Cramming

Would someone please tell me how I can cram eighty megabytes of scanned documents into an email? I am having a go with 'zipping' but it's rather like wrestling with my suitcase when I'm packing for a family skiing holiday - it almost took the entire family sitting on it to get it all in last time. I think I am going to be here half the night sending eight separate emails instead. That should create a marvellous first impression to my would-be examiners. Oh the joy - it's deep.

In case you're wondering what I am wittering about, I am finally getting my application sent off for my teaching course - the deadline is tomorrow. I hope I can squeeze these files a little bit before then without having a full-on meltdown. Ooh, melting. Does that compress documents? I also hope that the university don't take my tardiness as a benchmark for future assignment submissions. Yes, I did pull several all-nighters when I was a student first time round, trying to be hip and cool and run the deadlines to the limit. But those were the days when I could handle a whole packet of Pro-plus in one sitting and no-one was expecting me to get up at 7am and give them breakfast and wipe their bum the next day (at least I think there wasn't...) I would like to think I am somewhat more sensible now. There's just been some fun and games getting all the information about the course and subsequently getting the forms filled by the school which has caused the delay. I think I am in for a roller coaster year.

Anyway, I am happy to report that the Simply Red concert on Saturday was a total success, not one drop of rain all evening. We arrived by taxi at the rear end of a crowd of ten thousand people and managed to bop our way to very near the front - we couldn't quite see the whites of their eyes but still a great view. There were huge screens all around to get the full Mick effect, and he was superb as usual (I know my brother will be shaking his head at that comment..) And did I mention that this was all free? They closed off a whole section of Budapest surrounding Heroes Square for celebrations to mark the 20th anniversary of the end of Communism in Hungary. Even though we are not natives we were very happy to join in with everyone else. We rounded off the evening with dinner al-fresco and a boogie in some student cellar-bar, much to the amusement of the trendy twenty-somethings we were elbowing out of our way so we could give the Macarena the full treatment.

Sadly the rain returned on Sunday but that didn't stop us Brits donning the raincoats and wellies and wading around the Railway Museum. My friend Bob was here with her hubby and son and the three year old is well into trains. His Dad didn't seemed too put out either about climbing all over some of the trans-Siberian monsters they have on display, some of which have wheels two metres in diameter. I have to confess that we chose to dry off in McDonalds, clearly we know how to show our friends a good authentic time when they travel halfway across the continent to see us!

Today was also wet, so the kids opted for swimming. Argh!

OK, while I have been typing this I have put my daughter back in bed three times, talked to my brother for the first time in weeks and found out that my Nectar card with 32000 points on it has been deactivated for my lack of activity, just when I was planning to spend some on tickets to Legoland. Great. See, I can get on with lots of things at once when I want to; coursework will be a breeze - think of all the Blog entries I will be writing mid-sentence. But I have also now pinged off two enormous zip files containing my application. Fingers crossed everyone.

Water, water everywhere

... and not a drop to drink. I finally know what that means: it's all about a week in the life of Nobby and me in Sesame Street, Budapest. (Our road is named after a Hungarian children's TV programme, you should see the looks I get when I'm asked to recite it, I guess anyone who lives in a Ramsay Street or Cockleshell Bay knows what I mean.)

Water, water, water. This week I have either been jumping into it, getting pelted with it, mopping it up or wondering why none of it is coming out of the taps. And there I was imagining I would spend the summer holidays just using it in frozen cuboid form to cool my Pimms and lemonade.

