How to fly round the world and survive

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Normally the worst thing about a holiday (apart from flying with small children) is when it comes to an end. But when you have to fly all the way back around the world just to arrive at your own front door, it’s even worse. A healthy dose of jet lag is enough to make you look and feel like you’ve never even been away.

Our epic trip began last Sunday – starting with the pleasure of a two and a half hour trip on a jam-packed National Express coach, where I passed the time pinning a hyper 3 year-old to his seat and listening to the woeful bleating of a driver who felt his job description shouldn’t actually involve any driving. Especially on a Sunday.

Next came the lipstick coated power freak at check-in, who demanded we extract 2kgs worth of stuff from one ‘too heavy for the conveyor belt’ suitcase. Have conveyor belts suddenly grown weaker over the years or are they now simply exercising their civil rights? The 2 kg was of course simply added to the already overloaded hand luggage. Right there on the floor. In front of the power freak. The logic of this blatant redistributing is lost on me.

Having already completed the lengthy flight at the start of the holiday, what now lay ahead of us was hardly much of a surprise. But, just like child-birth, the mind has a habit of erasing the true extent of the ordeal involved, just to make sure that you will ever contemplate doing it again. Quite a handy thing, when you have a return ticket to use up.

For the first 11 hours I sat wedged between 2 children – covered in the crumbs of a rock-hard bread roll and wrapped from head-to-toe in the wires of 6 headsets. Why we even had 6 I’m not sure, there were, after all, only 4 of us.

As a flying parent you are faced with 2 possible scenarios, neither of which it has to be said are particularly pleasant.

The first option is to make the most of each and every inch of your seat, and to achieve the maximum level of comfort – granted, this isn’t much, given the blood clot inducing foetal position you are now in, with your knees wedged into your rib cage and your feet tucked into the magazine holder in front. This does however allow for the possibility of a few hours sleep for yourself, if the restless and wriggling children on either side of you would allow it. Which, as a general rule, they don’t.

The second option – the more selfless and painful one – is relinquish both arm rests and allow your uncomfortable children to stretch themselves out across both your seat and your lap. So resigning yourself to the knowledge that you will get no rest at all. Like I said, neither option is designed to really appeal.

I went with the second, though more out of necessity than choice I admit. When faced with a choice between crying, whingeing children, and a mind-numbing night of pain, I opted for the lesser of 2 evils.

By the time we had located our lost stroller at Hong Kong airport, walked several kms through duty free (without even getting within sniffing distance of any shopping), gotten lost and caught the necessary train to find our connecting flight, I was quite happy to snap the head off the unhelpful ground staff who told us off for being late. If I’d had the energy or a free hand I’d have smacked him round the face. Like I said, I was tired.

Within minutes of the next plane taking off I went into self-preservation mode, pulled on the blindfold and went to sleep – until I felt the eyes of my tired husband boring into me, so resigned myself to waking up and giving him a chance to pass out.

Arriving back in Perth would have been a welcome relief, if we’d actually come back to the comfort of our own home. But we couldn’t and we didn’t.  Instead we had to stay in a hot and basic rental for a week, battling jet lag and fighting flies. With mornings starting around 2.30am, 2 over-tired kids to entertain and no car to even escape the cabin fever, I think it’s safe to say the end of the holiday was far from perfect.

Post holiday blues wouldn’t even begin to cover how I felt. I was in a completely different colour spectrum all together.

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For richer for poorer, till death do us part

With the winter now behind us and my muffin top threatening to morph into a Brioche, this morning I took myself off to a spin class.

It’s been over a month since I last graced the gym with my presence – a chest infection and school holidays have kept me at home, and in a distinctly weakened state. It’s hard to say what caused my state to weaken more, the chest infection or the school holidays, but either way I haven’t been able to get within sniffing distance of my trainers for a while.

So there I was, back in the darkened room and safely impaled on the ‘cushioned’ seat. I have to say it took me a while to remember how high the seat should even be and which way the peddles were supposed to turn. As is always the case at the start of a class the room was completely silent, except that is for two women near me who were in the middle of a deeply depressing conversation. Seeing as I was already strapped on the bike and had nowhere to go, I naturally tuned in my ears to listen.

