Monday 26 July 2010

A Triple Whammy

This morning my phone rang at 8.41 am. I was in bed and my phone was in the next room. It was ringing in that Cupcake emergency kind of way but there was no way I could get to it.

A short while later I phoned her back. My voice had that just-woken-up-gravelly-edge while she was hungover:

“One bottle of wine turned into three and a mojito” she groaned. I felt a pang of envy which soon disappeared when she delivered her triple whammy.

“One shoplifted pair of earrings, a plastic figure of Ganesh, an empty bag of weed and a morning after pill packet – empty and she hasn’t come on her period.”

These were the spoils from her 15 year old daughter’s bag, taken while she was sound asleep this morning. Stoned and pregnant? No wonder she was sleeping in, it certainly takes it out of me….

“What do I do?” she says

I have very little experience of dealing with teenagers so I said.

“I would have taken them out of her bag and lined them up on the table for her to explain when she got up. The fact that you’re hungover is good because you’re too fucked to be properly angry.”

The problem is, being something of a wild child herself, taking the moral high ground isn’t much of an option for Cupcake.

So here are three questions for you.

1) Do you go through your kids things?

A colleague of mine at work, a beautiful, neatly put together, level-headed woman once admitted to me that she regularly checked her daughter’s diary and personal effects. “You just do.” she said when I stood there open-mouthed.

2) How do wild mum’s parent?

Do you tell your kids about your experimentation with drugs, your brief addiction to fruit machines, your flirtation with topless modelling and the orgy you went to so that your kids can benefit from your experience, or, do you lie through your teeth and pretend that you were practically Amish as a teenager?

3) What should Cupcake do?

I have no fucking idea on this one……

As for my life, the sewing marathon continues. Since we last spoke I have knocked up (pun intended) two pairs of kimono shoes (really difficult to get a perfectly matching pair – mixed results), one pair of frilly knickers, one pair of non-frilly knickers, one pair of pyjama trousers, one pair of shorts and a matching tie and I have cut the pattern pieces for an A-line dress made from this fabulous vintage fabric,


which will have a cerise pink lining.



I may not have been Amish as teenager but I’m certainly turning that way now, I have a tapestry callous for fuck’s sake…..


I’m going to leave you now with a confession, a drinks recipe and a thought for the day.


Confession: I have been eating pate.


Drinks recipe: Freeze lychee juice. Once frozen, crush and add to Rose Cava.


A thought for the day from Gloria Steinem:


“I have yet to hear a man ask for advice on how to combine marriage and a career.”

Sunday 18 July 2010

Cupcake Empires, Incest and a Bootie Call



My dear friend Lady Violet left London on Monday to begin building her Cupcake empire in Edinburgh. So, last Saturday I flung on an electric blue silk dress and Havaiana flip flops and waddled myself over to Dalston Junction where I got on the new East London Line. It was like being in New York. The train was air-conditioned, for fucks sake.

Boris - take note - this is what London Transpost should be like.....

(Interior of the new East London Line trains - how modern public transport should be...)


I was equally impressed when I arrived at New Cross in TWENTY minutes at this delightful establishment where dear Lady Violet had hired the private room upstairs.


(Thankfully for me the star meant that the last item couldn't be enforced)

It was a bit of a struggle for me but I did it. Sadly it was probably the last time I will leave my house for the next HUNDRED YEARS…..as I have now been signed off work with Pelvic Girdle Pain (sexy!). In addition to PGP I now also have an incredibly heavy front to accompany my grinding back. This shit just gets better and better. The doctor told me I have ‘potent hormones’. Thanks doc, I’ll get that put on a T-shirt.

In the meantime I have fashioned this belt.....


.......out of a long piece of sari fabric which can be wrapped around my hips several times and thereby provide support to my back and weighty stomach, because if I have to wait any longer for the NHS to provide me with a support belt in my size my daughter will be pregnant herself.

Yesterday I had a mini meltdown when I attempted to take my son to the library, literally ten minutes from my house. I took a bus two stops but even so, on the way back, everything became so painful that I had to call Bushman to come and rescue me. I don’t know exactly what I expected him to do apart from sling me over his shoulder, push the buggy home, deliver my baby and pour me a rum and coke. When he did arrive, looking bemused, I became teary and cried silently the rest of the way home holding up my bump with both hands and shuffling along like those bearded old women who can only leave the house in their slippers. It was pitiful.

In my last pregnancy the meltdown came on a lone shopping trip for bedroom curtains. I had been looking for curtains for days and couldn’t find anything I liked. I sat down on a bench outside Wood Green Shopping City (that place alone is enough to make anyone miserable, pregnant or not) and wept. Looking for comfort I phoned Bushman. Strangely, crying over curtains is something he just couldn’t relate to. In truth, it was a short conversation which provided little comfort for me and I learned a valuable lesson. Pregnant by your Jamaican lover? GET ON WITH IT and only cry if something REALLY SHITTY is happening. Poor quality curtains and bad shopping experiences are not valid reasons to cry in public.

