The Trouble With Guidance

I don’t know about you, but I didn’t have much luck with guidance counsellors when I was at school.  Here’s why:

Counsellor - “Good morning, how are you today?”
Me -     “Good thanks, and yourself?”
    “Oh, um…yes…I’m fine, thank you…for asking.”  She looked quite flustered and taken aback by my interest in her well being and general state of mind.  There was an uncomfortable pause as she gathered her thoughts.  I decided things would progress more smoothly if I took the lead in this.
    “So, I’ve been thinking of going on to college.  I’d really like to become a teacher - either in History or English Literature.”  I offered.
    “Oh really?  Why’s that?”  She blinked.
    I should probably mention at this stage that she was the kind of woman that was unbelievably un-self aware with thick coke bottle glasses, wiry hair with a mind of it’s own and always seemed to have more lipstick on her teeth than on her lips.  The kind of woman whose house was filled with floral patterns from the 1930s.  The kind of woman that had several cats with names such as Cuddles, Twinkles, Mr Snuffles etc.
    “Well, I’m really interested in those subjects and I would love to stay in an educational environment.”
    “Oh right.  What kind of subjects will you need to take at college to do that then?”
    I considered this carefully.  “Um, well I suppose History and English would be key.”  I watched tentatively as she bobbed her head up and down in a slow nod.
    “Mmmm,” she agreed, “you’re probably right there.”  She took a moment to look vacantly at her lap, then suddenly snapped her head back to look at me with a severe and slightly panicked look on her face.
    “You do realise you’ll have to go to University to be a teacher?”  She seemed to have to work hard to produce the word ‘University’ from her mouth.
    “Yes,” I replied, “I’d quite like to go to University.”  I was starting to worry I’d wandered into the wrong office.
    “Well are your grades good enough for something like that?” She blinked rapidly.
    “I’m predicted A* to C grades for my G.C.S.E.’s.”
    With her mouth hanging slightly open, she stared at me as if I had just given birth to a fridge door through my left nostril.

    “Oh” She said.  And blinked.

    “Mmmm” I said.  And swallowed too loudly.

    As she gave a longing lingering look to the phone on her desk, I got the impression that she was desperate to escape from this situation.  I resolved to move this on as quickly as I could, so I said,
    “I ordered some information and application details from my two favourite colleges.  They each sent me a prospectus with details on their courses.  This one looks really good - the booklet says they have a well established Arts and Humanities faculty and that they run yearly trips to Rome for History and Art History students.  I sent off my application to them this morning, so hopefully I’ll get an interview in the next couple of weeks.”

She blinked.

    “They have a prospectus?”

I sighed.

I escaped from her office as quickly as I could.

Mums go to Iceland

My country of birth is the beautiful land of fire and ice that hugs the Arctic circle: Iceland.  I often tell Icelandic stories to my friends, and in particular their children.  Kids love hearing about all the Elf folklore and legends of Trolls that come from Iceland.

I was telling my friend's youngest child about Iceland, and about visiting my family when I was over there.  I was explaining to her that although my Dad is not from Iceland originally, he has in fact lived there for most of his adult life.  Children process vast amounts of new information each day, and I could almost see the cogs whirring around in her mind as she listened to what I was telling her.  I whittled on for a while..."In Iceland there are elves that live in the rocks....The mountains of Iceland contain families of Trolls....The ground is sometimes covered in several feet of snow in Iceland in the winter...."

Whilst I was talking to her, she turned and looked at me with those gorgeous big brown eyes of hers.

"Yes," she said. "I know all about Iceland."
"Really?" I said, somewhat incredulously.  I knew my friend hadn't visited Iceland before, as I would assume she would have mentioned it at some point, and I didn't think the study of Nordic countries was in the syllabus for most pre-schools.
"We've been there," she replied, with a very serious look on her face. "It's red."

My friend and I looked up from the little girl and looked at each other with matching looks of confusion.  We both fell into hysterics at exactly the same time when we realised what she was talking about.