One of the women was recounting the tale of an incredibly unlucky friend whose husband had recently suffered a heart attack, and dropped down dead in front of her. To make matters worse, he had no insurance, and as a result, the family home now had to be sold.

With this new and rather unsettling information sinking into my mind, and wishing I’d tuned my ears in the opposite direction, the class began.

For the next 45 minutes, as I sweated away like a beast and used all of my powers of self control to stop myself throwing up over the woman in front, part of me kept wondering why I had ever thought it a good idea to come to the gym this morning. The other part of me – the more dominant bit, that tends to mess around with my concentration – couldn’t stop thinking about this man. Or rather the widow that he’d left behind.

Like most people I suspect, the two things that I fear the most are the loss of my children and my husband – losing either would turn my world upside down. The very idea of some terrible happening to my family is something that doesn’t even bear thinking about. Yet I do. Probably far more than is considered rational or even remotely healthy.

For some unknown reason I have a tendency to keep living out these worse case scenarios in my head, and in doing so, making myself feel sick to the core. I wish I wouldn’t do it, but when my paranoia is triggered by distressing headlines or other people’s bad news, I can be like a woman possessed.

So as I’m peddling away, climbing imaginary hills and racing other stationary bikes, my brain is spiraling into a panic induced overdrive. What would I do if this happened to me? How would I deal with it? Where would I find the strength to get up in the morning and get through the day?

Several gears later and these questions are replaced by guilt – for not appreciating everything that my husband already does for me. Vowing to be an all round better wife, I peddle on with renewed vigour. Oh how my husband – who was at that time sitting in his office and as fit as a fiddle – would have laughed his coffee up at these irrational and melodramatic thoughts. He’s simply not enough of an emotional basket case to take it to these levels, and for that, and the fact that he has a truly proactive approach to death, I am incredibly grateful.

For what sets me apart from this other poor woman is that I know that even if I were to lose my husband, I would never lose my home. Being the ever practical man that he is (and working in the industry, which always helps), we are both insured up to the hairline, and worth far more dead than alive. Cheery thought that, but not terribly helpful it has to be said when it comes to paying the credit cards in life.

So now, whenever I get a bee in my bonnet about some hypothetical tragedy, he is always quick to point out that if he dies, whilst I may be alone, at least I will not be poor. And while I do of course protest that this will not make up for his absence, I know what a difference it would make. Of course I would still grieve and weep and wail, but at least I wouldn’t be forced to do it out on the street, or without a clue about how I was to house, feed, clothe and educate our kids.

That said, I still mutter loudly about the large amounts of money that leave our account every month to pay for the host of different insurance schemes, covering loss of life, limb and hubby’s income. It’s always galling to pay out for something that may never happen, but as my ever sensible husband would say, if you can’t afford to pay for your insurance every month, then you certainly can’t afford not to have any at all.

So to cut a long story short – the spin class ended, my heart rate returned to normal and I proceeded to extract the ‘cushioned’ saddle from my left Fallopian tube.

Somewhat short of breath and damp around the edges, I calculated that in the space of 45 minutes I had not only killed off my husband, mourned my loss and appreciated his knowledge of life insurance, but I had also lost just about enough calories to counter balance the Yorkie I wolfed down the night before. Quite an exhausting morning all in all, and one that I decided called for a Kit Kat to calm my shattered nerves.

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A bad case of wind

I mentioned in the previous post we’ve been having storms here in Perth, but really the word ‘storm’ doesn’t do it justice. It’s been more like a series of typhoons, cyclones and hurricanes all rolled up into one. Most days it’s wet and windy, and there isn’t a long enough break between the rain to even take the dog to the park. I did try yesterday, but I had to flatten myself around a tree trunk as soon as I got there, and then wait for the horizontal rain to give up and go away.

The stupid thing was I had looked at both my raincoat and umbrella on the way out the door, and decided, that with the sun shining directly above the house and the nearest dangerous looking cloud out on the horizon,  I’d go without. Apparently a rain cloud can cover ground a lot faster than I can.

So this is my 3rd winter in Perth, and without wanting to sound like a whinging Pom, they are definitely getting worse. I don’t know whether it’s global warming that’s causing weather patterns to shift around, but the climate and seasons are refusing to stick to the guidelines. Australian summers are getting hotter and drier, winters are getting windier and wetter, and the Gods of Thunder and Lightening are definitely way out of control.

