This morning she came into our room “to look after us” and snuggled in between us before kicking off the bedclothes (rendering both of us unclad) and then demanding Milkshake (the televisual kind) and milk. We got up, Babyfather went downstairs to get the milk, I showered, peace descended.  When I got back, the following exchange:

Doddle: Mum, can we make croissants today?

Recidivist: We don’t make croissants, darling.

D: (Impatient) But can we have some?

R: I don’t think so, love, they’re very rich and your tummy is still not right.

D: (Wheedling) But I’m better.

R: Well, you’re not really better, are you?  Yesterday we thought you were and then you were sick in the afternoon.

D: But I won’t be sick today.

R: We don’t know that yet – you might be.

D: (Angry) I won’t be.

R: Darling I’m sorry but you’re not having croissants. You can have bagels or toast -

D: (Whining) But I don’t like bagels anymore.

R: Well you can’t have croissants. It’s just not going to happen. I am trying to make sure you get better.

D: (Furious and incoherent) No don’t you …  I don’t … dah …

R: Doodle!

D: I’M RUNNING AWAY AND NEVER COMING BACK (Stomping downstairs). I don’t want to live with you anymore.

(The following is overheard from downstairs, between Doodle and Babyfather):

B: Doodle, that’s not a very nice thing to say to your mum.

D: (The following few utterances all in full-flowing tantrum mode) I don’t want to live with her anymore. I want to go back to London.

B: So who are you going to live with?

D: I just want to live with you.

B: But I live with mummy, here.

D: I don’t want to live with mummy, I just want us both to live in London without mummy.

(I carried on getting dressed. After a while, Doodle appeared in the bedroom, and came up to me and looked at me.  She tilted her head to one side, and narrowed her eyes, determined to get through an unpleasant task.)

D: Sorry.

R: Oh darling, that’s ok. But you must be careful about saying angry things to people.

D: Can I have some chocolate spread on toast?

After much more discussion about what she could and couldn’t have, we had a rambling conversation which took in the following: where we live, why she’ll have to wait til she’s grown up to decide where she lives, why she can’t see that she’s growing up, how the fact that she outgrows her clothes and shoes proves that she’s growing all the time, how she doesn’t want to get too big for her new purple shoes, doesn’t want different shoes when she’s a grown up, and why didn’t she have an icecream last night. A brief return to the croissant debate, consensus on chocolate spread, and I was finally off.

Then to the doctor’s to drop off a poo sample. Then up the hill to put in an application for next September to an already oversubsribed list at a school out of our catchment area. And thence here.

Now to do some real work.

The new series has been less well received in our household. For a start, the presenter, Victoria Coren, had begun edging her way onto the shortlist for the list of “personalities” of whom my tolerance is very low. Also on this list (reasons in parentheses) are June Sarpong (that voice), Keira Knightly (the whole smug package), and Aishleyne from last year’s Big Brother (she looks like her breath smells of onions – the list of her other offences would not fit in the space of one blog). (And excuse the excessive use of brackets, but yes, I am aware that all of my pet-hates are women, but I don’t think, as Babyfather seems to, that this necessarily means anything.)

Victoria (Vicky as she likes to call herself) presented such a simpering, self-satisfied persona to the cameras that it began to seriously erode the pleasure the programme gave me. The mock-flirtatious smiles, coupled with an accent which I imagine Victoria herself (I will not use a diminutive for her) believes to be cut-glass, became too much for me and I began hoping that she would be cut down to size by the guardians of the OED to whom she submitted her weekly findings. Stern and academic, they presented a nice foil to her capricious flippancy, and a couple of cutting words from them would surely have stemmed the stream of her twittering.

In addition to this, our Friday night schedule was already full, and with Ugly Betty, Peep Show (now finished – and thank goodness, with the “watching through the gaps between my fingers” horror that some of the episodes accomplished), Friday Night with Jonathan Ross, Eastenders, and more recently the double whammy of Big Brother plus eviction show, our sky plus was already creaking through over use. So something had to go and it was B&P.

