• Manuscript 1: something about family connections in weirdy brain tumours
• Book chimney sweep
• Get copy of invoice from electrician
• Manuscript 2: slugs and snails in cancer?*
• Buy winter boots for M
• Return library books (pay fines)
• Find plumber or competent person to replace kitchen taps
• Make appointment to view primary school
• Radio Lymm website
• Send letter registered post to woman who drove into C’s car
• Order turkey and think about other christmas catering – book supermarket delivery slot now?
• Change sheets in spare room
• Think about T’s birthday: plan cake, birthday tea, etc

*On reflection, this one sounds peculiar. Perhaps if I could get more than 5 consecutive minutes too look at it, all would become clear. But T is poorly (cold/cough/query teeth) and wakes up for a shout every 7 minutes, requiring a minute of back-patting each time. I feel bad my authors are probably not getting their money’s worth, but what am I supposed to do? I’ll read it properly tomorrow. Fingers crossed.

When my sister and I were younger we used to laugh at our mum for claiming she had had such a busy day she hadn’t even had time to go to the toilet. That’s been me the past few weeks and let me tell you it is quite uncomfortable! I bet you all thought I had disappeared into therapy after my previous traumatic post.

The past two weeks have been a complete blur of activity. Mostly pleasant and taking advantage of the glorious autumn (forest walks, farm visits, Chester zoo, visitors, soft play and I’ve even visited the allotment!), some less so (M had her booster jabs; C went to Edinburgh and back in a day for a funeral) and my evenings have included an unseemly amount of actual paid work. Can’t turn it down; can’t find time to do it (before 10 pm). (Look! I made this!) I don’t help myself by insisting on proper home-made soups and stews for lunch and so on: just pile on that to-do list.

I’m here now! Today I find myself at a loose end. Just some household tasks, and a friend coming for dinner, and some cards to buy (oh, and two large manuscripts and a website to work on – but I don’t work during daylight hours). I intended whizzing to the allotment as soon as T showed signs of sleepiness but it is so grey and gloomy (and cold) out there that I can’t find much enthusiasm. I am a fair-weather allotmenteer and not ashamed to admit it. Perhaps I should curl up with seed catalogues; it’s that or the ironing.

They have come out in force, just because I said something a wee bit uncharitable about one of their friends. I didn’t hoover it (and I certainly didn’t approach with glass and card: Katy, you clearly have no idea what it is to be scared!). In fact I left it in the bath. We all had a shower last night come on girls it will be fun! I said brightly, not letting on the real reason. It’s still there (and my cleaner will have to deal in order to clean the bath tomorrow).

However. One more behind the bathroom door this morning. One halfway along the landing – possibly the same one. Now, one on the stairs. The same one? Who knows. I feel a bit sick and have to keep saying just leave it alone Maggie, spiders won’t hurt you. Huh.

I hate this season. Cameron is not allowed to go away (or even to work) in September ever again. I am starting to think I might have to be really brave and do the hoover thing – I can’t camp out downstairs all day, we are leaving for our holiday tonight! But we have a Dyson, what if I see it in there? I know I’m a wuss but I am getting teary just thinking about tackling it.

Shudder.

I am trying very hard to suppress the rising panic I feel in my chest. My cleaner appears to have gone awol. I love my cleaner, she’s like a human whirlwind – except she tidies rather than messing: an anti-whirlwind? An anti-whirlwind that leaves a trail of folded, dusted, re-arranged items that smell fresh and fragrant. Anyway: she didn’t turn up Friday which isn’t in itself all that unusual; what is unusual is not texting to say she’ll be along Saturday/Monday/whenever. So I texted her – no reply. I tried again – nothing. Decided to actually ring today and got a number unobtainable tone. I’m not really sure what to do: if she’s quit for some reason without feeling she could tell me – and changed her phone number in case I turn stalker? – I’d like my keys back, and to know so I can try to find somebody else.

It has taken me the entire day to muck out and dust the living room. Haven’t hoovered yet, haven’t got to any other rooms. There is a good reason why we have a cleaner: I am just rubbish at it. Too easily distracted and insufficiently interested in or motivated by housework.

Popped to the allotment for a whole 20 minutes this morning (that was all I was permitted before littlun started screaming and the rain started again) – just long enough to pop in some purple-sprouting that will hopefully be our first taste next spring if the pigeons don’t get it first.

M has chickenpox so we are in quarantine until next week. She’s not poorly but full of beans if tending a bit towards the whiny voice.

T has a horrible chesty rattly cough, a runny nose and is Definitely* teething.

10 o’clock this morning, the power went off. No telly. No computer!** No electrician until Monday.*** I’ve managed to get most things back on but no power to most of the sockets and no hot water.

*Bearing in mind that teething is something you can never be sure about until it has happened.

**At 5 in the evening I realised that I could get a really long extension cable and plug it in to the kitchen, the power to which I managed to persuade to come back on.

***I want “our” electrician not an emergency one, because it’s an old house and wires don’t always go where one might expect them to. Switches don’t always operate what you might expect them to. Some do nothing at all, as far as we know. He said he could come if I could swear hand on heart that it was an emergency as he’d have to leave a house half-wired. Fond (addicted) of the web as I am – and desperate for cbeebies as I feel - I could not honestly claim it was life or death.

But all in all much better than anticipated given that Maggie has been A Horror (capitals warranted) this weekend and that we were all, not unrelatedly, awake well before 6 this morning. It started rather well: I was pleased and justifiably smug to be at the allotment by 9.30, hoeing and planting spuds, having already dropped M off at preschool and been to the post office. An utterly glorious spring morning (but all that warm and wet last week has fair brought the weeds on). Home for coffee and another low as I dropped a large and very heavy pyrex jug onto my toe (probably a good thing she was at preschool and didn’t hear the language).

