How I lost the battle of Mother's Day

Each year I become Mumzilla and insist on a Mother's day outing featuring at least two of my three children. (Use this link for outing ten years ago)

Last year we visited Sissinghurst  and this year we planned to build on the Vita Sackville-West theme.  Carenza and I had watched Orlando - both the current West End play and the Tilda Swinton film adapted from the Virginia Woolf novella in which she made clear her adoration of Vita.  Our Mother’s Day outing would be to Knole, the great Tudor pile which inspired Orlando.

Perran had a plausible alibi for Mother’s Day itself, so we went a week early.  Allowable slippage I thought. 

However, it turned out to be just the beginning of the rot setting in.

One of the purposes of having a Mother’s Day outing is to avoid the church service where all women are given a brightly coloured polyanthus.  (Something really annoys me about it, but I can’t put my finger on what.)   This year I had to contract an actual cold to get out of it.  Made me miserable for a few days, but worth it.

Then Pascoe’s Mother’s Day card arrived, adding a new layer of weirdness.  He had given a photo of me to an AI program and asked it to make me into a Roman lady (as I am a Classics teacher).  Unfortunately, he had selected a picture where I was holding a hedgehog (why?), which then rather dominated – see pic.

Maybe I should give Mother’s Day a rest.  After all, apart from grumbling and sending the occasional WhatsApp, I’m doing very little mothering nowadays – except of course, when I find an orphaned hedgehog.

 

 

I wanna thank you

On Saturday, Nigel and I listened to R4’s Saturday Live.  We particularly enjoy the ‘Thank you’ spot. This time it was about somebody who had slipped and broken their leg on a cliff path.  A passing hiker had stopped, rung for help and waited with them until the paramedics arrived. ‘At the time, I was just so relieved to be taken to hospital, I forgot to even ask your name.  But whoever you were, thank you.’

Later, we were walking in some quiet woods when we heard a piercing cry.  The gut-wrenching screaming went on and on.  It wasn’t quite human, but what on earth was it?  Whatever it was, it was in great distress, so we pushed our fear aside and hurried towards it.

At a fork in the path, a woman was holding tight to a labrador, restraining it.  Close by, a man was struggling with a large-mesh fence.  Stuck half way through the fence was a muntjac deer, a buck from his pronged antlers.  The dog had startled the deer into the fence and the animal was trapped and fighting with extraordinary strength and making that blood-curdling sound. 

Nigel helped in attempting to dislodge the terrified muntjac.  It was quite a wrestling match and as it finally came free, its antler caught Nigel’s hand causing three nasty gashes.  It bounded off into the undergrowth at top speed. 

The other couple thanked us profusely, but we wondered if we might ever hear from the deer – perhaps one day on Saturday Live…

‘I was in quite a hurry to get going, and I’m afraid I didn’t thank you properly.  And I’m so sorry - I think I may have accidentally caught your hand with one of my antlers.  Anyway, my freedom today is all down to you, and I just want to say Thank you.’

Cross-dressing drama

 I was to meet Pascoe in Liverpool for a mother/son weekend.  I checked out the theatres.  Most were between shows.  Pascoe found some great stand-up, but it was fully booked.  Eventually we settled for The Everyman Playhouse – Death Drop 2 – back in the habit – a show featuring several well-known drag queens and set in a nunnery.  This didn’t really sound like high culture and I worried it might be so rude it made my hair stand on end.  However, I told myself it would be a new experience.

I was much more confident about the outing I had booked for Nigel and I just the evening before in London.  This was high-brow –a dramatisation of Plato’s Symposium at the Bloomsbury Theatre, put on by students of University College, London.  This was to be a philosophical dialogue about the nature of love.

However, when we got there, the cast of male philosophers was played entirely by young women who acted with gusto and humorous asides to engage the audience. 

Looking back, I think I laughed more at the cross-dressing Plato, but only because so many of the drag-queen references in Death Drop 2 whistled straight over my head.

And which was more educational?  Well, I learned quite a lot at each.  But in VERY different ways.