Why it’s good not to win an Olympic ticket

These last couple of weeks millions of people have been logging online and, unbelievably, willing vast sums of money to have disappeared from their bank accounts. Sums of money that they probably can’t really afford to lose and almost certainly shouldn’t have agreed to be taken. Amounts large enough to cover the mortgage and quite a few bills, or even next year’s family holiday.

It may sound unlikely but it is indeed true. And more bizarrely still, for the last couple of weeks many of these people have actually been limiting how much they spend, just to ensure there’s plenty left in their account to take. Yes, it’s a rare occurrence indeed when anyone actually wants their bank balance to deplete overnight, but then again, it’s also a rare occurrence when tickets for The Biggest Sporting Event In The World come up for grabs.

We are of course talking about the 2012 London Olympics Games and the chance for a lucky chosen few to watch world-class athletics up close. Normally participation in this spectacular quadrennial event is limited to those who can afford to cross several time zones and visit foreign shores in order to attend. But next year it will only cost a tank of petrol, a swipe on your Oyster card or a return economy train fare to get there. Come to think of it a train fare can often cost the same as a trip through several time zones, but let’s not dwell on that right now.

With 20 million applications made for 26 Olympic sports and only 6.6 million tickets actually available, it was inevitable however that rather a lot of people were going to be disappointed with the outcome, including, surprisingly enough, many of the sportsmen and women who weren’t even able to secure tickets for their own families. Others fared slightly better in the ‘lucky dip’, with one man receiving £11,000-worth of tickets. It has to be said his odds of winning were slightly higher having applied for £36,000-worth to start with, after an agreement with his bank to increase his limit should he be successful.

We applied for tickets – the Opening Ceremony and the swimming – and failed to get so much as a penny whipped out of our bank account. It was annoying after all that hype, but at least we’re now better off for it. Besides that, what I do have is a pair of tickets for The BEST Event Ever In The World pinned to the notice board right in front of me now. Tickets for the very last night of the Take That concert in Wembley. So I think if I had to choose between watching the concert of a lifetime or lots of athletes (as good as they are) walking in a circle and waving flags,  I’d go with the first.

And for all those others who also failed to lay their hands on an Olympic golden ticket, remember this. Whilst your day out next year watching sporting history happen would have been highly exciting and no doubt worth every penny you’d spent, much of it wouldn’t. The reality is you’d also have had to deal with congested roads, overflowing car parks, enormous crowds, seriously overpriced food, a severe lack of usable toilets and, worst of all, if you went with pint-sized people, a miserable looking child attached to the end of your arm. A child who, if you could actually hear him about the din, would probably be saying he’s bored, tired and wants to go home.

Taken in part from Blog written for Treehouse Life.

Planes, trains and watery accidents

My 2 1/2 year old son has been undergoing toilet training for about 6 weeks now, and I have to say he’s doing a lot better than I ever expected him to. Boys are, after all, meant to be a lot slower on the uptake when it comes to the learning about when to poop and pee, and when to clench and hold.

Of course there have been accidents. One next to the sofa, one in the bedroom where he shut the door on himself and couldn’t get out, and a handful around the bathroom – normally as a result of him misjudging the volume of wee in his bladder and shooting off the potty before he’s completed the job.

Trying to shoo the dog away as I re-dress, empty, bleach and wipe is the hardest part of all.

Unfortunately my sons days at nursery do set him back sometimes. Whether it’s the excitement of finger painting or the 15 or so other kids queuing up for the potty, some days I go to collect him and am met with a bag of wet clothes and a rather nasty smelling teddy. The washing machine never had such a good work out for so few clothes. One day, when he had gotten through all 3 sets of spare clothes in his Bob the Builder backpack, I arrived to find him wafting around the room wearing nothing more than a kimono from the dressing up box. That was one of those occasions when you wish you had a camera to hand.

As with many things in life, thinking about doing something is often worse than actually doing the deed. The very idea of replacing nappies with pants on a leaking child is one such time. I found the only way to really stay one step of the game in the beginning was to spend every 4th minute asking him if he needed to go, and then ferrying him backwards and forwards to the potty, armed with 16 books and a thermos of tea (for me). It was monotonous and repetitive, but it did the trick. After a while, and probably because he got so damn sick of being asked, he started to tell  me when he needed to go. Or rather he’d screech “Poo Mummy” as he scurried towards me, with one hand behind his back clutching his bottom.

Seeing that I would drop everything and leap to attention when he needed to go, he quickly realised that the whole process could be manipulated into something of a game. I’d run to get him to the bathroom, peel off the layers, sit him down and then he’d laugh. “No Poo Mummy”. Hmmmmm. That one soon wears very thin, particularly when you’re in the shower, eating your breakfast or halfway up a mountain..

A Blue Mountain to be exact. Let me explain.

