Never Count Your Blessings.

No really. Never, ever, NEVER, count your blessings as I, in a moment of blatant foolishness did last week. Count your blessings, indeed revel in all that is silly and scrumptious and pitifully delicious about your crazy little world,  or worst of all – feel a tiny bit smug about your life and infinite capacity for gratitude, and I promise you this: the universe will take time out from running wars and warming up the globe in a naughty fashion, to remind you, yes- silly old you, that life isn’t all ha ha hee hee hee and that dancing while you wait for the kettle to boil is all very well, but what are you gonna do when the fluff flies out of the window and there is only one minor catastrophe after another to deal with? Here’s the test Honey Pie, now lets see how Goddamn grateful you are!

Plainly it has not been a good week.   Quite frankly it has been a helluva week and if I don’t laugh I will cry till I dry up like an Autumn leaf. 

There I was tra-la-laing home from nursery on Wednesday, happy as Lillian, opening the front door into my cosy little Queendom and plain old desperate for a cup of chai, when I heard an almighty bang. I turned on my crimson booted heels and found myself face to face with a very angry lady indeed. A lady so ludicrously cross she had gone the same shade as the spanking new blue Land Rover she had just stepped out of. So I smiled, as is my want, and took hold of Finley’s hand as he jumped out of the postage stamp I like to call my front garden. But smiling was apparently a very bad idea, and I was utterly flummoxed as she stood before me ranting, "What was that?? What are you smiling at?? What has he done to my car? It’s a month old! I’m from Southport!!".

I’m from Southport?? What did that have to do with the price of fish? I didn’t have a clue what she was talking about, but clearly I was required to respond to her outrageous venom in a suitable fashion and so, quickly establishing that Finley was the cause of the trouble, I put on my very mean, very cross Mummy voice and as stern as I could told Finley to "Go into the house, right this minute!". And into the house he went. Slamming the door behind him and locking himself in- and his Mummy out. A Mummy no longer in possession of a set of keys…

Oh yes. My child was locked in a house full of potential danger and this crazy woman in front of me was demanding my number in case the almighty bang had caused some invisible damage to her over-sized house on wheels. So in a fluster, and inbetween shouting at Finley through the letter box, I wrote down my number, took the blame for goodness knows what, promised to pay oodles of money for a re-spray and ran next door to Karens house for comfort and sensible advice about breaking into my own house. Unfortunately Karen is as crazy as me, and the best we could manage was persuading Finley to post my mobile phone through the letterbox, drinking a cup of tea and watching in wonder, stooped like a pair of hunchbacks, as Finley mouthed he needed a wee and prompt as you like took himself upstairs and got himself locked in the bathroom.

By which time I had suffered a  Mummy heart attack  and collapsed on top of  the daffodils.

So thank goodness for   knights on white chargers. Or rather, my Dad in his white trannie van.  A man equipped with  the know how to remove half of the porch, peel off the crumbling beading, take out the window and supporting tongue and groove, and open the door to let me rescue my very silly son.

The house will never be the same again. But fortunately the whole debacle was Finleys fault. Pity he won’t take responsibilty for the next disaster. On Sunday morning, in a fit of  "Weyhey, it’s Spring!",  we got up before our breakfast and made our way to the first car boot of the season. I was irrationally jolly.  Telling Finley terrible made up out my head Knock Knock jokes and wailing "It Must Have Been Love (BUT ITS OVER NOW!!!)  at the top of my voice.  Never mind the fact that there was not a drop of treasure to be caught and we were knee  deep in mud, I was h-a-pp-y. Happy with the four 1950’s plastic coated floral hangers I procured and stupidly happy about once again rooting through other peoples truly terrible junk. I was so happy, and thoroughly optimistic about life, love and of course vintage housekeeping, that I wasn’t even fazed when the car dug itself so deep in mud that the wheels started screeching in an alarming fashion and men in their hoardes, came running to dig me out.  Foriegn men. Wafting their hands about in a levering action, grinning at me through the mud splattered window panes as the car refused to budge,  getting muddier by the minutes, and to Finleys delight developing dirt moustaches and clothes their washing machines wouldn’t thank them for.

And then, in a flash of inspiration, I released my hand brake, surged forward in a kamikaze fashion, narrowly avoided running  over one of my Polish saviours and drove away, beeping my horn in a flirty way I truly hope disguised the fact that I was mortally embarrased about the utter girliness of the whole matter. Cars don’t go if you have your handbrake on Alison. And Sweetheart?  Spin your wheels the way you did and you will, on the way home, suffer the nightmare that is a punctured tyre and find yourself, yet again, having to call upon your knight in a white trannie van, and endure the kind of lecture only the despairing father of a soon to be thirty five year old little girl can issue.

Life can only get worse. That very night you will pour boiling fat down your leg and create a ruler sized blistered burn on your left calf. You will smash two glorious red wine glasses in two entirely separate incidents, and in a moment of utter, utter Britney style lunacy, you will bestow upon yourself the kind of crackers "cut with the kitchen scissors" (yes, really) haircut, people in turn of the century mental insititutes were frequently seen to sport. 

And the moral of this over-winded sorry tale?  Never ever NEVER count your blessings. It is, it seems, like wearing a saucy  red dress in front of a sex-starved bull. 

Perhaps it is time I grew up?

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