That notwithstanding, it is to the idea behind the programme that I owe this blog entry. For I have coined a new word of which I am proud, and I want it recorded here for posterity.

Last week Babyfather and I were having one of the wondering conversations which we have of an evening, and the word forelock was mentioned by one of us. We discussed its origin and I wondered if fetlock was so named because it’s a piece of hair above a foot. (It is, I’ve just checked.) So forelock is hair on a forehead, fetlock is hair on a foot. So far so simple. But I began pondering other possible variants, and came up with the coinage knoblocks. It may not look like much at first, but say it aloud a couple of times. Allow the second syllable to roll off your tongue and enjoy its comedy potential.

I’ve written a possible dictionary entry:

Knoblocks pronounciation ‘näb-”läk NOUN. The locks of hair which grow on the pubic bone above the genitalia. Originally coined for use with reference to a man’s anatomy, it became used for both male and female pudenda when the person who coined the word consigned mingelocks to the dustbin of etymological history.

I’ve timestamped this entry. We first discussed it last Thursday 31 May. And maybe when it’s in the OED or the Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English, or wherever it will first be honoured, this little blog entry will help ensure that Victoria Coren doesn’t get her knoblock nets in a twist.

Freddie – likes a pint.

Firstly. I can’t be the only person to think that what happened was quite funny, can I?

Secondly, if he does (which I strongly believe not to be the case) have a drink problem then he should receive sympathy and support, and offered treatment, not censure. The comments on the show I heard and on online news sites this morning are horrid – treating alcoholism as a choice and a disgrace rather than a devastating illness which wrecks lives.

Thirdly. Since when did the nation’s sportsmen owe us something? Since when did they become accountable for a nation’s distress when they don’t perform to the best standard? I can assure the bizarrely misguided caller who I heard last night that Flintoff wants England to win the world cup a whole lot more than mere spectators, even fans so dedicated that they spend their lives and their money travelling round the world with the Barmy Army. As far as I am aware, my tax dollar does not fund the England cricket team, and much as I love to watch them and hope that they win, I don’t think it’s my right to have an Ashes/World Cup winning cricket team.

Fourthly. Since when did sportsmen become the pillars of morality which they seem to be expected to be now? A sample of comments on the Evening Standard’s website This is London read “Flintoff is a chav. The moment he appeared with a short sleeved T- shirt & tattoo’s in Australia it was clear he was unfit to lead England at cricket. So it has proved, he should be warned, shape up or ship out, drunken louts not required.” “All we hear about nowadays is sportsmen behaving badly. Before playing for your country was about pride but its all about the ‘celebrity’ side of it now. These sportsmen are role models to youngsters and should act responsibly not like drunken teenagers.”

Nonsense. All they want is to play cricket. They didn’t ask to be role models, and it is not their fault if the tabloid press use non-stories like these to illustrate their own thundering, (and hypocritical) morality. And anyway, what’s wrong with going out and getting drunk? Flintoff is 29 and world famous. Nasser Hussein may point to a drink problem in the team, but after the few months he’s had, wouldn’t anyone want a bit of a bender?

Finally. Cast your minds back to September 2005. We’d just won the ashes (I was there, at the Oval), and the lads had gone on a three day bender which included a grand parade on an open top bus, nights without sleep, interviews with the press which were barely coherent, and a visit to Downing Street where Freddie wasn’t the only one who admitted to being worse for wear. The players were offered tea and water, and after a quiet word the Prime Ministerial fridge was raided, and they were given beer and wine instead. Harmy was pictured with a beer on the children’s climbing frame. All the papers carried pictures of the victory parades, and glowing stories of their drunken antics. Here’s a report at the time, which starts with a snippet from a Vaughan interview

“Then, with a sly smile, he added: “It’s been a long night. We’ve celebrated in true English fashion.” One look at the players, smartly dressed but bleary-eyed after a late, late night, and still glugging down beer or flutes of champagne, told you that much was true.” Not that anyone cared. Two months ago, cricket was languishing in a peloton of sports behind football, now it’s sexy and cool. As Christine Simon from the Isle of Wight put it: “I don’t follow cricket usually, but this makes you feel proud to be British, it’s what the country needs. The atmosphere is marvellous.”

