Nike FuelBand

Yes, I received one for Christmas and a few days on, I'm still addicted.  Actually, late December/early January is always a time where I become very aware of how lardy and unfit I am.  This house is a monument to the sheer amount of fitness equipment and DVDs which have fallen by the wayside, more's the pity. 

If nothing else, it spurs me on to move my carcass much more and gaining a five day steak on the Nike+ website is very rewarding indeed - by streak, I mean achieving my goals on consecutive days, not me taking my clothes off to exercise - ugh, no - I'd end up with two black eyes. 

As you can see from the picture, I managed to hit my daily NikeFuel burn rate of 3000 and have the green lights to prove it.   Now, let's see if it makes me lose any weight over the next few weeks....it's such a shame that it doesn't link to Android devices.  Pah.

The End of The Summer School Holidays is Nigh...

...oh thank goodness - school returns on Thursday.  Yeah, it's been an incredibly long summer, mainly because my mother (who tends to do quite a lot of the filling in childcare during vacations) has recently had a hip replacement and is unable to move a great deal, let alone run after a lively six-year-old.  I am currently looking after my son and a friend's similarly aged daughter and well, it's OK I suppose but I cannot imagine having a whole brood of children, unless of course I wanted to start up my own singing group?  Other people's kids are strange, I never really know how to deal with them and their presence seems to make my own child's behaviour rather strange.  That said, I like him to have playdates as he's a bit of a strange lonely soul and socialising is good for him, however I really don't like my stuff being flung around the house by nosey primary school age children.

Talking of such, I've just ventured into the living room and yes, it's ransacked.  Maybe this is a good reason not to bother tidying any more?  You'd better believe it.  Back to work tomorrow - for a rest - at least my colleagues don't pester me for Nobbly Bobbly lollies on the hour, every hour.*

*It's Mars Bar ice creams usually; Cornettos on a Thursday.

The Cultureseekers Trip to Constable Country

I must confess to being a bit nervous as I approached London's Liverpool Street Station where I was meeting a group of Cultureseekers to board the train to Manningtree in order to explore the region of North Essex and South Sussex which is known as 'Constable Country' after the famous landscape artist of the 18th Century.  I need not have worried, everyone was really friendly and welcoming, plus there were quite a few newbies there too.  We boarded the train which terminated at Great Yarmouth, so it was really crowded with holidaymakers(!) and after fifty five minutes we arrived at our stop.  Although it is located an hour from London it's very rural indeed and there was nothing but countryside plus a few sheep and cows. 

We walked to the famous Flatford Mill, location of Constable's most famous painting which you may know by its alternative title of 'Bloke Who Gets a Cart Stuck In a Stream'.  The millpond was very green and housed a number of rivercraft and some glorious waterfowl, which I stated did not belong to the Queen because they weren't located on The Thames.  That was an interesting fact I'm sure you'll agree and such knowledge will undoubtedly net me a huge amount of friends in the short, medium and long term. 

The guide, Mark, was very knowledgeable and had laminated copies of the various paintings which he used to illustrate the locations at various points along the way.  It was fairly tiring though and I'm pretty darn fit, although I say so myself.

It was a great day, I met a whole load of lovely people along the way.  I must confess that I did get a bit bored by the end of it as there are only so many landscape scenes that you can say 'splendid' about, but that's me all over: I have the attention span of a dyspraxic goldfish. 

Socialising With The Cultureseekers

Regular readers of this blog whom I can only assume have built up some kind of idea of my personality will know that I like to get out and about as much as I can, family commitments allowing.  However, I keep finding that I'm getting let down on a fairly regular basis, I'm not sure whether this is an age thing, but it's getting more difficult to schedule things with friends for a myriad of reasons and I for one am getting really annoyed about it.  Anyway, not being one who mopes around for long I decided to search the web to see what alternatives there were and lo and behold I found an umbrella organisation called Meetup: http://www.meetup.com/find/ which brings together a whole load of social networks across the world.  I am using the term 'social network' in its purest form, I mean actually physically meeting people, not simply posting banal things on Facebook to a group of people you probably don't really have much in common with, let alone actually see any longer.

The group which really appealed is called the Cultureseekers: http://www.meetup.com/CityCultureSeekers/ who are based in London and organise a whole host of events in and around the capital, some are day trips to places a bit further out, but generally it's fairly London centric.  Wow! I thought as I scrolled through the calendar of events, that's exactly what I'm after, so I downloaded the app and signed up, ironically using my Facebook log in.  Full membership is £10 per annum, but I think that's very reasonable as many of the group events save you money in the long run and it's not really run for profit.  I signed up for a trip to Constable Country on Saturday, 17th August and read my next post to discover how that panned out....

Geeky Motherhood: Part One

I suppose I only really write about my experiences of motherhood in passing in all of my blogs, but sometimes it's unquantifiable and I feel the need to share.  At the time of writing it's getting on for the half-way point of the long school summer holidays and I'm feeling it fairly acutely this year because my mother (who provides cover during vacations) has recently been in hospital for a hip replacement, so it's been a bit of an uphill struggle this season.  We have been for a visit to London today and although he's been fairly good, his constant jumping up and down, enormous bursts of energy and quite frankly, standard autistic behaviour is rather wearing at times and can drive a parent to distraction. 