The first of the big storms came a few weeks ago. A Monday to be precise, the day that my son’s tonsils were due to go under the chopping block. Instead, I was staggering around the house losing my breakfast to gastric flu, my daughter was in bed, busy retching into a bucket and emitting a series of very dramatic moans and groans, and my husband had just flown to Sydney on business.

Setting off to collect my son from nursery, I lowered myself carefully into the car (fast movements are not nausea’s best friend) and went to open the garage door. It went up half way. It came back down again. I pushed the button again. It went up a quarter of the way. It came back down again. Now of course common sense should have told me not to push my luck for a third time. But I did. It was cold, wet, dark and blowing a gale. There wasn’t a chance in hell I was going to walk to the nursery to collect him.

So I pushed the button. Once again it went up half way – and then stopped. This would have been bad enough on its own, but of course I’m not that lucky. A massive gust of wind then swept up the driveway catching the garage door on the way, it snapped it off the rollers and then buckled it in half. The twisted hunk of metal than dropped back down – to within an inch of the cars roof, with me in it.

Now I don’t want to come across as a useless, blubbering woman who falls apart in times of trouble, but this really was the very last straw in an incredibly long day involving a high temperature and a toilet bowl. I did attempt to use my very limited strength to push the door back up to an upright position, but unsurprisingly, the door had other ideas. So with the metal rippling away in the wind next to me, I called a friend and sobbed out my tale of woe.

Lucky for me she saved the day, collecting stranded son and sending round further reinforcements, in the form of her husband who helped me to tether the door up with ropes. That night I laid in bed listening to it banging away and imaging how much damage it would potentially cause if it broke free and took off the roof of the house across the road.

3 weeks on and the storms have returned to try and finish off the garage door, which is still roped up and wedged shut with ladders. Trees in the garden are bending like blades of grass and rubbish bins are flying up and down the street like tumbleweed. I feel like Dorothy, minus the safety blanket of a pair of sparkly red shoes.

So the other night my husband came in from work and shut the door. An hour later the wind picked up and blew it back open again. Every other door in the house slammed shut, the roof hatch disappeared up into the eaves and all of the AC covers in the ceilings went with them. Trying to shut the front door again was the tricky bit.  With a cyclone now picking up pace by the door mat, the front of the house had turned into something of a wind tunnel, and we couldn’t get the hall door open to get out there. I half expected the front of the house to take off into the night sky, leaving us hanging onto a door handle below.

The two off us finally pushed the door open and slammed the front door shut, but not before the length of the hallway was covered in hailstones and the coats on the hall stand had all had a wash.

“And that is why I always lock the door when I shut it” I said.

With no sign of this bad weather letting up anytime soon, you have to wonder whether Mother Nature has a real axe to grind with this part of the world. Perhaps she’s ticked off with some Aussie half wit calling her a Sheila, or maybe she’s just having a shocking case of PMT. Either way, until we lower the excess on our insurance I wish she’d air some of her grievances elsewhere and give our badly built house a break.

When smelly children need surgery

Everyone has heard about those kids who stick something up their nose.

I’ve often thought what sort of idiot, albeit a pint sized one, does that? Images of a manky, sniveling little boy, with a crusted up, snot smeared face and unruly hair spring to mind. The sort of child who pulls wings of butterflies and feasts on worms and bugs. You know the type, they usually feature in the local paper, with a picture of the child proudly clutching the spanner set he somehow misplaced up his nasal cavity and his proud parents beaming away behind, quoted as saying “We wondered why all the magnets in the house kept sticking to his face.”

I also wondered what happened when this unfortunate event occurred. How did the child in question breath, when their nostrils were stuffed full of unidentifiable stuff? How did the parents not notice that little Jimmy had snorted his peas off his plate instead of eating them? And how on earth do they ever get the ‘foreign object’ back out again?

Last week I found out that I have one of ‘those’ children – oh what a proud parental moment that was. So off the back of that, I can now confirm the following. Yes, breathing is indeed restricted with something lodged up your nostril. It is easy to miss something different about your child, if it’s not visible to the eye. And believe it or not, it can take surgery.