So what do we gather from this? That it’s ok to have a drink problem when the country is celebrating a win with you? That when you’ve won the Ashes you can take a break from the tabloid-imposed role model duties? Or just that the papers will make a story out of anything, and if Fletcher had had a quiet word, past captains hadn’t got on their sanctimonious high horse, and the media had accepted it was just a bit of fun, most of us wouldn’t have cared a toss about it, beyond it being a mildly amusing story?

In general, a piece of news will catch my eye and I will muse over it on the way to work/whilst lying awake at night wondering how I am going to turn over without my massive bump making me fall out of bed/whilst slipping into a trance like state in front of Deal or No Deal. I will then slowly form an opinion, edit out my more knee-jerk reactions, try and pretty-up any particularly thunderous or rabid responses it solicits in me, and engage myself in a somewhat masturbatory game of putting this opinion into phrases which I like to believe are beautifully turned, but still this side of pretentious.

My lunch hour at work will then unravel into a glorious afternoon of checking my computer rear view mirror for suspicious superiors or uppity juniors, who may find fault with my translating these thought processes into what you see before you, during work time.

Obviously this process changes from post to post, as some of them are just vacant ramblings and not news-based at all. But usually something will grab my attention enough to enter me into the process, and hold it enough for me to actually get me out of the process the other end. Call this an apology for laziness, if you will, but recently nothing has inspired me to write anything. I had a half-written piece on the Oscars, a few thoughts about writing something on the Estonian jam mountain (should that be lake?), and just today a half-arsed attempt at a post filled with wit and levity about the fact that Judas Iscariot has finally been given his right to reply in the press. But I got bored halfway through when I read about the caution with which the academic community is greeting the revelation. Apparently the text is from the second century and is therefore a second-hand gnostic interpretation of what happened. And it has something to do with The Da Vinci Code. I was almost comatose by the time I got to that bit – obviously inserted by the journalist in an attempt to make what was an interesting story which had become dull dull dull a bit more topical.

There is one piece of news out today that I love though, and that my imagination hasn’t stopped mulling over; and that is the delightful snippet which I saw on the beeb last night, and which is seemingly covered nowhere but on their website, detailing the fact that a policeman who put a youth in a bin in a Hackney park was cleared of charges. What’s not to like about this story? It was in Hackney, and although it doesn’t mention what park it was, if it was anything like the Hackney green spaces I know, the youth was almost certainly feral. The policeman got off, the father admitted that if the kid was being ‘lippy’ he should have been arrested, and the friend who filmed the whole thing on his mobile phone could be heard laughing throughout the video clip. At a time when Damilola Taylor’s parents are going to have to sit through another entire trial before having the chance of seeing their son’s killers brought to book, it is refreshing to see that a little kid who deserved a stern telling off by a responsible adult, can be given one without the world tearing its hair out.

Crikey. I sometimes scare myself with my reactionary sounding rhetoric. I can almost hear the words political correctness gone mad. Let me know your views – am I a closet Daily Express reader? I hope that actually, on reflection, the reason I enjoyed this story is because of the fact that the incident was caught on camera, and my reaction is good old fashioned laughing at another’s pain.

The site has been around for almost ten years now, (and hence I feel a little bit behind the zeitgeist on this one), and the phrase has obviously recently come into such popular usage that a quick google of it reveals the following results: 1 and 2 are direct links to the site. 3 is a wikipedia definition. 4 is a wordspy definition. 5 an urban dictionary one. 6 an article from USA Today discussing the sudden popularity of the word. 7 another online definition. In short, most of the articles are concerned with the etymology of the phrase.