"No honey," my friend replied through her giggles to her little girl. "Edda means Iceland the country, not the supermarket!"

Water Sports

Around the time of my 9th birthday I went on holiday with my mum and step-dad to Thailand. It is a truly beautiful place, and I feel so lucky that I had the opportunity to go there. We had a wonderful time - drinking in the sunshine-shocked warmth, eating the exotic, seeing the spectacular, navigating the wild and enjoying the luxurious.

There was, however, an incident. I think there is always some kind of incident wherever I am concerned. It involved me, the beach, a quiet afternoon, my mother and a large inflatable object attached to a 15 year old speed boat. We should have known it would end badly.

It seems my 9 year old soul was going through an adrenalin-junkie phase. I wanted to go on a jet-ski, but mother-dearest wouldn't hear of it. I wanted to go para-gliding, but mother-dearest wouldn't allow it. I wanted to go water skiing, but mother-dearest shook her head. I wanted to go abseiling, but mother-dearest stamped her foot down. And rightly so - I was 9 for heaven's sake!

Eventually, after my 9 year old attention span had flitted between various heart-attack inducing adventures for a day or so, it finally settled on something slightly more sedate. Slightly.

The hotel had it's own private beach, and this beach had it's own offering of water sport activities (see jet skiing and water skiing above). Now, I'm not sure whether my mum was actually interested in partaking in this particular activity, or whether my constant outlandish demands were making her soul whither away and die somewhere deep within her, but she actually said those magic words every kid wants to hear: "Oh alright then!"

So we walked through the pool area one beautiful sunny day to reach the idyllic crystal-clear Pacific ocean. Well, I say walked...actually it was only mum that walked. I ran around her in circles, pleading with her to hurry up. We reached the water sports section where all the jet skis (sigh!) and motor boats were tied up, and spoke to the pleasant looking but bi-lingually challenged beach attendant. Mum slowly explained to him what we were looking for.

After a few confused looks and apologetic smiles, he suddenly understood what we were asking. He looked us up and down - my mum in her swimming costume and a beach sarong, and me with my tiny scrawny 9 year old frame clad in a bikini. "Two?!" he practically shrieked. Mum looked non-plussed (looking back, my constant whining and nagging may have prompted her to have a lunch-time glass of wine), and replied, "Yes please, just the two of us."

He muttered to himself as he backed off the make the arrangements.

After a couple of minutes (well, it seemed like hours to my impatient mind) he motioned for us to follow him down the wooden ramp towards the boat. The way I remember it is this: There was a gleaming speedboat tied to the dock, with a powerful engine at it's rear waiting to roar into life. Attached to the end of the boat by a thick length of rope was a long yellow inflatable shaped like a banana, that had five separate seating areas with wide black straps to hold on to.

The way my mother remembers it is this: There was an ancient looking pile of rust floating in the water with a leaking engine attached to the end of it by some sticky tape and glue. On the end of a frayed piece of nylon string attached to the back of the boat was a large inflatable object shaped like a soggy sausage. There were five separate faded areas where people had straddled the object over the last decade or so, which were further marked out by damaged and almost-missing straps which she presumed she was supposed to hold on to.

Anyway, beauty is in the eye of the beholder and all that. So, I instantly proclaimed that I wanted to be right up front and, ignoring my mother's protests to the contrary, happily launched myself on to the banana-boat. Mum carefully negotiated her seat right behind me, and wrapped one protective arm around me whilst desperately searching for purchase on a practically non-existent "safety" strap with the other hand.

The huge excited grin on my face soon faded into abject horror as the speed boat kicked into life and sped out across the water. I didn't realise the sea was this bouncy. I didn't realise we would be going this far out to sea. I didn't realise we would be going this fast. And I sure as hell didn't realise that two people (and one of them being a 9 year old skinny wretch) going on a banana boat ride intended for the weight of five people was Not. A. Good. Idea.