The first clue that something was where it shouldn’t be was that my son smelt horrible, with a nasty whiff about his person that would come and go. The type of odour that simply refused to budge, even with much vigorous washing and twice daily teeth brushing. It’s hard to say exactly what the smell was even, somewhere between sour milk and a rotting vegetable perhaps. Fairly unpleasant in other words.

The pong went on for quite a while, until it escalated to such a point that my maternal alarm bells started clanging loudly in my ears. By this time I could no longer hug him on my lap without having to turn my head away to gasp for breath. Regardless of how much you love your child, no mother wants to sit and bury their nose into a compost heap every day.

Granted I do have a particularly sensitive nose, and could even detect a smoker walking 5 floors down and 500m away when pregnant, but this time it was more than me being fussy. So why wait till I was gagging you may ask? Well, apart from the whiff he was perfectly healthy. We checked him all over decaying flesh or rupturing boils, and like I said, he was washed and brushed regularly. Perhaps it was the fear of having a child diagnosed with halitosis that simply riddled me with fear.

So anyway, off to the doctor we went, where I told him that my son smelled horrible.

The doctor, as I expected, looked at me like I was something of a heartless cow when it came to my mothering care and concern. Then he looked into my sons mouth, and lo and behold spotted tonsils the size of walnuts. Or Brazil nuts. Or was it almonds. Anyway, regardless of the nut, apparently they were enormous and stopping all the air flowing down his throat. So the enlarged tonsils were blamed for the smell and I was referred to an ENT specialist to discuss having them removed.

A few weeks later we sat in front off the consultant. “He smells” I said, bracing myself for another raised eyebrow and resisting the urge to let out a “Mooo”, like the nasty Friesian that I am. The consultant looked at my son, turned him both ways and then informed me that he probably had something stuck up his nose. OK. Didn’t see that one coming. His nose certainly didn’t look any bigger than normal, and as far as I could remember, I hadn’t noticed him foraging around in the tool box and sniffing up a spanner. Perhaps it was a piece of Lego, or one of those wretched little Polly Pocket shoes I’m always telling my daughter to clear up.

Next stop for the doctor, the mouth, and his enormous tonsils were confirmed. They were then linked to his excessive sweating, loud snoring and irregular breathing at night, the long periods of time he spends awake and chatting in the early hours of the morning and his inability to shift a cold or cough. Well that cleared up all of those annoying habit’s then. I was told they needed to be whipped out ASAP, and as luck would have it, he had a slot to do it in a weeks time.

Marvelous, that would be the same day my husband was flying to Sydney for a week. Multitasking is one thing, but multitasking with a sick child alone is a whole other ballgame. By this stage, heartless cow was now looking more dazed and confused cow.

The night before surgery arrived, and with the bags all packed and ready for hospital, I promptly threw up. And then again. By 9am the next morning my husband had turned a rather sludgy shade of green. By 9.30 my daughter had been sent home from school. Or rather brought home, there was no way I was trotting into the school office to collect her dressed in my pyjamas.

I think it would be fair to say that so far ‘Operation Tonsil’ was not going to plan. With all of us (except the patient-to-be) now rolling around clutching buckets, the surgery was postponed for a further week. My son carried on watching Thomas, completely oblivious to the lucky escape he had just had.

A week later and into hospital we all went, lugging three enormous bags of essential items with us, only one of which was half unpacked. The other two sat in the corner completely untouched. My little boy was taken away by scalpel welding men in blue coats, and two nail biting parents sat in his dismal little room and watched the minutes tick by. Time does indeed go by much slower when you’re waiting for your precious offspring to survive.

On the way to be with him in the recovery ward I heard him long before I could see him. Weighing in at only 14kg, and just minutes out of a general anesthetic, I rounded the corner to find two nurses unsuccessfully trying to pin my little boy down onto the bed. Like a child possessed, he screamed blue murder and understandably thrashed around as he tried to figure out where he was and why he felt so odd. I have to say his show of strength was pretty impressive for his size, however it meant that he somehow managed to pull the tube out of his hand, and as I laid down with him to try and calm him down, he nearly catapulted me off the bed.

That night in hospital went as well as could be expected, considering the small and depressing room, the one colour suits all food and the rails of the bed that fitted in just perfectly between each of the vertebra down my spine.

