Saturday 17 March 2012

Whoa! Haven't been here in a while...

Can't believe how many months have passed since I was last here. Service was interrupted mainly due to my daughter throwing a tantrum and knocking a glass of red wine over my(new) computer.

Cheers, love.

Then, my long suffering father took said computer to some cockney wankers who kept the blessed thing for three months before telling me they couldn't repair it.

Meanwhile I had to go to a funeral in Jamaica.......

During this 'holiday' my credit card reached an all time high and my mothering reached an all time low. I had to sleep with both my children in a small double bed. Bushman, slept elsewhere. Not only was I sleep deprived but sex starved. Not a good combination.

My kids behaved like spoilt, foreign assholes. In fact, I had only been there three days when I called my mother and insisted that she take my children from me the moment that I landed back at Gatwick.  

All of this was before I'd even had my now infamous 'Montego Bay' meltdown. This was when I shouted at my son so much that a security guard followed me out of a shop and told me not to treat my child so roughly.

I was livid.

I wanted to say ......"But you beat your fucking children in this country!!!"

Rather than hurling abuse at the security guard I chose to hide in the back doorway of a fried chicken shop instead. I was so ashamed of my spoilt son and his ungratefulness and so angry at the security guard that I was reduced to tears. Even in the doorway I couldn't get any peace, just constant cat calls from lecherous men offering to 'comfort me'. So,  I fell back on the one thing that is always guaranteed to make me feel better. Swearing and smoking.

I went into a shop to buy some fags with the angry tears still drying on my face. A male shop worker offered to help me and then just as I was cooling down he said "What's your name?"

"Look, I don't have time for this fucking shit right now, just give me the cigarettes." I said to him.

So the thing I learned as the only white girl in the non-tourist part of Montego Bay is ... apparently, I can't act like a local. I'm expected to be refined and have manners.

Well fuck them, I'm NOT Kate Middleton.

Anyway...

Those of you who followed the Supercat Saga will be pleased to know that he spent his first Christmas cosied up with a brand new owner. That was definitely my good deed of 2011.

So, to be honest whilst I love a good blog, I have a lot of pressures on me right now as I am just a few days away from becoming a registered charity. Sadly, I can't tell you much about it because this blog, has always been, and will remain, anonymous.

But the good news is - I finally got my head around Twitter!

I may not manage a blog very often but I can definitely manage a Tweet.

You will find me under troutie77

Hope to see you around sometime.

xxx

Tuesday 8 November 2011

Bognor Regis in Pictures

Finally, in November, I went on my family summer holiday. We chose Butlins in Bognor Regis because we had no car and wanted to entertain the kids. Out of shame, I kept this a secret from some of my best friends.

Here is my experience.

No car. We're hardcore Public Transport types.


On the train at Victoria Bushman chose to sit next to a football team on their way to Benidorm. Nice way to start the family holiday.

This is what they left behind. Well, a small fraction of it.



This genuinely impressed me.


 It's fashioned out of a single towel.




A room with a view? Sort of.



Time for a drink and maybe a snack.


No, I wasn't quite thinking of this.


The special offer at the overpriced Spar shop.




Thankfully, blue skies the next day make me a little perkier.




The seafront at Bognor. I just had to get out of that place.




Bushman at the bandstand.





A welcome bit of colour on the seafront.




The sights









Bushman makes Bognor look positively romantic.



The sea wall




A little unfair......



My son, the wallflower, at the Tots Disco.


This was a balloon giraffe until I came across it. Now it looks like.....well,
 I think you can see what it looks like.




Bognor. I will never forget you.


Then after we left, this happened.

Sunday 9 October 2011

What have you done with our baby?

On Friday morning my alarm went of at 6.15 am. My eyelids parted and through bleary lenses I saw that the baby's cot was empty, except for a few toys.

Panic rose in my chest. It was overwhelming.

"Bushman. Where is our baby? WHAT HAVE YOU DONE WITH OUR BABY!!" I shouted, accusingly.

From the otherside of the duvet wall. I heard a voice say.

"Trout. Wha' wrong wid you? She sleeping at yuh mudder's house."

Seems I had totally forgotten that my children were staying with their grandparents.

The moral of this story is: I am an arse. A mad arse.

Tuesday 4 October 2011

Three

Today my son is three.

Last week Lady Violet came to visit. She snuck into his room while he was sleeping and pulled back the covers to see how much he'd grown, having not seen him for nearly a year.

"Fuckin'ell Troutie, he's a giant!"

It's true. I'm buying clothes for a 3 year old who is the size of a 5 year old. He's in the 99.6th percentile. Which means that only 0.4 percent of children his age are taller than him.