Oh, we bounced and flew all over the ocean. Literally. Every time we hit a wave, I would go flying off the banana. Mum didn't know whether to laugh or cry as she watched her tiny daughter swim back towards the inflatable banana after being launched several feet into the air for the 10th time. At one point I was flung forward, and was clinging on to the rope that kept the inflatable banana attached to the boat. I distinctly remember mum holding onto my twiggy ankle at the point (and laughing hysterically, I might add).

After what seemed an eternity of lack of gravity and wild G-force mood swings, the speed boat pulled back into the shoreline, and we both jumped off and ran/swam/jumped/crawled back to dry land. Out of a British sense of politeness, Mum managed to mutter some words of gratitude to the boat driver, whilst I made a silent promise to myself to never again engage in any activities that involve speed, the sea and inflatable objects.

I have always kept this promise.

My mum

My mother is a very brave and intelligent woman. She moved over to England from her native Iceland with her three daughters when she married my step dad, and forged out a new life for herself in a strange country. She always worked hard, and then went back to full time education to obtain her A levels and then a degree in Sociology.

However, as English is her second language she often as problems with her spelling. Now, everyone that knows me will tell you that I am really pedantic about spelling and grammar, so she would always ask me for help with her essays by proof reading them for her and helping her out with her spelling. She has gotten a lot better with it though over the years, but she still struggles with it a bit.

Here is a selection of the kind of things she sends in text messages and emails:

“Good morning Sweathart, how are you?”
Translation – Good morning sweetheart, how are you?

“Yes I’m just having a class of wind and then I’m off to bed”
Translation – Yes I’m just having a glass of wine and then I’m off to bed

“It’s been tough at times, but we shoulder on…”
Translation – It’s been tough at times, but we soldier on…

“To be honest, it depends on my shit pattern”
Translation – To be honest, it depends on my shift pattern

Yes, she is a very special lady.

The Helmet Holiday

I’m visiting my Dad in Iceland for a few weeks (actually I may be here for longer, catastrophic-volcanic-eruption-depending) and we got to talking about some incidents from my childhood. There are probably a thousand stories about stupid things I did back then that make me cringe today, but the Helmet Holiday really comes out top of the list.

I was a dainty 6 year old when I met up with my Dad in Scotland for a caravan holiday on the west coast. We met at my grandmother’s house in a suburb of Glasgow, and after caving in to the pleas of his only child we went out to the toy store before we made the journey through the Scottish wilderness to get to our caravan. I had recently been given a bike for my birthday by my mother, which was waiting for me back at home in England. I must have been rather excited about the bike, because I begged my Dad to buy me a helmet (such a safety conscious child!) from the toy store we were in. Of course, with it being a toy store, there really wasn’t that much choice in the way of helmets, but I saw the one I wanted instantly.

It was yellow. Bright, brilliant, sunshine yellow. It even came with Postman Pat stickers that I could artfully customise it with. Needless to say, nothing could stop me from being over the moon about having such a glorious helmet. Whilst my Dad dutifully carried the box it came in whilst we walked back to my grandmother’s house, I jammed the helmet on to my head and proudly walked through the streets of suburban Glasgow whilst plotting where to place the Postman Pat stickers.

Sadly, my brain wasn’t all that artistically evolved at the tender age of 6, but I thought I did a pretty good job of hastily attaching every single sticker onto the helmet in the midst of my excitement. Once the stickers were jammed onto the helmet, it went straight back on my head. And it stayed there.

Almost all of the photographs that exist from that particular holiday show me wearing my bright yellow head-gear. Building a sand castle: with the helmet. Walking on the rocks: with the helmet. Eating breakfast: with the helmet. Sleeping in the bunk bed: Without the helmet (My Dad had to put his foot down somewhere. I don’t know how he managed to pry the damn thing off me!).