For some unknown reason, all of the nurses also saw fit to raise their voices by several decibels as they barged into the room to check his stats, every 15 minutes throughout the night. To make continuous sleep even harder, each time they left they failed to close the door properly behind them. This left me with little choice but to climb over the rails of a ridiculously high bed, close the door myself and then climb back up and over and in again – in the dark. And all without waking the small restless child sprawled across the majority of a very small bed.

Did I mention this was a private hospital? No, I wouldn’t have guessed it either, if I hadn’t spotted the price list on the way in.

So now we’re home and I’m sitting with my little ticking time bomb of pain. Apparently he’s going to get a whole lot worse before he gets better, and he runs the risk of bleeding if he doesn’t eat toast everyday. Toast? I can’t even bribe him to open his mouth for ice cream right now. As far as he knows, his throat has just been attacked with a cheese grater.

This week is all about keeping him medicated up to the eye balls and preventing the dog from bouncing all over him on the sofa. It would be so much easier if he could understand why a day out ended in all this pain, but bless him, he doesn’t have a clue. Instead his sad little face looks up at me and I can just tell he’s thinking “What the hell did you let them do to me, you cruel and heartless cow?”

Oh, I almost forgot. The smell. That, I’m pleased to say, is gone. The ‘foreign object’ is still just that, as we have no idea as to what it might be. Let’s just say that if you blew your nose and that shot out onto the tissue you’d be somewhat alarmed, and probably feeling more than a little bit sick.

It’s sitting on the dresser right now, entombed in a plastic tub. I’m not exaclty sure why I’m keeping it, maybe so when he’s older I can whip it out and say “You may not have eaten worms and bugs as a child, but you did stick this up your nose. Happy 21st!”

I’m sniffing, I must have Swine Flu

The whole house is sick at the moment. Or should I say the inhabitants of the house are sick at the moment. The bricks, mortar and roof tiles are doing just fine.

An assortment of coughs, colds, sniffs, sore throats, blocked and dribbling noses are running a riot through the family right now, resulting in a never-ending stream of half used tissues that the dog keeps fishing out of the bin and shredding all over the floor. Horrible sticky spots have also been springing up all over the kitchen counter, where the medicine hasn’t quite made it fast enough from the plastic spoon to it’s unwilling final destination.

Of course all of this sniveling misery can only mean one thing. Winter has come. Aside from the calender telling me so, the arrival of this rather unwelcome season is evident for a number of different reasons.

Firstly the most obvious, it’s cold. Secondly the most expected, I’m cold. And thirdly, all the confirmation I needed, the dog is cold. Well I gauge this from the fact that despite his now thick rug like fur, he is spending more time hunting out a heat source to sleep in front of, and less time skulking around outside, waiting to ambush next doors cat.

So given the indisputable evidence above, I decided that this year I absolutely refuse to suffer the cold for as long as I did last year. I would say suffer in silence, but as my husband would be quick to point out, I never like to keep my suffering to myself. Far to damaging to the Yin and Yang of my well being I think – better out than in, and all that jazz.

So how does one prepare for the long months of shivering that lay ahead? That would be adding to, increasing and stock piling the various heat supplies in our home.  First stop, the log basket. Running dangerously low, with only 2 logs, a few scraps of bark and 4 firelighters left over from last year.  Panic over, another trailer load has now been delivered, and the new logs are stacked all the way up the side of the house. Asking for an invasion of termites of course. These logs, in the eyes of a hungry white ant, equate to a 5 star hotel, with complimentary breakfast, lunch and dinner laid on for a year. Never mind, a risk worth taking.

Next it was time to buy a new heater to go by my desk. Save me getting all scrunched up in my seat as I sit and type away for hours a day, with hunched shoulders and bright blue nail beds. The open grill on the front does mean Charlie is likely to go up like a furry fire ball if he gets to close, but if it’s a choice between my cold bones or his singed fur, sadly he loses.

Now for the bed. Last year, as I mentioned in my previous post, I ended up climbing in with half my wardrobe on, and my hoodie firmly zipped up and over my head. While this is undeniably a brilliant form of contraception, it was far from ideal. So this year, despite my husbands initial protests, I AM going to get an electric blanket. We may well wake up to find the feathers inside the duvet caked together with sweat, but at least my toes won’t need to curl up in shock as they hit the cold sheet.