After the fun and games of Pickle's indoor party we were hoping for a better weather result on Tuesday night for the open air Depeche Mode concert at the football stadium. After all, this is Budapest in late June.. durrr, what were we thinking? When we [abandoned] parked the car things were looking OK and there was almost enough blue sky to make a pair of sailors trousers (another old English saying, oh we're on a roll tonight) but being a Mummy for the past eight years has clearly hammered some precautionary sense into me and I tied my raincoat round my middle while Nobby decided to 'risk it'. As David Ghan appeared on stage in all his glory (and Nobby proudly noted that 'he's got more chins than I have') a little light drizzle began to fall, which was all well and good because we were packed in like sardines on the pitch between a goth in her best funeral hat and a bloke wearing black angel wings over his T-shirt. But by 'A Question Of Time' it was pretty much pelting. Lucky me having my raincoat - trouble is the hood acoustics weren't up to much so I couldn't really put it up so I opted for the free hair wash instead with everyone else. Meanwhile Nobby got drenched to the skin. As a consolation, next day I popped out and bought two tickets for their return trip in January, mercifully at the indoor Arena.

One of Pickle's favourite non-Lego presents at his birthday party was a snorkel and flippers set. So that explains why I have been (reluctantly) jumping into water. The little monkeys know that swimming is Mummy's least favourite activity - given the choice between a trip to the local pool or unclogging the toilet, the U-bend wins every time. But it's been raining and they've been driving me mad - when they drag themselves out of the virtual reality world of My Sims and Mario Go-Karting on the Nintendos long enough to take a pop at each other - plus I'm supposed to be a yummy mummy who encourages their kids to do sports, getting them swimming and riding two-wheelers before they're able to walk, so I had to knuckle down and fish out the one-piece. Luckily now they can swim a bit I don't have to supervise quite as much these days, apart from the occasional 'Help!' from Pickle when he gets out of his depth and out of breath. Which is all the time in the outdoor pool at our local sports centre. I just have to ask, who builds a 'children's pool' complete with slides and sprays that is a uniform depth of 1.5 metres? Do they all have their bean-pole growth spurts early here or what? Anyway, I got through several chapters of my book while they pretended to be sharks in the jacuzzi, although I don't think they much amused the old couple in there for a spot of relaxation before their afternoon nap. Pickle declared himself very satisfied with snorkelling, once he'd mastered the art of dipping his face in the water without dunking the whole breathing pipe in as well and trying to respirate chlorinated water. Poppet has declared that she needs some flippers now, having beaten me six times in races down the pool (I was doing my very best front crawl too, can't imagine how she did it...)

Today was actually relatively dry and warm so late afternoon I somehow persuaded them that poor neglected Tiggy might like a walk and we could go somewhere flat so they could ride their bikes at the same time. We had a very pleasant jaunt up in the hills, even Tiggy behaved herself and didn't sniff too many people in inappropriate places (crotches). Then there was an ominous rumble of thunder and we bolted for the car, generously swinging by the office on the way home so Nobby wouldn't get another soaking. There followed the mother of all storms. You know when books say that the clouds were 'boiling'? Well they were, it was absolutely fascinating. And the setting sun turned the sky all different shades of pink and orange and red, wherever it wasn't already a dirty grey. There was a beautiful rainbow at one point, and lots and lots of lightning, followed by an almighty hailstorm which pounded the house for half an hour. I decided the best view of the light-show might be the glassed-in balcony in the kids' rooms. Indeed, it was a lovely view, however the sight of the storm gushing in through the closed windows was far more alarming and I missed the next half an hour as I shifted toys out of the flood, mopped up and manhandled plastic sheeting over the outsides of the windows to stop further leakage. Then I called the landlord, who happily started telling me how he was out inspecting his flowers and fruit-trees after the hail before I interrupted with the news that his windows are knackered, then he shut up and agreed to come over in the morning.

So there you have it, a watery old week. Oh, except for the two days when the water supply was once more cut off without warning, I was only alerted to the fact when I tried to fill the kettle for a well-earned cup of tea after one of the swimming trips. The water company have two enormous holes in the already narrow roads leading up to our place which are daily surrounded by well-fed looking blokes, each one variously sporting wrenches, bum-cleavage and/or man-boobs who happily interrupt their loitering to say hello whenever we pass them. I reckon they might all be a tad muddy tomorrow morning, the torrents of water coming down the hill may even have filled the holes in for them.