At university, my linguistics tutor had a passion for the development of the English language. I will always remember him – a man who is viewed as one of the foremost worldwide authorities on Beowulf, a man who eschewed college functions and could, by all accounts, more regularly be found in the seedier pubs playing pool with the townies, a man who habitually wore black trousers, a white shirt and white trainers, with his shoulder length, receding hair tied in a pony tail to give him the look of Bill Bailey – leaning forward in his chair, jumping up to pull down a book from the thousands which lined his rooms, hopelessly trying to convey to a couple of hung-over, coming-down undergraduates the dynamic, vital nature of a language which has evolved and grown over so many thousands of years.

Perhaps this seed eventually germinated, but I gradually (and way too late for it to be of any use to me in my degree mark) developed a similar passion, and while with me it is not supported by much scholarly research, I still admit to a frisson of excitement when I spot a new trend in linguistic development. Having such an interest at times makes me feel as though my default position is one of deep conservatism. I refuse to abbreviate in text messages, find smileys abhorrent, and still bristle when I walk into a cafe to be confronted with a sign offering me ‘2 egg’s, bacon and sausage’s.’ The English language is a glorious thing, and if I were to be appointed guardian of it, (arrogant, perhaps, but this comes vertiginously close to topping my all time dream jobs list) I would allow only judicious and witty rule breaking when it comes to its evolution.

But the English language is also a completely organic thing, and has always been subject to change due to popular movements. The same tutor once set an essay on dictionaries – whether they were prescriptive or descriptive. Samuel Johnson tried to write ‘a dictionary by which the pronunciation of our language may be fixed, and its attainment facilitated; by which its purity may be preserved, its use ascertained, and its duration lengthened’. It was an admirable but completely misguided task to set himself, and he soon realised that it would not be possible, and instead concentrated for the first time in recording the usage of words in print, drawing his definitions from how they had been used, not how he felt they should be. In the end, he had altered his stance so radically that he believed that “to enchain syllables, and to lash the wind, are equally the undertakings of pride”.

So I have to accept, it would seem, that changes to the language which I won’t particularly like are bound to pass into common usage. And that they will happen precisely because it is such a progressive force. And I will have to keep my mutterings to a minimum if and when the cafe owners win out and the incorrectly placed possessive apostrophe passes into wider usage. And modulate my voice when I complain ‘egg’s what?’ But in the meantime I can also celebrate when something gets added or changed, of which I wholeheartedly approve. And ‘jump the shark’, because it is an interesting, vibrant coinage; because it describes a phenomenon which is particularly of-the-moment, and because it is memorable and unique, is one such addition.

The site’s quite fun too.

She was in court earlier this year for assaulting a woman at her ex boyfriend’s house in 2003. And part of her probation was an instruction to stay off drugs. Just a few days after both she and her attorney spoke of “over a year” of living a “drug free life”, she collapsed at a party in July, and was tested for drugs in hospital, and being found positive was deemed to be violating her probation. She has been sentenced by a lenient Judge to extended rehabilitation, with the threat that if she doesn’t clean up her act, she will serve a year in prison.

All this we knew already last week. But the latest reports tell that she is also pregnant with Steve Coogan’s baby following a two week drug-fuelled sex romp in a Los Angeles hotel. Coogan has recently split with his wife following newspaper reports of his sex-fuelled drug romps with two lap dancers.

Love has supposedly asked a friend ‘ “What does it make me look like that I have slept with Alan Partridge? Given the A-grade stars I’ve dated it’s embarrassing. I mean … Alan Partridge!”

Steve Coogan is denying the affair.

Now I normally would not have ventured out shopping on Saturday. I was still walking like a cripple, and the resulting pain, and the fact that not being able to ride my bike meant that I had to catch a bus, should have been deterrents enough. However, it was the last weekend of the sales, and I have to buy new smarter work clothes for my new smarter job.

En route to shopping, I was reading The Guardian Weekend Magazine, where I found out that after three years of telling us not to wear black, the fashion editor has declared that it is now back in vogue, and is, as the Private Eye Neophiliac column will no doubt be soon recounting, ‘the new black’. I was pondering on this as I rode the bus, and thinking about the fact that I had read earlier in the week, in Heat magazine, that green is now out, having been the colour to wear for the last, ooooh, two weeks, and we should all be switching to blue for autumn. Which would have felt premature, if the weather hadn’t been decidedly Octoberish this weekend.