So as the next EIGHT WEEKS before I give birth stretch out before me like a long holiday in Swindon with Gordon Brown and no booze,  you can expect utterly scintillating blog posts from a housebound Trout. Actually you might find nothing at all if you visit here,  in which case you will know that I am miserable because it’s a Troutie blog rule to keep the misery posts to a minimum.

So let’s keep things lighthearted and talk about incest instead….

My lovely friend Platinum Blonde, who I went to stay with in Exeter not so long ago phoned me this weekend with news that she is pregnant. I find it difficult at the moment to react to this news with anything other than scepticism being, as I am, a miserable pregnant woman. I was of course pleased for her although thankfully she seemed quite underwhelmed by this news and wasn’t expecting me to gush.

“I’m 13 weeks pregnant and I haven’t even told my brother yet…” she says. But what she also tells me is that she had a home visit from the midwife recently “….to make sure I’m not a crack whore” (her words, not mine) where she was asked if One-Non-Blonde (her husband) was related to her. She replies to the midwife, with some confusion and a sense that she’s stating the obvious,

“Yes, he’s my husband.”

The midwife, with not a hint of irony responded “No dear, are you related, this is Devon you know….”

Platinum Blonde who has been considering moving to Brighton anyway, says to me “I’m getting the fuck out of this place - she actually had a box to tick for that question.”

Apart from telephone conversations with good friends and my saintly parents, comfort has come in the shape of my sewing machine. I’m now fully into nesting mode, proving that despite being fat and unappealing I can still get a bootie call…..


(varying degrees of success - keen seamstresses will notice the faults and unfinished details - and yes I will be taking out the pins before my daughter wears them)


I have also created a 'Sherlock Holmes' poncho and muff for my daughter's winter collection 2012....



(Think maybe I went a bit overboard with the muff - you have to admit that is one big muff - do you think I could get the word 'muff' into this blog anymore times? - keen crafters can get some links at the bottom of this post - not muff links, sorry should clarify, crafting links!)


And now before this becomes a crafting blog I'm off to feed my son his breakfast,



fix the error on my washing machine, eat carrot cake for breakfast and get stitching........


Note to keen crafters: all items were made from this book. I'm now off to make some kimono baby shoes.

And if nobody leaves a comment saying "like your muff" I'm giving up blogging altogether.......





Friday 9 July 2010

Fishmarket Sex

Troutie, sex and Fishmarkets seem to go together like chips with salt and vinegar. We are inextricably linked, destined always to be nestled together through the twists and turns of fate.


Remember the guy who left me unsatisfied to go to the fish market to buy prawns for his Auntie? Well, at least my current lover has the decency to satisfy me before he fucks off to buy stinking kippers.


Let me enlighten you:


Bushman works in a Caribbean restaurant in North London. Sometimes he has to do the market fish run. This involves him leaving the house at around 4 am and reaching back home around seven. Serving others during sociable hours means that his own hours are quite unsociable; often arriving home after midnight and not coming to bed until one, two or even three am – and that’s if he doesn’t fall asleep on the sofa.


Our ships-in-the-night lifestyle is quite frustrating. I always complain that we don’t spend enough time together. In my waking hours I often demand that he should kiss and hug me when he comes to bed, despite the fact that when the time comes I am actually snoring my way through another encounter with Jon Bon Jovi or coming nineteenth in a hotel beauty competition.


Although a gentle giant on the whole, like most men, Bushman can be a bit bull-in-a china-shop. He’ll swagger into the bedroom at 2am shouting “Wha gwan?” (meaning in English "Hi!") - which is his usual greeting, when what I want him to do is to nuzzle into my ear, caress me gently as if I were a a fragile snowflake and tell me that he loves me. These mismatched ideas often lead to confrontation as I am one hell of a bitch in the night.


In the old days I couldn’t often be woken and if I was I would curse him,  “Do you have to fucking shout at me?", with all the sleepy stroppiness of a diva and then fall back asleep. These days I’m barely sleeping so although his “Wha Gwan?” is usually still met with some resistance I am really already in some form of wakefullness.

Naturally, with the onslaught of advanced pregnancy, sleep is becoming more troublesome. Pillows between the legs, one somersaulting baby girl, one tossing and turning whale of a woman, toilet breaks, the heat, the relentless whirring of the fan to keep me cool, the constant sirens of all three emergency services, the burglar alarm of the mobile phone shop and the intermittent beeping of the pelican crossing, are all designed to keep me awake and send me crazy. This was the case last night/morning which also happened to be fishmarket morning.


When Bushman goes to the fishmarket he doesn’t sleep and get up early, he simply stays awake until 4am. Deep down this is the time he would like to chat to me and put the world to rights and spend quality time together (mainly because he has nothing better to do). My shiny black granite stone man, the one who is usually as silent as your kitchen worktops (if you’re posh enough to have granite worktops) wants to ‘chat’ between the hours of 2 and 4am.


And so it was this morning. At 2.30 he swaggers into the room, leans in close to me, grabs my shoulder and says “Wha’ Gwan?”. I complain that he has woken me although this is not strictly true.