So tomorrow one of my best friends is coming for the weekend with her hubby and toddler and we are planning to stop in at the free open-air Simply Red concert up at Heroes Square on Saturday night - weather permitting. I'll let you know.

Why I'm glad I only have two kids

Sshhh! Don't tell the kids you've seen me. I am hiding from them. I reckon while High School Musical is on the TV and the Lego is out in force I should be safe to slip away for a few minutes. It's been the school holidays for a week already and everything was fine until the rain set in. Now they can't bounce away their excess energy on the trampoline they are taking it out on each other and the dog. I've just resuced poor Tiggy from another one of Pickle's strangling assults of affection and banished him to his room. She's taken to hanging out in the downstairs loo where it is a) cool, b) quiet and c) out of sight, until someone gets the urge to pee of course.

Personally I just want a bit of peace to recover from the weekend. It was a mad one.
After some late night bowling and dinner at TGI Fridays on Friday night you'd have thought we'd all get a lie-in on Saturday. But Poppet surpassed herself with the early morning waking, appearing dressed and perky beside my bed at 4am. I'm wondering which to invest in first, a large clock and some lessons on telling the time or a set of black-out curtains.

One game of football and a trip to the Tesco's play centre later they still wouldn't lie down much before 10pm. But by then I had already sloped off out with a friend for an evening at the museums leaving poor Nobby in charge with just a bottle of wine and tub of Haagen Daaz for moral support. On Midsummer's night all the Budapest museums stay open till 1am and lay on entertainment. And my friend had a VIP tickets. So I ended up on the terrace at the National Gallery, overlooking the Danube, sipping champagne and listening to Nobby's new favourite band playing Ska music in Hungarian, daaaahling. Lovely. Then we took in a conjuror and dance display at Millenium Park before rolling home in the wee small hours.

Bad planning really since Sunday is Nobby's day for a lie-in, coupled with it being British Father's Day, so I didn't get the chance to sleep it off next day even though Poppet managed to sleep until 9. Sunday was party day - we held Pickle's birthday party a couple of weeks early because the actual day is in the middle of the school holidays and we didn't want one of those parties where only two kids can make it. Well, the theory was good but it back-fired on me beautifully. Having given out twenty invitations on the last day of term, banking on at least half of them jetting straight off to sunnier climes, fifteen kids turned up yesterday, along with twenty-fours hours of uninterrupted rain. Nice.

And this year they are at that in-between age where they don't want to play Pass The Parcel and Musical Bumps any more - at least the boys don't; Poppet of course couldn't wait to get her hands on something that needed unwrapping after seeing the mountain of presents that Pickle received - but the boys went on the rampage through all the bedrooms, returning to the lounge every ten minutes or so to grab some more sweets and crisps from the snack table before stomping back up the stairs to continue the domestic devastation. By far the favourite toy turned out to be a larger than life-sized but realistic-looking rubber tarantula which they took turns placing on people's shoulders or just beside them and relishing the resultant near-coronaries, several of which were mine since I am extremely skittish (ok, terrified) of spiders and they can get me every time. I bought the stupid thing for the Halloween bash and it added a nice spooky touch to the decorations at the time but that's no reason why I should keep finding it in my sink eight months later.

Having read the forecast and somewhat anticipated the boys' behaviour I invented a brilliant treasure hunt before the party started, one trail for the boys and one for the girls, and cunningly hidden photo clues around the house. However when I called them all to order and announced the game an unexpected hush fell over the boys and they all started looking at the floor and shuffling their feet, until one of them confefssed that they'd already found and followed half the clues, somewhat ruining the prospect of having them all occupied and off the coca-cola for the next half an hour. Poppet's team were quite excited though, since they'd been dutifully Passing the Parcel and Pinning-the-Handbag-on-the-Barbie for the previous hour rather than investigating how many small boys you can fit under a cabin bed, and quickly ran off in search of the first location. The only trouble being that the role of 'team leader' went straight to Poppet's head so she raced from clue to clue, ripping them open and flinging them over her shoulder as she ran to the next one, with six girls trailing woefully behind without so much as a look in and me shouting at her to 'share nicely'.