So I met up with Insightful, and she spent the next two hours plucking things off rails and carrying ever heavier piles of clothes for me to try on. Along the way, one of our conversations went like this.

I: So I am not sure what to buy, I really like the whole hippy look. R: (in mock horror) No, no, no. Boho is out. It’s all directional for Autumn/Winter. I: (laughing at stupidity and vacuousness of R’s comments) Well I am going to do Boho now. R: (pondering) Yes. It’s actually a good idea. All that stuff is in the remainder bins, and you’re so far behind the times you’re actually probably ahead of them, with the way fashion spins round these days.

Now this may give the impression that I am a fashionista or at least a fashionistawannabe. This is not the case. I am just awfully good at recycling garbage that I read in the pulp press. But the theme of recycling takes me back to the whole ‘we own too much stuff’ one. Because I am struck by how regularly we are supposed to update our wardrobes, and as so many of us can’t afford to do this without buying the cheapest thing on the high street, and as they are invariably made out of fabrics which are ecologically damaging in their production, and which come from the Far East and therefore have high carbon miles attached to them, fashion really is one of the worst perpetrators of environmental degradation. The need to follow trends is so pointless and I sometimes wonder how otherwise intelligent women can talk about these things as though they really matter.

My friends and colleagues may think it’s scruffy, but I am still wearing clothes I bought four, five years ago. And in one case, a dress which I was given, second hand, by The Queen of Cakes when we finished University in 1997! Although that only really gets worn around the house on spring-cleaning day. I usually buy clothes which are similar in style anyway. This isn’t because I am stuck in a rut – more that I am aware of what suits me, or at the very least doesn’t make me look horrendous. And it will continue to do so, no matter what colour or accessory we are being told to wear this season. And can you imagine if everyone out there was wearing green?

And I guess I just hope that the people who do update their wardrobe every season, have the sense to take the stuff they don’t need to a charity shop, or give it away on the fabulous yahoo usergroup, freecycle. Thousands of users have already joined up, and the purpose is to give away anything you no longer need. No money is allowed to change hands. Failing that, even flogging it on eBay is better than throwing it away.

I returned home triumphant, having bought two jackets and two tops. It is total coincidence that the tops are both blue, and one of the jackets, black. Now I had better go and take that pile of Heat and Grazia from the floor by the toilet, and pop them in the recycling…

What I am going to write:

Dear [Manager]

As required by my contract of employment, I hereby give you one months’ notice of my intention to leave my position as Designer.

I have accepted a position with xxx Company, an opportunity to further my current career goals and achieve growth within the new company through a more senior and diverse role.

It has been my genuine pleasure to work for zzz Company during these last three years. I have enjoyed working with zzz Company’s fine staff of professionals and colleagues, and will miss my associations here. I wish you and zzz Company continued success in all your endeavors.

If I may be of any assistance in the hiring process or training of my replacement, please know that I will gladly make myself available to this effort during the next four weeks.

Yours sincerely

Recidivist

What I would like to write:

Dear [Manager]

Every time I was told I was getting more responsibility, you heaped the work on me, and then neglected to balance this with adequate remuneration, status or recognition. I am more qualified, more skilled and more intelligent than every other member of the team, but, strangely, not more senior. My Head of Department was uncovered as having told a series of lies about me when I approached HR to clarify my position, and yet, even though they have confirmed that they are aware that his comments were untrue, I have received no formal apology or explanation.

I have been offered a job with a company which is going to pay me more and give me the responsibility which befits my skills and background.

Come on, what would you do?