The trouble is I never actually rode a bike on this holiday. I didn’t have a bike to ride – mine was a good 300 miles away in the East Anglian countryside. My Dad says this simple fact didn’t seem to bother me; I just loved wearing the helmet regardless.

Nowadays I don’t ride bikes that often. And I hate the colour yellow.

Baby Oh- Oh- Oil

I can be very dumb. Hard to believe, I know, but it’s true!

I was visiting my friend for her Halloween party last year, and we always get to talking about our school days whenever we see each other. She reminded me of something I think I will never live down…

I shared a bathroom with my older sister when I was growing up. Of course, this naturally means that the bathroom was always full of bottles of various potions and concoctions that only teenage girls can accumulate to such a vast degree. I was taking a shower one evening, and started washing my hair. I did the usual blind groping for the shampoo bottle and managed to find the right one. When I had rinsed the shampoo out of my hair, my hand reached out for what I thought was a bottle of conditioner. I squirted out a dollop of it onto my hand and put it in my hair. Almost immediately I thought the texture was all wrong. I blinked several times to get the water out of my eyes so I could look at the bottle.

Oh crap, I thought. It’s Johnson’s Baby Oil!

I frantically tried to wash the oily mess out of my hair; I was rinsing and rinsing and rinsing until all the hot water was gone. This of course prompted a rant from my very pissed off sister for not leaving her any hot water, but she couldn’t resist laughing at my still slick oiled hair.

Needless to say I went to school the next day in a very foul mood. My friend that I was visiting last year said that she would never get the picture out of her head of me storming into Art class that morning looking like I had combed a vat of butter through my hair, ranting about the woes of Herbal Essences bottles feeling too similar to Johnson’s Baby Oil.

This one's for you Mum!

My mum and I don’t live in the same city, so whenever we meet up we usually go out somewhere for lunch so that we can have a good chat and catch up on each other’s lives. Now as I’ve gotten older our relationship has changed into much more of a friendship, and so when we are ladies doing lunch we usually have a right old laugh!

One of our favourite places to go is Chilli’s in Cambridge. Every time we go we always say that we won’t order too much and will just share a main of fajitas and a pudding, but when we get there and look through the menu we always end up with at least one starter, two mains and several sides because we seem to share a genetic trait for having larger eyes than bellies.

One such day we were in Chilli’s and had ordered enough food for at least six people, and after sharing a couple of stories we were feeling very giggly indeed. When the waiter brought over the bill Mum reached over for her bag to retrieve her purse. She looked into her bag, and looked over to me with a look of total amazement on her face,
“Oh no! I’ve forgotten my purse!” she said.
“Yeah right Mum,” I replied, “I’m not falling for that one!”
“No really love, I honestly don’t have it!” She burst into giggles at this point as she viewed the mixed look of horror, disbelief and naughty amusement on my face. “Do you have any money on you?” she asked.
“No Mum, I haven’t got any cash, and there isn’t any money in my account so we can’t use my card!” I said.

You see, the thing is, my Mum and I have never been in this kind of position before, so we quickly tried to haggle out the details of which one of us would be washing the pots and which one would be drying them, or whether or not we should just try and make a run for it. However, the look of horror on Mum’s face only served to send me into hysterical giggling fits, and my hysterical giggling fits only threw Mum into equally hysterical giggling fits.

For some reason, Mum decided it would be a good idea to try using my bank card to pay for the meal, even though there wasn’t any money in my account. She had some vague notion that Lloyds TSB wouldn’t mind giving me an unauthorised overdraft for no apparent reason. So when the waiter came over with his card-gadget-thingy-me-bob I handed over my bank card whilst trying desperately hard to conceal the huge grin on my face. The waiter seemed quite amused at the cackling hyenas he was taking payment from until the card-gadget-thingy-me-bob said the card was declined.

“I’m sorry Miss but there seems to be a problem. Would you like me to try again?” He asked with one cynical eyebrow raised.
I looked over at Mum choking back her laughs, and with a sudden guffaw of my own I squeaked out, “Yes please!”