So the best laid plans and all that. Next time I'm renting a venue and an entertainer. Ooh, and a babysitter and a weekend in the Spa for Nobby and Me. Yes, I think that would be perfect.

And there's more...

So the kids were up at 6.30 am... so early in fact that Nobby wasn't even up for work yet. On the up side it meant that he was able to give them breakfast instead of me but bang went my lie-in; I knew I shouldn't have mentioned them on my Blog yesterday. Would someone mind telling me why the little monsters can't manage to drag themselves out of their pits for all the Lego in China on a school day but they can appear, awake, dressed and on-the-lum by my bedside at sparrow's fart when we really have nothing to get up for except the early showings of Sonic The Hedgehog on Pop? I blame the nutters who set the datelines that made Hungary the same time-zone as France - the sun gets up at 4.30am here at the moment (trust me, I've seen it, and clearly so have the kids) and it's pitch black at 9pm. I also blame the Hungarian house builders who designed this place with triangular windows you can't cover up. Pooey.

I suppose I should be grateful that I was up in time for a shower before the water was turned off. But then Poppet dogged my every footstep thereafter begging me to make her a dress out of a length of a material she'd 'found' in my sewing crate. Let me make this clear: I have never made a dress in my life. Despite my loathing of shopping I would sooner take my chances with two small children and a branch of C&A than dig out my sewing machine. That machine is strictly for cushion cover repairs and the occasional bedsheet for the Barbie dolls. However, I decided to give it a go and I can report that she is very pleased with the results and I am chuffed to bits that I even managed to do a zip! Now, of course, I seriously need to go and hide all other 8-year-old-girl-sized pieces of material lying about before I have to create something else.

So then we heard the familiar brum of the Postman's moped - he was early too, what is going on here? - and I rushed to the mailbox hoping to find this week's English newspaper; it's amazing how much you can miss sensationalist, biased narrative about the goings-on in the world when it's not readily available. To my delight, there it was, alongside an exciting-looking jiffy bag. What a bonus! Care-Parcels from home - my Mum's specialty. Even though it was addressed to Nobby I decided to have a sneaky peek. In hindsight the sellotape came away a little easier than normal - you usually need a crowbar to get into my Mum's offerings - and the bag was strangely thin. And what do you think it was inside? Absolutely nothing. Mum has since confirmed that there was a Steve Berry novel in there for Nobby when it left the UK about ten days ago. Somewhere along its curiously long journey across Europe someone has seen fit to burgle my post and nick a second hand English-language book. Seriously, what is the world coming to?

Anyway, I was going to tell you about Rose's kitten. The one a friend of hers found heading traffic-wards across the footpath outside their school and decided Rose was the one who could help her work out what to do about it. I've known Rose for a few years now and had I been in the loop I would have told her friend to choose someone else; Rose is not a cat person. Rose is a tortoise person. We are both reserving the cats for our dotage when we plan to have matching retirment cottages, zimmer frames and grumpy attitudes, with at least a dozen cats between us to terrorize the Meals On Wheels guys.

Rose texted me for suggestions. I texted back - 'drop it off with a local vet'. Little did I know but by then the kitten had already been to the vet and been declared freshly born but abandoned and in need of hand rearing. You know the drill: feeding with a dropper every half an hour, 24 hours a day for the next 4 weeks, then weaning, then house-training... then the new furniture, carpets and curtains as it starts to systematically wreck the house. Piece of cake really. Not. Even I wouldn't take that on and I am the world's biggest softie. So imagine my surprise the next time I Skyped Rose and found her with a small mewing bundle on her lap and a mini-feeding bottle in her hand...

She's called him Claude and he seems to be doing really well. Rose seems to be coping with the sleep deprivation. She's now fluent in 'mieow' and the proud owner of a homemade 'kitten sling' so she can keep him close by and still get stuff done around the house. Which is good because the house, in her words, is an inch thick in microbes given that Claude now poos every ten minutes and they've been unable to fashion a kitten nappy yet so she normally dashes to the sink at the first whiff.