The trouble is we spend so little time together that once awake I feel like I should make use of the time even though I know that I will hate everybody and everything with intense passion, come morning, when I have to get up for work.


This morning after a suitable period of coming round I say to him, thinking aloud.

“See now you’ve woken me up and I can't get back to sleep so I feel like I should be doing something useful like having sex but it’s just soooooo much effort.”


Now, you see, the thing is, that if a man said that to a woman he would never hear the end of it.


"What do you mean effort? Oh, that's nice, now I'm effort...."


But a woman says that to a man and he just thinks “Did she just say sex? Great!”


Of course sex during the later stages of pregnancy is no simple affair. It’s not your kind of roll over, missionary malarkey. It’s a shapes matching exercise. Your stomach is convex, their stomach is also often convex (unless you are with some flat-stomached Adonis under thirty) and you have to get yourself into all sorts of funny positions just to get your genitals even remotely close to one another.


When it was all over Bushman pulled on his clothes and left the house. We had officially had fishmarket sex. Naturally it took me another hour to fall asleep. It was 5am when I finally slept and my alarm goes off at 6.45. I had enjoyed a total of 4 hours sleep.


I really did make a concerted effort to go to work this morning. I got up, showered put on make-up and even left the house a few minutes early, heaving my enormous, unsteady body up the road.  But, when I remembered that I needed to top up my oyster card and found my purse missing I caved in, sloping off home knowing that once inside that door I would not be leaving again.


“Hi there, this is Troutie I won’t be coming into work today as I’ve been having fishmarket sex which has resulted in general fatigue due to lack of sleep and back pain (appropriately known in pregnancy as pelvic girdle pain) due to the athletic positions one needs to adopt during sex in the later stages of pregnancy. See you Monday – goodbye!”


By the way, my house stinks of kippers.









Tuesday 6 July 2010

Troutie’s Pregnancy Advice: Less Cake, More Wine


Last night I spent a lot of time with Jon Bon Jovi. I have never been particularly attracted to Jon Bon Jovi, so this was a mystery to me. I wondered whether JBJ is considered as existing on the ginger spectrum? Because if so this might explain it.  Every time I am pregnant I find myself inexplicably attracted to redheaded men including Laurence Fox and Prince Harry.


After I awoke from my Jon Bon Jovi dream, I had to attend a repeat blood test at the doctor’s.




“Why do I need another one?” I asked the nurse.



“You’re borderline” she said “Sugar high, iron low. This baby’s taking it out of you.”



“I didn’t need a blood test to tell you that.” I said



I enquired whether this was as simple as eating less cake and drinking more red wine. The nurse didn’t seem to disagree with me, so I spent this afternoon disobeying the first order (less cake) and taking red wine with my dinner.



It’s fair to say I look pretty washed out. There’s no pregnant glow about me and my mood is definitely less than bubbly. So today Victoria Sponge and Cupcake came to cheer me up and we took Afternoon Tea in my mother’s garden with homemade scones and raspberry jam and cream imported from the Suffolk countryside.

 

Also on the table, Gooseberry Granita made with Gooseberries from the Stuston Farm Shop. Scroll down for something of a recipe.
 
Anyway, I promised that I would pass on my 'Blog with Substance' Award....and I shall....just not right now because I'm going to bed to spend time with men like this, this or this. None of whom I actually fancy......

Gooseberry Granita: get some gooseberries, boil them with a bit of water and a bit of sugar. Push through a sieve, allow to cool and freeze overnight. Smash up the gooseberry ice and put it into a glass jug and with a few slices of lime, cucumber and a couple of sprigs of mint. Then add any amount of the following to taste. Sparkling Elderflower water, Apple Juice (really nice stuff not the stuff that looks like piss) and San Pellegrino or other nice sparkling water. Alternatively, or additionally, you could add champers - yum. Makes a lovely green, green, cocktail.

Happy National Kissing Day, by the way you gorgeous people!

Thursday 1 July 2010

Rude and Funny? Me? Not today.......

Last night I came home and drafted a blog post. It was a pretty miserable one which totally went against my blogging philosophy.

This morning I got up and found that the lovely blogger LCM had honoured me with an award. I'm not a big fan of awards - especially after the last saga, but this morning I was grateful for it because it meant that I wouldn't have to blog my post of misery after all.  

This is also lucky for you because it means that you don't have to read about my back pain or how fat I feel. (yawn)

There's actually not much to read about here right now. I need to go and lie down so that I can make it into work tomorrow morning and after that I'm off to convalesce in the country for the weekend with no internet access.

So all I can say is that I will be back next week with an award to give to ten lovely bloggers.

In the meantime here are some places I've been lately:

Feeling crafty? One amazing site I just discovered here. Ignore the bit about the marathon and click on her refashions or tutorials buttons. 701 followers can't be wrong!

Think you are a hardcore eco warrior? It takes a certain kind of type of girl to love the planet this much. Although I confess that this beats the mooncup for me.

Lastly and ironically, for somebody who just won an award for being rude and funny I have been neither today. I want you to know that this is something I feel intensely bad about.