Domestic Goddesses R US

Am feeling a bit tired today, but totally smug after a ridiculously domestic weekend which included: hanging all my washing outside to dry on the line (doubt there'll be much more of that this year, and there's been precious little already); harvesting some vegetables from the garden (lettuce, tomatoes, courgettes and beans) then turning them into delicious homemade food for a picnic, supplemented by some extra veg from the organic box! (The culinary goodies were courgette fritata, middle eastern aubergine dip and green bean and tomato salad, yum!)

Took princess O to aforementioned picnic in Regent's Park with a couple of my friends - we had to pretend to be a family of donkeys which turned out to be slightly embarrassing walking around on all fours and munching on grass, but she loved being our keeper.

The culmination of the domesticity came only last night though, when I used the carcass of the chicken (organic naturally) that we had for dinner on Sunday evening and boiled it up with some more veg to make fresh chicken stock. I swear I had a moment of deep joy looking at the jug of fragrant amber as I put it in the fridge this morning. Trouble is, I'm so knackered by all this housewifery that I'm not sure I'm actually going to be able to manage to make anything with it before it goes off! (And as soon as I put it in the freezer I know I'll never remember to defrost it till it's too late.)

Anyway, it was quite pleasurable after a summer of childlessness and then being away on holiday, to just come home, relax and enjoy being a mummy again.

Thunderbirds are Go!

Wow, I've finally done it, the website is live. I can't quite believe how quickly it's all happened. One minute I was lying in bed desperately trying to think what I could do about getting this damn book published, the next I've got a fully functional website and a Facebook group with 50 members (which might not be much just yet, but give it time.)

My mind is now racing ahead on all systems to the next stage of the process, which is of course lots of PR! It's all slightly sick making as I'm generally not that comfortable with this type of self-agrandisement, but I'm trying to imagine it all in the third person, as though I'm talking about someone else, so I don't have to think about it too much.

Anyway, I emailed the local paper today to see if they'd do a story, and am also hoping work might come up trumps too. Could I be the next Jade Goody/Kerry Katona? Known for nothing more than their hideous ability to turn up on the front cover of any/ever magazine for doing nothing more than fart. I do hope not!

It all seems like a long time since I got back from holiday though (something I've failed to write about in my rush to get the website going, but it was the most utterly lovely week in Sardinia, which I would highly recommend to anyone looking for crystal clear sea, gorgeous beaches and absolutely delicious food! I can't remember being so relaxed in a very long time.)

And rather gratuitously (because in reality I completely fancy the guy in the ad) and to prove that I have, I think, mastered the art of adding pictures/film into the blog, I'm also putting in a clip of the "D&G light blue" TV ad, because if it isn't in Sardinia, it looks just like it (and D&G have a house on the Costa Smerelda in Sardinia, dontcha know, so it really could be.)

A cunning plan

Unbelievably I appear to have a hangover again, and it's Friday again - must be the fact that I only have time to blog on Friday afternoons when work is quiet, and when I'm hungover so I can't quite face too much work because honestly I don't go out that much, though it would certainly appear that way! (It's also the summer hols and the princess is away again, so I really feel that I have to maximise on socialising before real life kicks in again.)

Last night was just a relatively quiet evening in Soho (for once) with an old work friend, but in order to maximise upon child-free time, I'm also going out tonight with university friends and to a wedding tomorrow - I think my liver is going to be a swollen wreck by Sunday! And worst of all we're going on holiday the week after next so I'm supposed to be on my bikini-body diet and exercise regime (which is clearly not going too well after an immense jacket potato and cheese at lunchtime!) For a brief moment at lunchtime to day I did think I might go for a run to perk myself up, but then decided a nice lardy jacket potato would probably be more enjoyable. No pain no gain? Absolutely!