Yes, I admit I am incredibly soft when it comes to the cold. I don’t deal with it well, and I definitely comment on it far more than is necessary – especially given that it is a yearly event and has been since time began. Well except for the Ice Age. Brrrrr… now that wasn’t a good time to be alive.

What can I say, I am English. It’s programmed into our DNA to hate the cold, talk about the cold and complain about the cold. Particularly, dare I say, those ‘less hardy’ people, like myself, who are born anywhere south of Birmingham.

I admit that I am that person who opens their front door in the middle of a freezing UK winter, wearing nothing but T-shirt and shorts, then proceeds to blast the person clear off the front door step with the scorching gust of central heating that escapes from my beautifully over-heated house.

So this said,  I am obviously not that person who would consider an Ice Hotel as a suitable holiday destination. I don’t care how warm the reindeer skin sheets and elk fur blankets are supposed to be. I am also not the sort of person who has, up until now at least, ventured anywhere near a ski slope. Though to be truthful, this is probably more to do with my incredible inability to balance on anything other than a flat, solid, stable surface. I would be that person who breaks their leg before even making it out of the ski hire shop.

Anyway, I digress somewhat. As I was saying, we’re all sick and sniffy right now. And I thought nothing of it until my daughter brought home a letter from school yesterday. I say a letter, what I mean is a ‘lets induce panic and clear our classrooms so the teachers don’t have to work’ announcement.

According to the WA Health Authorities, children showing any signs or symptoms linked with Swine Flu should not only stay off school, they should also remain tucked up at home until they are completely better.

So lets run through a few of those possible symptoms.

Fever, yes, we’re all slightly warm – Tick. Cough, yes, both kids sound like asthmatic dogs – Tick. Runny nose, well like I said we’re running and blocked – Tick, Tick.

Righty then. Given how long we were all sick for last winter, I’m calculating that according to the Health Authorities, we should all remain in quarantine until around about October time. Seriously, is this for real? We haven’t been, or even know anyone who’s been near Mexico, the US, Canada, Japan or Panama in the last 7 days. We don’t live near the one confirmed case in Western Australia. And neither I, nor any of my family suddenly feel the urge to eat from a pail or start rolling around in mud.

Maybe I’m just numb from the media always trying to fan the flames of panic, just to sell papers and fill headlines. Perhaps, after living through the SARS in Singapore, I am now somewhat unfazed by such a potential ‘threat’ to mankind. Either way, I refuse to get my tissues in a knot, hide away and hyperventilate over the very worst case scenario.

I don’t believe you can live in fear of every runny nose and cough. Swine Flu is just that – a type of flu. Just one of the many types of viruses that spreads around the world in seasonal epidemics, resulting in the deaths of hundreds of thousands annually. It’s been a while since the big 3 influenza pandemics of the 20th century killed tens of millions of people. Medical science has progressed, vaccinations are now available, and according to the doctors I have spoken to, it is no longer the death sentence the media likes to portray. The emergency services here are apparently already under siege with people calling for ambulance with suspected Pig Flu. That’ll really help with those long, long waiting times at the A&E.

Call me completely irresponsible, but my daughter needs to learn and I need to work, so she’s not camping out in front of the TV all winter with a red nose and a box of tissues.  She’s had a flu jab and can wear a face mask if need be. So unless she suddenly grows a curly tail and starts to squeal, she is going to keep going to school.

And finally, before you tell me I’m being flippant, I’m not making light of the situation, merely questioning how the situation is being dealt with in the press. And to prove my point, here are some Swine Flu facts for those who are panicking, coughing or just curious.

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Love Thy Neighbour

There are some boys on our street who make me wish that using an air riffle was legal. They wander around, swearing at the tops of their voices and generally going out of their way to irritate, provoke or pick fights with everyone who gets in their way. As children go, they could best be described as feral.

Over the course of the last year, they have attempted to smash both the street lights with rocks and the curbside with a shot-put. They have run riot through front gardens – breaking trees and trampling flowerbeds. They have removed sprinkler heads, thrown rubbish around and pinched the girls bikes off them when they have ventured out to play.

