Expect the unexpected

My best bud, let’s call her Rose, came over for a coffee and a rant at lunchtime. We do love our sessions putting the world to rights. Sometimes you just have those days where some old bat has rubbed you up the wrong way in the Post Office or some nutter has cut you up at a road junction and you just want to vent. Today it’s road-works. Rose says it’s getting a bit like World War 2 around here with all the trenches up and down the road(!) - the latest one stretches from her place all the way up past mine and round into the forest. It’s been a feat of manoeuvring to get out of the drive and past the various over-sized Tonka trucks in the street for the school runs 4 times a day.

Sadly the car and the gate had a run-in on Monday and the new dent is, of course, on a different door to Nobby’s last effort when he was late for football. Mind you, mine’s not so spectacular and I even managed to hide it for a few days by parking the car the other way round on the drive. But of course I forgot yesterday and his opening greeting to the kids upon returning from a 2 day trip to the UK was ‘I see Mummy’s dinged the car again’. Oops. I did have a lie all lined up about narrow parking spaces at the supermarket and hopeless old dears in 2CVs but in the end the truth just kind of spilled out.

Never mind, it’s not like anyone else’s car is perfect, you can tell who the new people are by their unblemished paint-work. A couple of trips to a French underground car park will soon sort that out. And banging up the kerb onto the footpath to squeeze past a few JCBs will nicely scuff those tyres too.

After school Poppet had a little friend over for tea and a bit of Barbie play. (Today it was burying Barbie up to the neck in the sandpit.) I was just cooking up some crepes when a flash of pink went streaking past the window and made me glance outside… to see Pickle and the Little Friend both stripped naked and having a water fight with the hosepipe. Thus began an evening fraught with culinary curve-balls. Thankfully none of the crepes burned whilst I wrestled the hose off them and hung out their clothes (they took them off because they were wet – would it have been better to remove them before starting the water?). Later on while I was heating some oil to start Nobby’s dinner, Pickle chose to fall off a tower of crates he had built and while I administered TLC the kitchen almost caught alight.

At least we now know the smoke alarms are still working.