He did not look impressed as the card-gadget-thingy-me-bob came back declined again. At this point Mum had to admit defeat as I almost slid under the table with the weight of my amusement, and she asked the waiter if she could please speak to the manager. It was at this point I suddenly realised that if I made a run for it, I only had to out-run Mum in order to get away…

However, before I could make my Indiana Jones style escape the manager came over, and amidst a deluge of apologies (and a small amount of flirting I might add) Mum explained the situation. The manager was a total diamond about the whole thing, and suggested Mum ring her husband to ask him to retrieve her purse from the back of the chair in the dining room and read out her card number over the phone. He even offered to lend us some cash so we could go out to the cinema!

Whenever I think about that day I still get a huge grin on my face!

People who sit next to me on the bus

1) The obnoxious teenager.
Chews gum very loudly. Either has a fabulously banal conversation on her mobile phone with other obnoxious teenagers that include words like, "wicked man", "da bomb" and "safe yeah", or play loud 'thump thump' music on their shitty speakers on said mobile phone. Smells like bubble gum.
Actions to take: Turn the volume up on iPod and stare straight ahead.

2) Wobbly granny.
Creeps onto the bus at a worringly wobbly pace and spends a few minutes riffling in her handbag for her bus pass. Almost does a somersault when the driver pulls away without giving her a chance to sit down. Smiles at all the screaming babies and haggard mothers. Smells like musty humbugs from 1972.
Actions to take: Smile and nod politely when she waxes lyrical about her seemingly endless lineage of grandchildren.

3) The drunk.
Staggers onto the bus and shouts at everyone to smile - after all it's *hic* Tuesday afternoon man, yeah! Has an uncomfortable *hic* mainly one-sided conversation with the first person unwise enough to make eye contact. Tries to light *hic* up a cigarette, and then apologises profusely *hic* when someone tentatively reminds him he isn't allowed *hic* to. Smells like a brewery.
Actions to take: Get off the bus a few stops early and walk. Yes, even if it's raining.

4) The professional.
Marches onto the bus talking at 50 decibels into an impossibly small mobile telephone about "the guys", "the office", "last weeks figures" and "the pieces of skirt on reception". Wears a loud and cheap looking suit and carries a laptop case (likely to be sans-laptop). Can't be doing as well as he would like everyone else on the bus to think, as he clearly doesn't have his own transport. Smells of way too much aftershave.
Actions to take: Pull your skirt down to cover your legs as much as possible and button up your jacket when he grins in your general direction.

5) The trenchcoat.
Round glasses. Receding hairline emphasising a sweaty forehead. Non-descript ankle length trenchcoat (even in June). Shifty eyes darting in all possible directions. You have a feeling there is a body buried in his back garden.
Actions to take: Run. Fast.

I really need a car!

Inspired by Lev Yilmaz's "Tales of Mere Existence" video "How I sit on the bus"www.talesofmereexistence.com http://www.youtube.com/user/AgentXPQ?feature=chclk

Why Eye?

I was getting this strange thing where I kept seeing things out of the corner of my eye. You know when you're just watching television or whatever, and you think you see something move, but when you look there's nothing there? Well, this was happening a lot and it was starting to bother me, so I mentioned it to my husband. He said that he thought it sounded like I had an astigmatism. For those of you that don't know what that is, it's a condition where your eyes are more rugby ball shaped than spherical. I don't know about any other affects of astigmatism, but it does sound a trifle uncomfortable if you ask me.

I was telling my friend at work about this a few months ago whilst we were at our desks, and I said I had made an appointment with an Optician to investigate John's theory about my potentially oddly shaped astigmatism-afflicted eyeballs. When I finished telling her this I was met with silence, so I looked up at her from my computer screen to see if she was listening or if I was rambling on to myself. My gaze was met with a half-confused, half-concerned look on her face.

"Astigmatism? Isn't that where you start bleeding from your hands and feet?" She asked.

Bless her.