We’ve just got back from spending a week in Sydney. A week in Sydney in the rain. Who knew it would be so cold, or so wet at this time of year. Everyone but us apparently. Typically, the weather forecast for the week changed upon our arrival. It went from sun and a spot of cloud every day, to rain with a touch of rain every day.

Damp weather aside, holidaying with children is always a test – a test of a parent’s patience, stamina and will to live. Air travel in particular can be stressful at the best of times (something I wrote about before),  but throw in a couple of kids and several tonnes of ‘can’t get by without you’ luggage and you can find yourself half way to a nervous breakdown at 30,000 feet.

It’s always hard to know how your children will react to leaving the ground in a vacuum packed can. My son wasn’t amused. At all. Watching the aeroplanes through the terminal window – great fun. Walking down the air-slip onto the plane – not so fun. Sitting in his seat for take off – simply not going to happen.

So what does he call out in a desperate bid for freedom? “Poo Mummy”.

Yes, just what all the passengers around us wanted to hear. I’m sure some actually recoiled and held their nose in fear. So, with the fasten seat belt sign lit up and the plane doors already closed, he was whisked up the aisle to the toilet with potty in hand. Did he need to go? Of course he didn’t, but it would have been a pretty brave parent to take the risk.

And so followed a week of untimely potty stops. In the bushes in front of the Opera House. In the undergrowth next to the museum. Sat inside the land train going around Darling Harbour. Behind the seal enclosure at Taronga zoo. On a grassy knoll overlooking Botany Bay. On the train into the shops, and around the back of the Police Station in the CBD. There was no where he didn’t go. And there was no where we could go without a potty, wet wipes and spare clothes at the ready. It really is amazing how the bowels of a small child can shape and dictate your day.

The mountains, as previously discussed, were probably the worst. When he decided he needed to go, the rain was coming in at us diagonally from both sides – with the force of Niagara Falls. We happened to be out on a nature trail at that moment, trying to take at least one photo of the view to prove we had enjoyed the grey and misty scenery. We ended up in the car pack, huddled over him with umbrellas, as he sat on the ground to give it a go. Did anything materialise?  Nope, not even with the encouraging sound of gushing water hitting his parent’s heads.

Same story in the Jenolan caves, and then twice on the way back up the mountain at night, in thick and surprisingly spooky fog. At times like this it is definitely tempting to ignore the little voice from the back seat, but the car seat was hired and the excess for damage to the car was $3000. No pee is worth that much. This time he sat perched on his potty in the boot of the car, smiling up at us, as if it were all perfectly normal.

All pit stops aside, the biggest and most costly accident that occurred during the week, was not by my toddler, but by my husband instead. We were on the ferry traveling from Circular Quay to Darling Harbour, and had decided to sit outside in the spitting rain, to take some pictures of the Opera House as we went past.

Somehow, and don’t ask me how, the camera leaped out of his pocket, dropped onto the ferry floor and slid 2 foot across to the edge of the boat. As it happened (does it ever happen any other way?), there was a gap in the side of the boat. About, oh lets say, camera sized in width. The only bloody hole, I might add, that there was down our side of the boat.

The camera then proceeded to slide through the hole and sit on the outside rim. I’m sure the camera lenses winked at me. We both looked at it in disbelief – I know I was certainly wondering what the hell is it doing down there. Having a child on my lap I couldn’t move. My husband, who swears it all happened in seconds, apparently has the reaction times of a snail on speed.

PLOP, over it went. All of our photos sank right to the bottom of the harbour. I’m not embarrassed to say I burst into tears. My husband did what any intelligent man in the same situation should do. He kept very quiet and looked at the floor. After several minutes of watching my tears mixing with the rain, my daughter helpfully piped up.

“Now you’ve lost all of my photos.” Followed by. “This wouldn’t have happened if we’d sat inside you know.” I believe she received quite a glare.

We all left the ferry in silence. Even my son knew better than to say he needed a poo. Half an hour later, when we were standing underneath the sharks inside the aquarium, my husband ventured to speak to me. “Well obviously we’ll buy a new camera tomorrow.”

And so we did.

He did feel marginally better when told in the camera shop that he was the 3rd person that week to drop their camera into the water. Had our home contents insurance actually covered us for the camera outside of the house, then he might have redeemed himself a little more. But of course, despite trotting along to the Police Station to report it’s loss (hence the potty stop), it didn’t. Now had he dropped it into a mug of tea at home, we’d be quids in – go figure.

The new camera is shatterproof, waterproof, snow-proof and husband-proof. That of course means it comes with a manual thick enough to sit on at the breakfast bar. By the next holiday I might just have worked out which setting goes with which, and how to use the ‘Beauty Mode’. Till then, it’s safe to say my dearest husband will be remaining on the other side of the lens, and paying for his act of clumsiness through the public humiliation on this blog.

