor.) Stegosaurus; Triceratops; Velociraptor; Nodosaurus; the all-conquering Tyrannosaurus Rex; the more obscure Pachysephalosaurus and the almost unpronounceable Archaeopteryx. They were all there. I was generally pleased with her interest; regular readers will know that I have a mild dinosaur fetish, although many of these names were new to me. I read them out to her; she did not repeat them back to me, because she is two, and I thought no more about it.

Until the next morning. I was, again, feeding Clara, (you have to do it every day), and Eleanor wandered into the room in her pyjamas, having just woken up. Having done the usual greetings, and the requisite recitals of: “Clara can’t do [insert any verb] – she’s too little”, until self-worth and confidence was thoroughly affirmed for the day, Eleanor turned her attention to the dinosaur stickers on the wardrobe. I expected nothing more challenging than peeling them all off again. Imagine, then, my emotions, when she began to point to them in turn, and declaim:
“ Stego-sor-us; Try-Sarah’s-Tops; Tie-ranny-sory-REX; No-No-Saurus”, and an unmistakeable and perfect; “Archaeopteryx!”

Floored. Staggered. Misty-eyed. A bit freaked out.

Then she announced: “Weetabix!” in a matter of fact tone, and wandered downstairs.

What is a Mother to do? Is there a Dinosaur School for child prodigies? Is paleontology a suitable career? Will she remember any of them tomorrow? Does anyone care?

Quantum Chaos

For those who had begun to worry that my life was a little too ordered; a little too perfect - you clearly haven’t been reading this Blog. To put things beyond any doubt, however, let me tell you about the morning I had this morning.

Mark left to take Josh to his Summer Club. I was left alone with Eleanor, (currently potty training), and Clara, (currently bottle training). Having informed readers, perhaps a touch precipitately in a previous post, that Clara was taking happily to a bottle, it now transpires that the Sisters have Talked. On mature reflection, Clara has realised either that too much early compliance with the Parent People is not a good idea, or, alternatively, that bottles smell of wee.

As far as Eleanor is concerned, everything smells of wee. She has no more interest in potties than she had in bottles, and is applying her own unique approach to toilet training. Which is a tad unpredictable, to say the least.

She had a full-on liquid accident on her father’s watch earlier in the morning, which is how it came to pass that, shortly after his departure, I thought it safe to take a shower. I thought that, from a purely biological point of view, I had at least those precious ten minutes before the next drama. Wrong.

Clara was pretending to be asleep. I heard first my mobile, then the office phone ringing downstairs, and decided whoever it was could wait. I was just getting properly wet, and irretrievably shampoo-ey, when Eleanor sauntered in, and casually leaned against the door post.
“Potty, Mummy!” she said, coolly.

“Oh, brilliant, Eleanor!” I yelled enthusiastically. “Hold on! Mummy’s coming! Wait for me!” She surveyed me with sang froid; fully well aware of her potty power and savouring every minute.

I leapt out of the shower; shampoo and water dripping everywhere: grabbed a towel with one hand, and Eleanor with the other, and made, hell for leather, for the potty. She sat there, beatifically, and did absolutely nothing whatsoever. The phone went again. I thought it might be important, so, whilst waiting for Eleanor to think about life, I went through and took the call.

It was Andrew, my clerk, asking if I had received some important papers that he had sent through on Friday. I hadn’t. We had a little panic together over the phone, and, in the midst of the verbal flapitude, I clocked Eleanor marching purposefully past the door, in the opposite direction from the potty, with her pants round her ankles. Clara chose this moment to give up her pretence, and began to clamour for her share of the attention.

I was split three ways: yelling at Eleanor to return forthwith to her potty; shouting out comfort to Clara, and asking Andrew politely to hang on - but before I could reach a decision on how to prioritise, a large white van pulled up outside, presenting a fourth dilemma. It was the courier with the papers that Andrew had sent me on Friday.

I managed to explain to Andrew, over the cacophony, that I had to hang up, as the courier was here, just as the door-bell rang. Clara was really warming to her theme, and was stridently reminding me that she was, officially and in accordance with all Health Visitor and WHO guidelines, my priority. I realised I had only a towel between me and my modesty, but I didn’t have time to go back upstairs for more, as the driver was waiting patiently, albeit with some consternation, on the doorstep of the clearly audible madhouse. So I gritted my teeth, and put an: “I do this all the time: it’s normal!” expression on my face, and opened the door to the very surprised driver, who averted his gaze, and asked me to sign, which involved me trying to avoid unclutching the vital parts of my towel, as I took the pen, just as just as Eleanor bounced up, shouted gleefully and repeatedly:
“POO POO MUMMY!!!!”, and Clara reached her Level 1, “Now I’m serious!” pitch of screaming.

I disguised my extreme alarm as best I could; pulled an apologetic face, and tried to do a helpless shrug without dislodging my meagre cover, and the driver practically ran down the drive.

I threw the package on the floor with abandon; flung the front door shut, and gazed round wildly for the site of the latest toilet disaster, but, it transpired that Eleanor had managed, entirely alone and without supervision, to deposit the stated achievement in the desired receptacle, and Mummy went wild with delight and praise, lavishly bestowing reward stickers and sweeties and kisses and hugs in random fashion, while Eleanor looked very smug and pleased with herself, all the while fully conscious that she could perform the same feat very easily, at any time, any place, should she be minded to do so, but entirely satisfied with the inordinate attention that the exercise brought her. Clara, all the while, was causing the windows to rattle in their frames.

The results of Eleanor's labour then had to be dealt with appropriately, whilst Clara started spontaneously to combust, and then I ran to retrieve the smallest candidate for loudest member of the family; sopping hair swinging wildly; flopping down exhausted on the sofa to provide her with her required sustaining nourishment, all the while dripping over everything in my now decidedly soggy towel.

And that is how Mark found me when he returned. Still alive, but pulse racing and incapable of speech. He revived me with sweet tea. I had been up for less then half an hour.

I may not survive maternity leave. I need to get back to work: it’s safer.