One week they ‘borrowed’ a shopping trolley from Coles. Taking turns to sit in it, they rode up and down the street at breakneck speed. Had one of them fallen out onto the road, I don’t think I would have battered an eyelid. It was the worry of the trolley knocking another child off their feet or taking chunks out of my car’s paintwork that prompted me to have it collected and returned to it’s rightful home.

One day, after having gone outside and told the group of mouthy boys to stop hammering our curb with the said shot-put, they started chucking limes at our roof tiles. How much harm can you possibly inflict with a piece of fruit you may think. Quite a lot actually. Especially when the limes are rock hard, and the roof tiles are prone to breaking if you so much as snap your fingers in their direction.

You could be forgiven for thinking we live on a inner-city housing estate, with burnt out cars and old mattresses stacked up in the front gardens. Hardly. We live smack back in the middle of suburbia. Think Ramsey Street, without the regular bouts of arson, murder and intrigue.

To some, these underage pests may not sound too bad. It’s just ‘boys being boys’ you might say. I beg to differ. The petty vandalism aside, it’s the attitude, of these boys, barely into double figures, that just blows me away. The way that they turn the air blue when the other kids are trying to play, the constant fighting and the complete lack of respect towards anyone over 18. If you are thinking that the parents are to blame, that children are a result of their upbringing, then yes, I couldn’t agree more. But don’t even get me started on the mother.

Maybe I am officially now ‘old’. I know that the following is certainly going to make me sound that way – It just wasn’t like that when I was growing up. We weren’t allowed to call our parent’s friends by their christian names, we would have been eternally grounded for being cheeky to an adult and probably sent off to foster care had we dared to swear at one. Yet these kids think nothing of screaming all manner of abuse at an adult. They they did just that at a neighbour recently. Why? Because he stepped in and told them to stop using another child as a punch bag.

Maybe it’s me. Perhaps the world has just moved on, and I never got sent the memo about what is now deemed ‘acceptable’. I know that it is now the ‘in thing’ to treat your child like a mini adult. To dress them up to look 18, to let them stay up until they fall asleep, to educate them way beyond their years and to encourage them to join in adult conversations, voicing an opinion about everything they hear.

Teaching good manners and learning when to keep it zipped no longer seems to be a priority to some parents. It’s all about making sure the child feels important in the world. More important than they actually should be.

I have lost count of the number of presents we have given, where there wasn’t even a ‘Thank you’ in return. This winds me up no end. My daughter spends weeks after her birthday and Christmas, sat at the table, writing out thank you letter, after thank you letter. She may only be doing it because I tell her to, but I’d like to believe that this slow and painful exercise in gratitude and appreciation, will last a lifetime.

Saying that, I do have concrete proof that all my years of nagging about the importance of good manners, have not been in vain. Last month she woke up, called for me and said “Please can you get me a bucket Mummy, I think I’m going to be sick”.  I even got a “Thank you”, a couple of minutes later, as she pulled her head out of her Barbie bin, looking slightly green around the gills and covered in last night’s dinner.

My 2 year old is also learning to say ‘Please’ and ‘Thank you’ at the moment. Of course he is only parroting back what we say, and has no absolutely no idea why. But this is how kids learn. I go along with the philosophy of getting them while they are young. Hopefully then in years to come, a neighbour will never have to eye him up through their net curtains and wish they had a gun.

As for those loud mouthed pains on our street. It was a happy day for all when a SOLD sign recently went up. ‘Trouble’ is currently packing up and hopefully soon on it’s way. But it just goes to show, no matter where you live in the world, you can choose your house, but it’s completely pot luck who ends up living next door.

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Reaching dizzy new heights

For the last three months I have been swimming around underwater, drunk as a skunk and battling a severe case of morning sickness. OK so that’s not strictly true, but I may as well have been as this pretty much sums up how I have been feeling. Everyday I have had to battle with a complete lack of balance and contend with a blinding headache. And these are just two of the perks that you get to experience when suffering (and I don’t use this word lightly) from vertigo.

Vertigo is one of those medical conditions that you probably haven’t even heard of before you get it and have absolutely no idea how horrible it can be to live with until you do. I know that I had always been under the illusion that vertigo was something people only suffered from when they peered down from a tall building, descended down a steep set of stairs or threw themselves off a bridge attached to an elastic band. For the record, that last one does come with it’s own medical condition. It’s called insanity.