So today I gladly pass on my World's Biggest Softie crown to my best mate. And the best of British luck to her. At least I can also put away my wet kipper - I suspect she won't be needing any more 'No, you do NOT want another baby!' beatings after all this.

The world's gone mad

I think summer fever has set in - there are some weird things going on.

One not so weird is me not blogging for a few weeks. I have an excellent excuse this time, and no, Tiggy didn't eat my keyboard. The whole ruddy computer crashed. Can you Adam and Eve it? I was trying to fix the stupid thing at the time because its been on the cards for a while what with the sinister blue screen appearing every time Pickle boots up a game of Littlest Pet Shop online. A sensible person would have forked out a hundred quid for a portable hard drive and backed up their data first. But not me. I bought some cheap quick-fix software instead that resulted in a quite emphatic 'Computer Says No.'

Thankfully we managed to locate a Hungarian Rent-a-Geek (actually we cheated and bribed the IT department at Nobby's work with a months supply of chocolate biscuits...) and they managed to get the thing back on its feet with all the files intact. It's now running with the aid of a Zimmer frame but hey, it could have been a lot worse. And then I went out and spent a hundred quid on a portable hard drive and backed up all my data.

Meanwhile strange things are afoot in Budapest. Some massive bloke rang my doorbell the other morning - when I was barely awake given that SCHOOL'S OUT FOR SUMMER!!!! and I had been enjoying the first of many lie-ins - and after my standard greeting of 'please stop what you're saying, I don't speak Hungarian' he managed to get across 'water...off'. We've been here almost a year now so I knew this was my cue to race through the shower, fill the kettle, switch off the washing machine and stick a large bucket of water by each loo because sure enough the water supply was off for the rest of the day. When we drove out later to visit some sweeter smelling friends than ourselves, we saw the source of the trauma, yet another burst watermain gushing torrents of water down the hill. I shan't tell you the extortionate rate we are paying for the water here but I'm not convinced we're getting our money's worth.

Anyway, we returned home this afternoon to find that the lovely electric gates into the drive refused to open. I so wish we'd had these things in France instead of dicing with death each day double parking while I ran round to close the things by hand but too late now. It turned out that today's challenge is that the power is out. There I was with 2 hungry children, a bag of potatoes and couple of courgettes and no way to cook it all. I could have used the gas barbecue I suppose... if the gas bottle delivery man hadn't mangled the connector the other day and had to take the whole thing away for repair, calling 'see you in a couple of weeks' over his shoulder.

Hmm. Well, Nobby's just walked in with a bottle of wine and two glasses so I am going to save the story of Rose and the newborn kitten, christened Claude (clawed!) and nickname Poo-fest, for another day.
Bye for now.

No time!

I do not have time to Blog at the moment. It is a terrible revelation, you'd think that I would be able to get creative and make some time in my day to report all my doings to my news-starved friends and rellies but the truth is I am mired in a confusing mix of business and laziness which means that I am either chasing my tail trying to get through my to-do list or flaking out on the sofa trying to recover from a frantic day. So I am sorry you are having to wait several weeks between episodes of Nobby and Me. It's not actually because we are more boring than watching bowls on TV or a weekend at a librarian's conference, its quite the opposite.

I have even been seen sporting my watch recently which I rebelliously shed several months ago after reaslising that life in a Budapest stylee was proving much easier to handle than the clamour of the French school runs. No longer was I hemmed in by ten minute drop-off and pick-up windows four times a day or the mania of trying to get two kids to two different locations at the same time. I am theoretically free as a bird between 8h30 and 15h now I am here. But then I started looking for stuff to do. Then stuff started finding me for doing. And everything is going a bit Pete Tong.