Anyway, to the point of my post... I had lunch on Wednesday with a girl I used to work with here, who is now a glamorous digital marketing type in order to discuss my latest (and possibly most brilliant) ploy to gain international recognition for my fantastic manuscript: I am going to launch a viral campaign on Facebook (oh I'm so down with the kids me)

One of my other friends (aren't I so lucky to have such a bunch of talented and helpful friends?!) is going to build me a little website where I plan to host the book, or at least a good part of it. Then via my cunning Facebook viral marketing campaign, I can spread the word (quite literally) and get lots of people to visit the website, read the book and comment on how brilliant it is, thereby providing an instant market for the publisher who won't need to do any more work to sell thousands of copies! Brilliant or what?

Of course these things never go quite according to plan, but here's hoping...

(And I'm off to get me a hair of the dog and fast!)

Is everyone weird?

I was wondering this yesterday after lots of emailing with one of my friends about her ex-girlfriend and how weird she'd turned out to be and it made me think about whether anyone is actually "normal".

I suspect the answer is no, but then I have always thought I was relatively normal, and most of my friends seem to be too, as are their husbands/boyfriends, but perhaps that's because we don't delve into each other's hearts of darkness too often. So maybe it's just that the more you get to know someone, the more you find out about their hidden neuroses, idiosyncrasies etc and uncover their weirdness. Though I still maintain that there is a scale of weirdness and this particular ex of my friend's is right up there!

There were some people out in Soho last night wearing their weirdness right on their sleeve though - the princess is away at her aunty's this week, so Mummy and Daddy have been cutting loose. (Oh my god, you don't appreciate how nice not having kids is until you've actually got them, by which point of course it's too late! But it does make the rare occasions alone oh so delicious - the 8am starts, the late nights watching films, the no rushing to the childminders the second work's finished.)

Anyway, Mummy went out with her work chums last night and drank her bodyweight in cheap rose and white wine spritzers and ended up at 3am in some dive on Brewer St dancing to hardcore techno with a Bulgarian Marc Almond-alike! I love those nights when you get to a certain point and wonder how the hell you ended up where you are and oh, why aren't you in bed? Sadly they are precious few these days, but I made the most last night.

Needless to say, today hasn't been the most productive at work, what with spending most of the day eating potato in some form (4 hash browns for breakfast, a plate of roast potatoes for lunch) and of course the inevitable dissections of the night and looking at everyone's photos (how did we manage before camera phones??)

We were talking about best hangover foods this morning, and someone said dairylea squares which to me seems akin to inviting yourself to give up and be sick, but the humble potato has always been my trusty friend, in whatever form it chooses to take, though I've been told by a reliable source that any yellow food will cure a hangover, which is why egg, chips and lard are always so good!

Ok, time for me to sign off - it's the weekend! I need to go home and have a speed siesta before getting in the car and driving a few hundred miles (not the ideal after 4 hours sleep) but my writing friend is accompanying me, so at least we can spend the evening discussing how crap our careers are and how we're misunderstood, tortured geniuses, and it's the publishers loss, not ours. Gaa.

pottermania

Well, I've just spent a very enjoyable couple of weeks gorging on Harry Potter in anticipation of the last book being published last weekend. I am pleased to say that I very carefully engineered it so that I had almost the whole of Saturday free to read it in one book-drunk frenzy so that I could get to the end before anyone spilled the beans on how it all turned out.

For once I was very pleased when Princess O appeared at the crack of sparrows next to my side of the bed, whispering very loudly "mummy, is it your morning yet?" And it was - we got dressed and down to the bus stop at an indecently early hour to catch the no 6 to Borders on Oxford St to purchase said book.

The trick of the peaceful day was firstly a sunny morning, and a Mr Men book for O, so we lay on a blanket on the lawn in the back garden reading next to each other (well I was reading, she was looking at the pictures), followed by a trip to the swimming pool with Daddy so Mummy could have some "quiet time" and then a very rainy afternoon so we could snuggle up on the sofa and watch Beauty & the Beast (twice) while I was frantically pacing through the pages of HP.

