This past week has made me realise that my children truly have a better social life than me. All I need now is an orange light on the roof of my kid-mobile, a bri-nylon shirt and some cute cockney patter and I will have become Mummy-cab. I wonder if I can get a meter fitted…? If I started to charge proper fees for the amount of taxiing I am doing I would soon be rich. Hmm, slight flaw is that I am also the pocket money provider… maybe I just need to withhold it all until they learn to drive, then charge them rental?

We had to put a veto on play-dates on Sunday just to spend a few hours with our offspring ourselves and make sure we don’t miss out on anything. Poppet spent a day in the countryside with her best friend and her family on Saturday and came back having learned how to ride a bike. Pickle was at one friend’s house for lunch then we picked him up and dropped him at another one for dinner where he made it to the next level of Indianna Jones on the Play station (ok, I didn’t mind missing that one so much).

So Nobby and me got to sample our exciting future adults-only weekend lifestyle, all the lunching and sight-seeing and movie-going that we promised ourselves would once more be ours like it was in the old days B.C. (before children) as soon as they were old enough to palm off on other people for the weekend… and we ended up in a garden centre. Oh crap. We’ve skipped middle age and gone straight for our bus-passes, hanging out by the winter pansies wondering which realistic woodland creature fashioned from an old log to buy next for the patio display. Actually, I exaggerate; we were looking at furniture - nice rattan stuff for the conservatory, we didn’t go anywhere near the cane chairs with the loud chunky cushions so maybe there’s hope for us yet. But I did find the gnomes highly tempting…

And anyway, Nobby needed bringing back down to earth after a weekend in Portugal with ‘da ladz’ for a 40th birthday golf session. They spent 3 nights at a 5-star hotel with all the golf they could handle and no curfew on getting home for the babysitter, so I needed to make it clear that this is not going to be a frequent occurrence, however many Super-Wife points it earns me to let him go. I myself actually made it out to a party while he was gone. The kids came too of course, so it wasn’t exactly the beer-stoked rave-up I imagine the boys were having, nor did we manage to stay out past 9pm but still. I felt slightly better when Nobby told me that the ‘great value golf package’ his mate had found on the internet because the hotel had just been refurbished and wanted to attract new business meant that certain features were still not ready – like the pools and the sauna… was it rude of me to laugh? Oh, and they had to fly slEasy-Jet, who ran out of bacon butties on the early morning flight. But the suntan he was sporting when he walked back in the door on Monday night made me slightly green, although the ‘Hello’ magazine and pot of Clarins helped.

So given my comparatively dull existence at the moment I have very little to report, unless you want me to detail all the road-works in the area, on which I am now a total expert. Now that the weather is getting warmer there is way more bum cleavage on display at the side of the road than usual, it’s really not a pretty sight. At least some of them still turn and notice the nice blonde in her shades trundling past with the tinted windows hiding the mess of battling brats in the back – perhaps I’m not ready for that blue rinse just yet.