Rose bought me a fabulous present for my birthday, it's called a To-Don't List, a large pad with 4 sections where you can write things you want to sabotage, shelve, forget about and generally chuck over the fence. In other words the million jobs that are beating down your door that you know you need to do but would rather round up and put in a field with a healthy dollop of semtex - such as your third tax return of the year (don't ask, and don't move country either for that matter), the financial review you promised to get to the financial advisor by end of January, finding english speaking dentists in a foreign land so Nobby can finally get rid of his wisdom teeth or finding a place where you can get the Nintendo DS repaired before the 5-hour drive to Croatia in the summer. The fact that it says To Don't on the pad goes some small way to relieving the tension, but I still have to get it all done somehow!!

And then I hold my hand up for a research project. What was I thinking? I reckoned I could fit it all in around the teaching and the language lessons and the visitors. Mercifully I didn't have to teach today as the poor little mites are in annual testing this week. I was invited to help adjudicate but I decided to get started on this thing instead and I wish I hadn't! There is a tonne of it and I am new at research and I can see this taking me a lot longer than the 20-30 hours I was told, possibly with a quick divorce tacked on at the end. Damn. At least I will be getting paid, though I fear it will be about a penny an hour judging by how long the introdution took me.

So whilst I have a lot to tell you about our recent round of guests from Paris, Pickle's new bike, the Boy Next Door's performance in Jack and the Beanstalk, Poppet's piano recital, Tiggy's relentless digging, and the mail-order sausages I just signed up for (?!) it will all have to wait for next time as I have groceries to buy and kids to collect before we all starve or are handed over to Social Services.

I'll be back.

Upstaged

You know, kids have the ability to make you feel a lot of things - angry, happy, sad, proud, guilty... or just totally stoopid. I am an intelligent woman, I did my time at school, as I endlessly remind the small people when they reckon they know it all. Then, just as you least expect it the little buggers totally upstage you, usually in front of strangers, often numbering ten or more, and prove that they do indeed know it all.

We spent this bank holiday weekend exploring the 'Danube Bend' out to the North of Budapest: lots of lovely countryside, castles, cathedrals and holey roads. No, that's not a typo, there was nothing religious about this tarmac, although I doubt it has been maintained since the Crusades. I love to complain about the roads up here in the Buda hills - we have one on the way back from town which looks like it is gradually wrinkling down the hill and rattles small pieces off the soviet buses as they bomb down it; we have to remind my Dad to clench his teeth so he won't lose his dentures. You'd think the main road in a major tourist spot would be pretty well looked after. But you'd be wrong. The main road up along the Danube is so full of potholes the only way to avoid them all would be to constantly swerve across the road as if you were following a large snake, who was very late home for dinner and didn't want to upset the missus. I was especially sensitive about it because Nobby's back started to play up as we left civilisation and the ol' Sharan tends to roll when she goes round bends and bounce when she encounters so much as pebble in the road. Poor Nobby.

Still, at least there was a fabulous hotel waiting for us with lovely warm spa pools which the kids dragged us into before we'd even unpacked. These are the same kids who moan and groan every Wednesday before their swimming lesson, but plop them in a jaunty shaped pool with water jets, fountains and a 'rapid river' and they are happy as Larry. In fact you won't be able to drag them out until even their noses have started to resemble prunes. Nobby and me had had it after an hour but Poppet and Pickle stayed in for another two, diving for bits of plastic, splashing old ladies and generally being a nuisance, so we hit the poolside bar. It was 5pm. See, that's what they mean by 'drive you to drink'.

Next day we explored some ruins and joined in some of the medieval activities that were laid on for the holiday weekend. Poppet made a corn dolly and Pickle had a go at archery. Then Poppet made a flower out of dried grasses and Pickle threw daggers at a tree stump. They both started making candle by hand, until they realised the dipping-and-waiting was going to take more than their customary attention span of 5 minutes so Mummy took over while they tried their hand at stonemasonry. Yes, this place had it all. One lady enjoyed trying out her English on us and was showing Pickle some ancient games like cup-and-ball and spinning tops. But right next door was a mock jousting machine-thingy where you strapped on a shield and attacked it with a sword - much more his cup of tea. Poor lady didn't stand much of a chance unless she fancied a duel.