I've been thinking all week about the key to the success of Harry Potter and I think it's the fact that although many bad things do happen, it is a world in which you feel very secure and where you feel that nothing bad can happen to you. Plus of course the idea that it would be soooo cool to go to a school where you learnt to ride a broomstick and change yourself into a cat. I like the way that JK deals with death too - helping children to understand that these things happen, but also offering a way back; life after death in the form of a moving photo, a mirror, a portrait on a wall, whispers from behind a screen, or a stone which promises to return you from the dead.

At any rate, I'm quite sad to have come to the end of the series, and to have to return to my own, far less exciting life.

and p.s. I thought the Deathly Hallows was a complete return to form after the less than brilliant no's 5 and 6, and I know I'm an adult and that perhaps I shouldn't be enjoying it quite this much, but everyone's got to have somewhere to escape to after all. (Third space? Pah, just give me a book.)

Urgh

Well I had to finish the last post because it had been hanging around in my edit section for over a week, but let me tell you, today I feel utterly depressed, for reasons large and small:

1. Still no news from The Flying Dutchman and I'm just too embarrassed to email/call again as I've made the last two contacts and surely you have to know when someone's ignoring you?
2. Lunch with my dear writing friend whose book fate is getting even worse - knowing he's going through the same has not cheered me up much.
3. On a different subject, I am pining for another baby and for reasons too depressing to mention, it's just not going to happen anytime soon.
4. We got burgled last week (while we were all asleep upstairs) and the car was knicked along with various other things.
5. Some unspecific funk that's been hanging over me for weeks now.

Anyway, in an effort to jolly myself along, here's the synopsis for my book - I'd love to know what you think:

"No matter what you hope for, life doesn’t ever turn out quite how you expect it to: as friends Giles, Jo, Aimi, Simon and Max find out. At their heart is Katie Higgs, new mum, aspiring artist and incorrigible dreamer, who is suddenly in the last place she ever wanted to be when she is unceremoniously dumped by Max. Inspired by Alison Pearson’s “I Don’t Know How She Does It”, this is the story of how being a stay-at-home mum isn’t all it’s cracked up to be either, especially not when you’re single and unemployed; but how with wonderful friends, more than a few glasses of wine and a lot of soul searching, you can find your way again and even get the life you wanted after all."

Whose Afraid of Virginia Woolf?

I am going to attempt to weave several utterly unconnected strands together in this post and somehow prove their relevance. These are:

1. A research debrief I went to on Tuesday about online behaviour in the UK

2. My forray into the "blogosphere" yesterday

3. Virginia Woolf! (Who I have wanted to talk about for a week now)



So... on Tuesday I went to perhaps one of the driest research presentations in the history of research (and I've been to some pretty dull ones before I can assure you). There was one thing though which caught my eye, and that while men are far more likely than women to read blogs, and to comment on them, when it comes to creating them, the numbers of men and women are equal (it was around 10% of the online population each). This pleased me greatly, not least because I am a new member of the blogging community myself, but also because it seemed to prove an equality of creativity between men and women.

Knowing that part of being a blogger is being "connected" I finally also managed to spend some time reading other women's blogs - so far I'm totally in love with Drunk Mummy and Posh Mum (once again there will be a pause while I work out how in God's name I actually make links to their blogs). They are both fab and I really do feel like part of a mummy/writer community albeit very much on the peripherary.

Which brings me neatly onto my third point, Virginia Woolf. In "A Room of One's Own" she talks about the difficulty of women "creating" because of the lack of time, money and education afforded them, and the patriarchal society which holds them back, not to mention the onerous childcare duties which prevent any time for freedom of thought or expression.

It was interesting reading this 80 years on and thinking about the huge strides women have made (for example when she writes, women aren't allowed in a certain library in Oxford, this may still be true, but I feel that the essence of equality has at least changed for the better now.) Though of course we are constrained in completely different ways these days.

Overall though, all of these things made me proud to be a woman and to feel that maybe writing was a worthwhile thing to do after all.