It's strange, I suppose I always wanted a child but wasn't really as obsessed as many of my peers were; although saying that I attended an all girls secondary modern where at least four pupils were mothers by the time they'd sat their GCSEs.  Many of my contemporaries' children are in their teens now, but I always knew that if I'd had a child in my teens or twenties that it would have compromised who I was in so many ways.  I did time it right though when the time came: I'd been married for a quite a few years, we had a house, I'd completed my degree and had attained enough ground in my career to level off a bit, so there you go, both practical and romantic. 

Not knowing many people in this borough, despite having grown up here, left then returned a few years later, myself and The Duke signed up to NCT Antenatal Classes.  For those not in the know the NCT stands for the National Childbirth Trust and in a nutshell it's a bit of a middle-class yummy mummy club where the emphasis is on natural childbirth, breastfeeding and attending nearly new sales in drafty church halls.  I seem to recall that I quipped in an early class, when posed the question "what made you decide to have children?" that we had a spare room in the house and we may was well fill it with a child instead of a komodo dragon.  Oh dear, that's not the way, is it?

I won't use this blog post as a ritual slagging off of the NCT because I did later become co-chair of my local branch, well for about six months before my return to work compromised my attendance at committee meeting, but I must categorically state that they do provide a great service in the community.  As for the antenatal classes, well unless you like sitting around on a hard chair talking about the things you're planning to pack in your overnight bag, don't bother and if you're not interested in seeing pictures of women across the globe breastfeeding whilst sitting backwards on a donkey - stay away.  As for the lesson where the teacher smeared Colman's English Mustard on a plastic doll to replicate the texture of baby poo - well, forget it.  It made me laugh a few years later when Dawn French's midwife character in the peerless BBC comedy Psychoville was obsessed with a stunt baby whom she dubbed 'My Little Freddie Fruitcake'. 

Finally: although published a couple of years after I'd given birth, this book is an invaluable source of wit and wisdom and is derived from the excellent Mumsnet website.  Actually, I can recommend the online stuff too because I've never been trolled on there and that's rare in this day and age.

The London Transport Museum Gift Shop

A couple of weeks ago I went for a wander in the LTM's gift shop just to see what kind of wonderful things they stocked in there.  I'd never ventured upstairs before, but despite the heat, I'm glad that I did as they had a huge array of transport-related books up there, plus posters and maps galore - ergo, it was brilliant.  I must admit that I already owned some of the books they had in stock, sad geek that I am, but I leafed through a few others:

There's something about a book of maps which really floats my boat; yesterday I managed to pick up a copy of Metro-Land from a bookshop and it contains the plans from the original Metropolitan Line which looks vastly different from the current purple line's topography.  I also thought that the descriptions and prices of the suburban houses was also rather quaint, considering how much they'd be worth today, especially as quite a few of them nestle in the 'stockbrokers' belt'.  It seemed to accompany Betjemen's seminal documentary, which I've seen recently repeated on BBC4.

I thought the pictures detailed above were aesthetically pleasing and would be happy to decorate Duchess Towers with them.  There were drawers full of posters which could also be framed, especially the art deco ones.  Some of the station architecture on lines such as the far reaches of the Piccadilly are rather wonderful and are incredibly futuristic, echoing the images of UFOs and creations derived from worlds outside our own.  Truly amazing.

The Herne Bay Telly-Go-Round

People often ask me why I like odd things and my reply would be - life's strange, so enjoy it.  Anyway, I do see the bizarre and the surreal popping up pretty much everywhere and quite frankly, I revel in it.  One of my current obsessions, of which I have many - the TV quiz Pointless being one of them, ditto my new Philips electronic flosser (don't ask...)

Right, the Herne Bay Telly-Go-Round is a local phenomenon - it's a kind of sideshow attraction funded and run by the local Rotary Club and is basically an automaton featuring past and present childrens' TV characters and is rather nicely filmed in this YouTube clip: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoPhJmRwzXU  My son absolutely adores it, as do quite a few people who meander down the seafront, I think it's because it's a mixture of rather quaint poorly-maintained figures and hugely inaccurate models - i.e. Thomas The Tank Engine is painted the wrong shade of blue and sports a face daubed with icky grey paint.  Sometimes they'll add another plush model, but the remainder of the characters will be sadly ignored as a result.

I've taken a few rather rubbish pictures on my phone to illustrate the point:

T

They're all rather shabby aren't they?  Is that a bit of a Viz 'up the arse corner' scene I spy with the Fraggles?  Obscene, especially in front of the kiddies.  Also, who on earth was/is 'Wiggli Willi'?  The only reference I can find using Google's safe search function is an arachnid character who helps children with their counting?  I mean, don't get me wrong, part of the reason I go on breaks to the seaside is for a bit of 'Wiggli Willi', well that and copious amounts of ice cream anyway....