If it seems that I only ever blog twice a year on my children's birthdays, you'd be right.

I am officially the world's worst blogger. The last time I left a comment on anyone else's blog was sometime in the early nineties when mobile phones were still the size of bricks.

Between the utter exhaustion of working and raising two children and the pressure of trying to keep a relationship alive when you are mostly ships passing in the night, I am also in the process of starting a charity. They'll be more on this later.......

I'm sure that some of those excuses will sound familiar to all of you.

Meanwhile, my daughter has turned one with no dramas. Bushman executed the affair with finesse and a professionalism which, as usual, made me want to sleep with him. The truckload of Jamaicans did not turn up which was rather a shame as it would have made this post more interesting.

Since then I have visited an art exhibition about prison, danced with some pensioners on a canal boat, booked a family holiday to Bultlins in Bognor Regis, eaten cake with a group of Buddhists and a heroin addict has offered me her unborn baby to look after.

And quite how you follow that sentence, I'm not sure.

Happy Birthday to my first born. and a happy third birth day to me. XXXXX

Sunday 4 September 2011

Don't expect a party bag....

Tomorrow my daughter turns one. She has the most unruly hair of a one year old I've ever seen.

For her party today I have created the most enormous headpiece for her to wear. I'm hoping it detracts from her ratty locks and my bad parenting.

This party has been the centre of much family controversy after my son's 2nd birthday party last year  when rather a large number of unexpected guests arrived courtesy of my beloved partner, Bushman.

In a moment of rage so great that I whispered through gritted teeth, I made him promise that next year we would be having our daughters first birthday in his restaurant and he would do all the work. Earlier this year Bushman tried to get out of this deal. He underestimated me.

So, today, friends, family and frankly whoever wants to come, will join us at the Caribbean restaurant where Bushman works. It's smack bang in the middle of Camden Town so there has been much ado about parking, parking expenses, travelling etc.

I have done very little towards this affair aside from buying a second hand party dress on ebay for the birthday girl, fashioning an extreme headpiece and creating a birthday banner with the help of my son.

Come to think of it I haven't even bought her a present..... and I certainly won't be sending her a birthday card so it will be this scenario all over again with my mother.

I have pretty much done nothing and intend to continue in this fashion. 

To every question about birthday cakes, vegetarians and booze I have responded, "He's dealing with it."

In a way this lack of control is unnerving. Will there be a cake? Will it be worthy of Cake Wrecks? Do I care? On balance the answer is. No.

There will be no party games. No party music. It will be laidback Reggae and Ska all the way. There will be a limited number of children. And if your kids are expecting a party bag - fuck off to someone else's party.

For anyone that likes a good birth story - this is what I was doing a year ago.

Happy Birthday Baby Girl and well done to me. x

Wednesday 10 August 2011

Restorative Justice



I have so much stuff to say about the London Riots I hardly know where to begin, but as a big believer in restorative justice, this image from riots in Vancouver earlier this year really warmed my heart.

Rioters started to apologise on broken shop windows.

www.nowpublic.com

Sounds like a little but maybe it could mean a lot?

Monday 8 August 2011

Supercat

About a week ago I saw a slightly grubby cat laying in some bushes outside our flat. He was sunning himself and I thought nothing of it.

A few days later the cat was outside again and as I struggled through the doors of my flat with my double buggy (scraping the tops of my feet with the bottom of the heavy, outside door and bruising a hip in the process as usual) I noticed that the poor mite had one completely grey eye.

"Oh you poor thing!" I said to it.

As I took a closer look I could see that the thing was really manky. Underneath its long black and white coat (what was left of it) it was really quite skinny. Its skin was scabby, its coat matted and it was utterly filthy. I realised that this cat didn't belong to anybody at all.

It just sat there and looked at me, out of its one good eye.

Whilst standing there talking to a cat and two children and neither of the three having anything intelligent to say, a neighbour came along and we struck up a conversation. Then the Polish lady from upstairs lent out of the window.

"It won't eat." she said

"I feed it and it won't eat. He's been there maybe two weeks?"

With two children eagerly awaiting their trip to the park I had to leave the poor thing, telling it "I'll deal with you later."

The cat wasn't around when I returned and after misguided phonecalls to the RSPCA and the Cats Protection League and back to the RSPCA again, it took me 24 hours to get any useful information out of anybody.

"We will collect it" said the woman at the RSPCA "but you'll need to catch it for us."

Despite explaining that I lived in conditions similar to a tenement yard at the turn of the century, still she asked if I had a 'spare room'.

"No, love." I wanted to say to her. " I do not have a spare room. I have two kids under 5 in a two bedroom flat with the same square footage as a walk in wardrobe. Spare room my arse."