It is actually a symptom of a balance disorder, which gives a constant sensation of spinning or whirling and the illusion of movement, when no movement is actually present. An example of this would have been when I sat at the traffic lights the other day and the road in front of me looked as if it were moving towards me at considerable speed. It was quiet a surreal experience and had I not known better I would have sworn that someone had laced my green tea with a hallucinogenic mushroom or two. Throw in some dancing trees and a talking dashboard and the ‘trip’ would have been complete.

This sensation of constant movement is apparently classed as ‘subjective vertigo’. The perception of movement in surrounding objects is called ‘objective vertigo’. What do you know, it’s my lucky day. I seem to have been blessed with both types.

Now I have never had a good sense of balance at the best of times. I am likely to pass out on any fairground ride faster than the ‘Tea Cups’, I feel sick if I towel dry my hair upside and I couldn’t walk in a straight line even if it were 2 feet wide and came with a built in hand rail. So no, having a medical condition that affects balance is never going to be a good thing.

It came on out of the blue, just a week after my husband came out of hospital with his own clot to worry about. After a 3 day imploding headache, the loss of my peripheral vision and no sense of feeling in my hands I decided that I had reached dizzy new heights that I couldn’t deal with anymore. I checked myself into Emergency. One night and 5 different doctors later and the world was still spinning. I was told I was suffering from a migraine and was sent home the next day. 2 days later in a state of desperation I threw myself into my doctor’s chair and begged him to fix me.

30 seconds later he told me what was wrong, handed me a box of tissues and then told me there was nothing he could do. Funny how he knew to give me the tissues first.

Not knowing what had brought it on made it seem even more bizarre. It could have been stress (husband with blood clot – check), some sort of virus, a problem of the inner ear balance mechanisms or even something wrong with my brain. I heard that thought, I do have one. They did an MRI and double checked.

When living in a time where antibiotics are dispensed like Strepsils, it’s rather unsettling to be told that the prescribed remedy for what you have is, wait for it… ‘waiting’. Especially when it can take up to 3 months to go away. Worse still is being told not to get stressed.  Not being able to locate the butter in fridge can make me stressed, what hope did I have of staying calm when I couldn’t even cross a room without drifting off sideways or pick my son up without wanting to throw up all over him.

I left the doctors armed with a boxes of tablets to try and combat the dizziness and nausea. Ironically one of the side effects of the tablet was dizziness. I then went home to lay down and feel incredibly sorry for myself. Had I known back then how long it would last I think I might just have crawled into a hole and lost all will to live.

There are of course lots of suggested alternative cures on the Internet and plenty of books written about how to deal with Vertigo. Somewhere I read that using energy saving light bulbs can make it worse and strawberries can make it better. So I ate several punnets to compensate for all the bulbs that we use in the house and hoped they would cancel each other out.

I found vertigo exercises to try, limited myself to how much I worked everyday and tried to keep as calm and stress free as possible. I found someone to help treat the tight knots in my neck and back and made myself start going to Pilates again. I ruled out the Body Balance and Yoga class as I thought that trying to achieve a ‘Downward Dog’, ‘Tree’ or ‘One legged King Pigeon’ pose probably result in last night’s dinner coming right back out to greet me.

Then last week the whole family came came down with a virus, something that, unpleasant as it was may just have proved to be that proverbial cloud with a silver lining.

If you are eating, please don’t keep reading:

The force with which my Sunday Roast left my stomach, coupled with the piece of chicken that shot out as I blew my nose afterward (disgusting I know, but medically relevant) seemed to unblock my ear and reduce the severity of the vertigo. It has now been 3 days since I stopped popping my pills and (touch wood) I am finally feeling a bit better. Obviously if you find yourself suffering from vertigo, intentionally making yourself sick isn’t a route I would recommend, but on this occasion it seems to have done the trick for me.

So to cut a long story short, if you ever find yourself unlucky enough to be on the receiving end of a bout of vertigo be reassured by the knowledge that as horrible as it is, it will eventually go. Until then, try not to get too stressed, it only makes it worse.

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