On summer festivals and one's inner Gordon Ramsay...

They called it the Glastonbury of the East, aka the East Anglian Latitude festival. Home to about 4 million teenagers and far too many Boden parents. There's something about Southwold, Suffolk and the Kensington-on-Sea set. Which is odd, because no one goes to London from Suffolk and starts trying to convert everything to something a little more 'hedgemumbly'.
Anyway, it's taken me this long to recover. And we only stayed one night. But I felt it imperative to record to empty cyberspace my personal fire/bath highlights of the whole thing - perhaps best exhibited by a list of do's and don'ts'

Don't take children who spent a week recovering from a sick bug anywhere, let alone a Glastonbury-esque festival, and if you do, don't camp.

Don't expect it to be anything like the experiences you had pre-kids, ie hedonistic summer fun.

Do make the effort to find the family area - hence avoiding pitching next to sneering teenagers/2am teenagers/shagging or 'who's that c**t snoring'-shouting at 6am teenagers.

Do take a portaloo. I could go on for hours about the toilets. (And I spent time in the arse end of nowhere in Africa pissing on cockroaches for three months, so I'm not exactly doing an Anthea Turner here.)

Don't expect to part with anything less than your monthly mortgage payment (and that's just on food and drink).

Don't expect to feel anything other than Gandalf-like in the presence of Young People bearing signs saying things like 'Old People - No!'.

Do prepare yourself for the Inner Gordon revelation you will have about yourself.

Do expect to understand what people mean when they say that the closer you get to 40 the more your body knows it.

Don't eat anything that will make you need a No 2. (Eggs every meal for a week beforehand may help).

Don't stay the night that your Arthritic Son has to take Methotrexate. Unless you are Mother Theresa reincarnate.

Having said all that, the bits that were enjoyable were great. The bits that weren't... well, let's just say, we were all in the car with the tent packed by 10pm on Saturday night - 3 of us in tears. Yet again, Slack Mother learns that while she may think Arthritic Son is just tired like his school mates, he is actually a child on mild chemotherapy. So much for those DLA forms that tell me we're not entitled to any more financial assistance because he can now walk around and use his limbs again - not needing 'any more assistance than a normal child his age.' And yes, I do know about the people who diddle the system, and yes, I would like an hour in a trapped lift with them.

But hey. It's the end of school today, so what am I whining about? Now it's just the holidays to get through - and like zillions of other parents lured into a false sense of security by last summer's summer, we're going away for two weeks. To the Norfolk Coast, where it has been monsooning since about last February. One wooden bungalow, four boys, potential flooding and (if like the rains of 99) a backed-up toilet. Just don't ask me to donate any organs if I die there. I intend to consume enough wine to inflate my liver to the size of a small Virgin island. Oh, and sod the government's recommendations, it's cirrhosis or homicide. Which would they prefer?

Of Schools and Sick...

Back to normality. It's almost the end of term and everyone is knackered. Consequently, the school ups the ante and ensures we're all mental and emotional wrecks for the holidays. Teachers are sadists, I don't care what anyone says. They always have been, they always will be. If it's not Sports Day (fair enough - it is allegedly the summer), it's school trips, or assemblies, or leavers plays, or prize givings or discos or school fayres or organ donation...

Talking of which, we did two of those last week. Sports Day on Friday didn't get cancelled - much to my chagrin - which entailed standing around in the wind/rain/sleet and watching plastic eggs get blown off spoons with a pre-schooler whinging for Britain. Just as we are leaving, and I'm elatedly telling everyone how within half an hour I shall be sinking my teeth into a nice bottle of Sauvignon Blanc, whingy pre-schooler blows chunks everywhere. Great. Journey home in the car was nice. He continues to offer up the contents of his stomach as sacrifice to any sanity I might have had remaining for the rest of the night, stopping at about 11pm. Very considerate, although Husband and I barely slept anyway - waiting as you do for the inevitable tap-tapping of the 3am puke-dripping-down-floorboard scenario.

Next day is the school fayre. It was sunny (shock!), the kids were happy and the Exorcist Child not puking, so we went mad and virtually remortgaged the house to pay for endless tombolas, tattoos, second-hat tat and all the usual school fair shmutter. We even got the paddling pool out in the afternoon, such was the unencumbered joy of a bit of sun. Arthritic Son, however, decided it was his turn to whinge. And then, at 12am precisely, to start with the whole chunk-blowing routine. For 13 hours. Oh, how I love the old Methotrexate. It does so liven up anything to do with immune systems, no? We wade through Sunday and its associated bleaching/laundry fest and manage to get to bed early only to have Husband up at 2am performing the Huey & Ralph opera. Cue Monday. Both kids off school/nursery, both parents doing a pretty exceptional imitation of what might happen to you if you decided to downsize on frontal lobe activity and eat cryptosperidium at the same time.

It was supposed to be our 'chilling out' weekend. This weekend (pause to sob and wring hands in despair) we are off Camping at a 'family' festival (an oxymoron if ever I heard one). This being my life - and my life being the sort of bath/fire thing already talked of in this blog - I am staying open-minded. I may be gone some time....

It might as well rain until September...

Heard that on the radio the other day and thought, well, yes. Seeing as we now know it's going to. It's monsooning even as I speak, warm and cosy now that I swapped my sandals for socks and boots.

But I'm not going to moan on about the weather, no indeedy - not when I have 4x4s to get my teeth into. This weather, these floods and mudslides, it's their time, isn't it? So why is it that the Bodens who pay through the nose for some semi-aquatic mountain-munching Posemobile - while conveniently showing the rest of society they are a) higher up, literally, than them and b) loaded - drive them like they're in a gold-plated golf buggy? Oh, I could go on. And on. Perhaps it's because they seem to have multiplied recently in the rain, like mosquito larvae do. And cryptosperidium.

While I'm at it, I'd quite like to have a go at the media as well. Perhaps if they hadn't told us all through the winter how fantastic the summer was going to be, we might not be feeling quite as cheated as we are. Some baboon was on TV this morning telling people how not to get depressed about the weather. Great coming from a man who had clearly just come back off holiday (permatan) and has a great job telling other people the Secrets of Recognising the Blatantly Bloody Obvious (if you watch too much telly and don't see anyone, you'll get depressed). I particularly appreciate the fact he obviously has about as much understanding of life indoors with small frustrated children as my doorbell.
All of which leads me to believe it's the media that 's the biggest problem, not the weather.

P.S. There is one other problem with the damp that I am quietly doing a little research into. Arthritic Son is not doing so well in this weather and has complained several times of pain in his knees. This is unusual for the summer months. Perhaps if anyone else out there (yeah, I know, like anyone ever reads this...) has any arthritic thangs going on, they'd let me know.