At the top of the hill was an all-weather Bobsled run, boasting 750m of track. We just couldn't resist. We have a local one near to our house but this one had bigger and better sleds, with back rest and seatbelts because they go so fast. As long as you don't get stuck behind the Saga day-trippers of course. No offence but I should have realised when 'Doris' and 'Derek' ahead of us in the queue decided they would ride tandem that they were not going to be flying round the corners on two wheels like Poppet and me planned to. Oh no. Derek was gripping that brake so hard I could see the white knuckles from my own sled, creeping along behind him. Well, never mind. It looked like the most fun Doris had seen in a while so all power to them.

On Sunday we visited the hugest cathedral I have ever seen, in Esztergom. Ostensibly the scene of Rose's first 'proper' kiss (read 'snog') . It's quite a setting. I really can't remember mine (she lied) but it was nowhere near as nice a location. We jumped on a Petit Train for a scenic tour, not really sure what to expect as the driver only gave us a picture postcard each as tickets and he somehow convinced himself that since I didn't speak Hungarian I must be fluent in German so he nattered on about 'drei-hundert forints die kinderer' while I quietly switched my face to screensaver.

But here's something we didn't expect - there is a bridge across the Danube in Esztergom which the little train trundled happily across after a brief jaunt past some pastel pink cottages and an almighty building site, and lo and behold, we were in Slovakia. Then he pulled up beside an ice cream shop and invited us all to get off and go get an ice cream. Of course the kids were already picking flavours while I hesitated and made a quick check in the guide book - Slovakia already switched to the Euro. We only had Hungarian forints. This was going to be one very quick conversation. Mercifully they were quite happy to take whatever money we had. I don't mean that nastily though, quite the opposite. How much would you pay for a double scoop of ice cream in a wafer cone in a popular tourist spot in the UK? £2? £2.50? They wanted the equivalent of 30p. And when I gave them 7p too much they made me wait for change. Incredible.

So I should point out that all weekend Her Royal Highness Queen Poppet was twittering on about 'holiday presents'. She picked hers out when we stopped for lunch on the way up on Friday. I advised her to shop around a bit, given that the item in her affections was a polished piece of rock on a leather shoe-lace and the one next to it had just fallen off in her hand. (Cue swift exit from tacky, tourist-trap.) And the fact that we hadn't even got there yet so there was no guarantee that she was going to be well behaved and actually earn a gift. That won me a very puzzled look. Earn a gift? Has Mummy gone mad? Surely we just go on and on and on about it and wear her down until she chucks the wallet at us and sighs 'take what you want' while Daddy slowly hits his head against a wall...?

So we left it until the very last minute, hoping the idea would miraculously evaporate from her head and silently seething for introducing the stupid practice in the first place. It didn't, of course, and naturally it was my stupid idea several holidays ago before I realised these brats have memories like elephants. And we ended up at a little souvenir market in the car park by the cathedral. Poppet picked out a necklace with an enormous sparkly butterfly on it. Then Pickle all of a sudden became very excited about a wooden trinket box on the neighbouring stall. There were loads of them, all different sizes, lacquered in different colours and questionably carved in abstract patterns. I picked one up and immediately put it down again as a bit of a waste of time and money. But he wouldn't give it up.

'My friend's got one of these! I've wanted one for ages! Can I have a box Mummy?' So I took the one he was shoving at me and tried to open it. Nothing. The lid wouldn't budge.
'I'm not sure,' says I, grabbing another one and trying the lid. That one wouldn't budge either. There was no keyhole and the stall holder was just leaning against the table wearing an enigmatic smile when I turned my confused face towards her.

Then little hands grabbed the box from me and a little voice piped up with,
'Oh, Mummy. Don't you know? It's a magic box.'
And the little know-all proceeded to move the sliding panels, find the secret key, uncover the hidden keyhole and open the darned box, while I stood there like a muppet with my mouth open. Totally upstaged.
I just handed my wallet to the lady and said 'take what you want.'