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The JOY of marriage & the REALITY of divorce

Marriage is without doubt an incredibly tough nut to crack. If you choose well, listen to your mother and marry your perfect match it can be the best thing since Google. But even if you choose well, listen to your mother and marry your perfect match, marriage can still push all your buttons and drive you up the wall, make you question your judgement, and sometimes render you completely insane.

Unfortunately for the majority of people who pay a small fortune to merrily skip up the aisle and say ‘I Do’, a few short years later they will likely find themselves slinking into a solicitors office, handing over their life savings and 3 pints of blood, and snarling ‘What was I thinking, no I bloody well don’t’.

Divorce is everywhere, it’s a sad fact of life. It has probably joined ‘death’ and ‘taxes’ to become the 3 things in life that are depressingly inevitable. In many countries, 1 in 3 marriages now end up in costly court battles – fighting over child custody rights, the dog and the CD collection.  On the upside, now that CD’s have all but been been outed by the MP3, this particular dilemma will become easier to solve.

It is sad that so many marriages don’t even last long enough for the dishwasher to remove the last traces of the sticky label from the new dinner service. Or for the extortionately priced wedding albums to be filled with photos from the happy day. But hey, this is the reality of it all, and, as someone who has already trodden down that particular path, I can’t say that it necessarily a bad thing to be able to get out before the ’till death’ vows have a chance to kick in.

Maybe I have a very cynical view on marriage, (though I like to see it as being realistic) but I strongly believe that if something is really not right, then nothing is going to fix it. Not even hours of counselling, or resigning yourself to a lifetime of ‘doing the right thing.’

And yes, even if children are involved, I still believe that it’s better to be out than in. Nothing interferes with happy childhood memories more than miserable parents, slamming doors and death stares across the breakfast table. I think any child would plump for smiling parents and less fighting if given half the chance.

In the run up to my wedding, and that would be the first one that didn’t work, not the second one that is ticking along just perfectly, I told my then husband-to-be that I was a great believer in divorce. Romantic? No. Honest? Probably a little too much, given the money already spent out on the hot buffet for 50. But then what’s the point in mincing words.

Coming from a family history based in divorce and bad feelings, I knew that I would never be able to stick something out if I wasn’t happy. After all, life’s just too damn short to be depressed and hating the person you wake up next to. Luckily for me my ex was a very understanding man, both then and 4 years later, when we agreed it was never meant to be, called it quits and went our separate ways. Luckily for me we also had the friendliest divorce in history, with not one ounce of bad feeling or back stabbing bitterness in sight.

Some people of course aren’t so lucky, especially when the ‘injured’ party goes hell for leather to try and make life as difficult and complicated as possible. Whether this involves cutting up clothes, hiding rotting fish around the house before leaving or just trying to suck every last bit of energy, life and money out of the person doing the leaving. Some people simply refuse to draw a line under the past and ever let it go.

Of course now that I am older, wiser and blessed with hindsight, I can now admit that I knew at the time that I should never have got married in the first place. But that’s one of those things that’s hard to voice out loud, especially when the wedding ball is rolling at breakneck speed and you’re clinging on by your fingertips for dear life. Or when you’ve already had your dress altered 5 times to accommodate your diminishing weight (through the stress of knowing it’s not a good idea) and haven’t the heart to tell the seamstress her work was all in vain.

So all that aside. Knowing how hard a marriage can be to hold together behind closed doors, where no one can witness the pointless hypothetical arguments and the bread knife whizzing through the air, what hope has anyone in the public eye got of actually lasting the distance.

None really. Celebrity marriages are pretty much doomed to fail from the start. From the young and stupid who hotfoot it Vegas, 13 hours after falling desperately in love at an MTV after-party, to the veterans of the screen, such as the once lovely Mel Gibson, who hook up with someone young enough to be their granddaughter, and then flaunt them down the red carpet.

So when Katie ‘Jordon’ Price and Peter ‘One hit wonder’ Andre announced they were separating, it was hardly much of a surprise. Yet the celebrity watching world went “Noooooo, how can this be?”

Hmnmm, now lets think. They met on screen, they fought on screen. They married on screen, they fought on screen. They had kids on screen, they fought on screen. They moved to the States, they fought on screen.

The common denominator here? Well that would be the fighting.

Add that to the fact that every day of their life together was docu-soaped. And every word, thought and insecurity they felt was no doubt taken, twisted and exaggerated, just to up the viewing figures and satisfy the drama hungry audience.

So did they stand a chance? The words hope and hell spring to mind. I would have had more chance of winning the Lotto – and I don’t even buy any tickets.

Still at least they can now both guarantee a 10 page spread in Hello magazine, to discuss, dissect and detail their marriage breakdown. And then they can both star in their own new reality shows about how to bounce back, recover from a broken heart and go on to make pot loads of money.

Cynical? Me? Never.