Yours sincerely

Recidivist

I am a bit of a fan of Magic FM, often tuning it in on a Sunday morning, or when I am having a relaxing evening bath, or other occasions when the frenetic pace of Xfm, with their playlists of The Kaiser Chiefs et al seems inappropriate, or the calming drone of ‘Women’s Hour’ a tad soporific. I am not a fan, however, of dull, forced conversations, and have been known to spend a whole two hours glowering from under my fringe at hairdressers attempting to strike up a conversation with me with such original gems as ‘Are you going anywhere nice on your holidays?’, ‘Got any plans for the weekend?’ and ‘Weather looks like its going to turn out nice.’

I tried to let her outpouring of banality wash over me (under normal circumstances I would have been digging my finger nails into my palms in exasperation), and was struggling to contort my face into something resembling friendly attentiveness, when she commented on a Bryan Ferry song, saying ‘Now, play your average Will Young song in 25 years time and no one will feel this sort of nostalgia’. As she paused for breath, the song came to an end to be replaced by an ad for that little twat of a Crazy Frog.

I took the opportunity to vent some of the spleen and spume some of the bile her wittering had caused to build up, by directing it instead at the television, commenting that while I didn’t know how the cacophony could have outsold Coldplay four to one, I didn’t think much to Coldplay’s offering anyway. Her response caused me to have to exercise such control over my facial expression that my hands shook with laughter, and I still have a little chip mark in my otherwise immaculate ‘Notting Hill’ coloured nails.

‘It’s because most of our youngsters are listening to this that they’re all on ASBOs’, she said. ‘Take those kids who hung [sic] that boy up in Yorkshire….’ I blocked out her voice by paying full attention to the amphibian oddity.

I am so glad to see that, despite being bombarded with such music, my technician has managed to keep her powers of reasoning intact. The moral fabric of our society is safe.

The interview makes for uncomfortable reading because Ms Gold clearly wanted Mr Laird (or Mr Zadie Smith as she so embarrassingly put it) to conform to her preconceptions of him, and because the ‘I’s’ in the profile outnumber the ‘he’s’, leaving the reader wondering whether she understands the basic underlying purpose of such an article – to reveal the interviewee not the interviewer.

Granted, she points out that he holds back in the interview, and wonders to herself ‘when is he going to tell me who he really is?’ (Memo to Ms Gold – it is your job as interviewer to get him to open up, and can you please stop it with the ‘me, me, me’s already). She also, rather bile-inducingly, goes on to say ‘He reminds me of a flower, he opens and closes with the light.’ Not since – oh, let me think… the previous paragraph, where Mr Laird has managed to shoe-horn a reference to Nabokov into a question about his favourite biscuit – has The Guardian’s pretentiousness hit me so hard. In fact, I start to lose patience with him too, when I read the phrase with which he ends the biscuit musing ‘[with] Chocolate Hobnobs – you have to give a little bit of yourself’.

He redeems himself slightly towards the interview when he shows his thought processes have mirrored mine, and he has seen through her completely, in the following exchange, ‘I ask him to describe himself for me, as if he were writing himself into a novel. “That’s your job,” he says’. Bravo, Nick, I think.

But excuse my ramblings above. I just couldn’t let the article go uncommented-on. And having started that rant, it was very difficult to stop. The reason it prompted me to write a blog, however, was for the very tangential reason that he confesses to a weakness for chicken omelettes, the concept of which prompted a slight confusion in me. It just seemed wrong. I carried on with what I was doing, and then, a couple of minutes later, my subconscious surfaced, and presented to my conscious brain, the cause of my mental judder – eating chicken with chicken eggs is just plain strange. Quiches, omelettes, scrambled eggs, boiled eggs – all are paired with meat on a regular basis – usually pork-based, but often beef, lamb, fish, too. Just rarely, in my experience, chicken.

I don’t know if it is because of a kind of biological good manners that we have avoided a culinary marriage of the two. Is the idea of animal mortality harder to bear if it is mother and reproductive matter, dead, on the same plate?

I would like to point out that I am not a vegetarian. Indeed, I am an enthusiastic carnivore. But the idea of chicken wrapped in warm egg – a neat little inversion of how they existed in their live state, was one I just found disquieting.

But, fuck it, perhaps I am deconstructing this all too much?