On Tuesday morning the ground was wet. I went outside to throw out the morning's nappies. There was the sodden cat, who didn't look any cleaner for having had a rain bath.

"Right," I said to the cat. "don't move."

I ran over the road to the builders merchants and got the biggest box I could find. I grabbed a box of dry food and a pouch of wet food. When I returned the cat had done exactly as it was told. With a bit of coaxing and not much trouble I managed to box up the cat. It had food and water in the box and I made breathing holes in the box with a knife. It was like one of those magic tricks where half naked women have sharp things poked at them. The cat was so petrified it didn't make a sound. I left the box in the hallway, just outside my front door.

I went inside and called the RSPCA. My job was done. I just had to await their collection of the cat.

As I stepped out side the house to ferry my son to nursery I discovered that the fucking manky thing had escaped and was sitting by the front door. Then a kind of French farce developed where I was trying to keep my kids at bay and a neighbour was trying to leave the communal hallway and the cat was hissing and my kids were screaming and I was chasing the cat round the hallway with a towel.

Bushman came outside wearing nothing but a pair of tracksuit bottoms and tiring of the saga said purposefully "Mi get di damn cat."

"NO! You'll kill it." I said "I'll get it."

As I went near the cat the it hissed at me quite ferociously.

"OK." I said to Bushman "I give up, you catch it"

Towel in hand, my half naked Bushman walked over to the cat and despite its howling and hissing and spitting just took it by the scruff of the neck, picked it up and put it in the box.

I was quite surprised at how his half-naked mastery of this wild creature sent shivers down my spine. Had I not have been so preoccupied with the children and the neighbour and the cat and the RSPCA I would have bedded him there and then.

Anyway, although this has the potential to develop into some bizarre Mills and Boon scene, I shall bring us crashing down to reality with the fact that whilst being captured by Bushman the cat pissed everywhere. Bushman and I then spent the next ten minutes taping up the box so that the thing could not possibly escape again. The hallway reeked of cats piss. Then came another call from the RSPCA.

"Really sorry but there's no one available to come out to collect the cat. Can you take it to the nearest vet?"

What?

I explained to the kind lady at the RSPCA that I had two kids and no transport and that I was actually supposed to be at work and I didn't even know where the nearest vet was but she kindly informed me that there was one within walking distance of my house. The words were welling up inside my mouth and then fizzled out as the image of the poor, half-blind cat came into my head and I resigned myself to the fact that I was just too fucking soft to let this cat fend for itself.


Next I went out to buy twine so I could carry the damn thing. One end of the box had somehow got soaked (cat piss? water?) and I had to transport the cat a quarter of a mile down the road in a box which might give way at any moment. On top of everything else I started to itch.

I breathed a huge sigh of relief as I was buzzed in to the air-conditioned vet's room and set the box down. A young girl behind the desk chewed gum and eyed me up and down. I explained the whole story and told her how the RSPCA had advised me to bring the cat to the vet.

"But we're nothing to do with the RSPCA." she said blankly.

I reiterated.

So did she.

I started to lose faith in everything. I looked down at the box which had been taped up and stabbed at in equally wild measure. What the fuck was I supposed to do now?!!!

Sensing my frustration,  the young gum-chewing receptionist relented.

"I'll get Jackie." she said.

Jackie was a gritty, bottle blonde with dark roots and a heart that money can't buy. She took the manky cat out of the box and pressed it to her chest. It melted. She kissed its stinking head. It was love at first sight.

Then she looked in its mouth. "This cat's fucking ancient." she said. Instantly I liked her.

"My son named it Supercat." I told her.

She checked the cats genitalia. "Its an un-neutered male. Been out on the street for years."

Turns out that Supercat was covered in fleas and lice. Jackie said that in ten years of being a vet this was only the second cat she had seen with lice. Supercat had the beginnings of liver failure which they could control, but amazingly was FIV (cat AIDS) negative. He was blind in one eye. His teeth were broken and rotten. He was seriously underweight.

Today Supercat is eating like a trooper and has had a good sponge down. Jackie loved him so much that she took him home with her.

"Not even the Pope would give this cat a home." she said.

I told her that there was a Jamaican singer called 'Supercat' who came from a rough neighbourhood. I told her that my children's father was Jamaican and that I had no idea how my son came up with the name but that I felt it was quite appropriate.

Thankfully Supercat doesn't have to hustle on the streets anymore. Who knows, maybe he can get those teeth fixed with some gold replacements?  Hopefully he can spend his last days nestled in Jackie's bosom purring with delight.

God Bless you Jackie.

"Supercat"


"Supercat"