Picked her up: drove straight to Mothercare on the pretext that both girls needed shorts for the summer – actually I just wanted a bit of a drive so that M might have an afternoon nap and start to recover some equilibrium. Bought shorts then Maggie ran away from me in the carpark: she only wanted to help me strap Tamsin in but running away in carparks is one of my Things, so I got very cross. Was manhandling her into her carseat (Tamsin still sitting in the sling so effectively in one arm), bag, keys and M’s favourite cuddly, Weebee, on the floor behind me. A helpful woman picked up Weebee and passed it to me – I did say thank you but given stressy situation (kicking and screaming – Maggie not me I promise) was not terribly gracious and did rather grab it and mutter. I acknowledge that I could have been more polite but I don’t think I deserved a torrent of sweary abuse. Anyone with half a brain would have realised I was under pressure. Came home feeling really rubbish, but M has been great ever since (she did have a sleep in the end).

Last bad thing was soaking the bulghar wheat for tea in plenty of time, going to drain it to add to the salad and realising I’d selected the wrong jar and had still-hard barley instead. Bah.

Hey ho. Tomorrow’s another day.

Feeling a wee bit better this morning but back to no energy again this afternoon – have concluded I have some sort of post-viral crapness (even though quite a large part of me is going viral schmiral and suggesting I just need to pull myself together quick sharp. It’s terribly new agey, isn’t it, this (ma)lingering viral thing.) I am uninterested in food, however – most unusual – which suggests it’s not just knackered-mumness: Lisa’s Dinners has been on hiatus since I first sniffled. I’ve taken no photographs and am reading a really crap chick-lit novel and enjoying it (mostly). Something is amiss. Do I need a herbal remedy I can scoff at while admitting it might work?

Of course it might just be down to a perfectly understandable reluctance to edit 23 pages about quantum dots (they are very very small). Or fed-upness at the prospect of next week as single mum.

Absolutely and utterly fed up and grumpo today – and I can’t quite put my finger on the reason. The sky is grey, which isn’t helping but is something I generally take in my stride – one has to if one lives in Cheshire. Cameron is in Germany, but back tonight only an hour or so later than usual, so I don’t think it is that. Maggie is driving me nuts: for some reason she is awfully insecure and clingy today. Doesn’t want to go more than about a foot from me and prefers to hold onto my leg if at all possible (so I keep tripping over her). That isn’t helping either but I think it’s something more fundamental than all that: if I could just have half an hour off from being Mummy I could sit down and have a think and figure it out. (Huh. Who am I trying to kid? If I had half an hour off from baby-on-knee and preschooler-clinging I would have to tidy the house, do the ironing, cook tea and edit that unsolicited manuscript.) Oh, and Tamsin is the baby who will not nap.

I am neither mouse nor man, so why do my plans always get scuppered? After a weekend spent being clung to by a poorly Maggie (Saturday: very high temperature and general misery), making cakes and wrapping pass-the-parcels, rushing about cackling maniacally (Sunday: didn’t realise the clocks had changed until I turned the radio on at what I thought was 9.45 to find The Archers already halfway through) and hosting a tots party on Sunday afternoon (went very well: weather glorious so they could run about outside; cake pink; lack of catering uncommented on*), today was supposed to be my day. I am entitled to the odd day, I believe. I would take Maggie to preschool (nursery no longer), come back and wait for our new fridge-freezer, to be delivered “early morning” then get up to the allotment where I would take advantage of the sun to sow shallots, jerusalem artichokes and prepare for spuds and peas.

Huh. And gah. Tamsin is having a growth spurt so feeding and filling nappies constantly while refusing to nap for more than 20 minutes unless strapped to my front. Which is fine, but rather precludes activites like digging and, well, anything allotmenty. (Also ironing, so it’s not all bad.) The fridge-freezer turned up as expected, right on time once we had established that I don’t in fact live in the house over the road. It made it all the way to the patio – it would fit through the front door but not the internal one, and wouldn’t go through the side one at all – only I couldn’t get both patio doors open so there it has had to stay. In the process of fiddling with the doors I managed to lock the other one (that I had managed to open) irretrievably open.

3 pm. A locksmith is fixing the back doors but I ain’t going to get much planted or dug or even visited today. The fridge – enormous – remains outside at present, and I am feeling very cross and frustrated and like the day has been completely wasted. And Tamsin continues to demand a feed every half hour.

*I think – they might all be talking about me behind my back (“and do you know she didn’t even have sausage rolls“). Only C and I had wine, too, everybody else had tea.

Karen, who has clearly been subject to my Observer Woman Magazine rant so many times as to be able to quote it verbatim, kindly sent me this link yesterday. Read the profile to the right – so nice to realise I am not alone in my dislike of this piece of tripe publishing. The Food monthly is OK; Cameron tells me the Sport one is pretty good and he seems to read the Music one, but – leaving aside the irritating implication that we women shouldn’t be bothering our pretty little heads about the news, the review or heaven forbid the business section* – why is the Women one full of inane articles about ex-lovers analysing what went wrong, and shoes? I like a nice shoe as much as the next woman** (assuming she is not Imelda Marcos) but I don’t buy a newspaper to read vapid articles about them. (No, I buy it for a crossword and some recipes, mostly.) And £400 handbags! Does anybody really, seriously, have one? Want one? Need ideas for better things to do with that sort of money? 

If we must have our own special supplement -  and I don’t object to women’s magazines per se, but I do object to getting such a low-quality one with what is supposed to be a sensible and serious newspaper - couldn’t it be filled with something a bit different (and not a poor copy of flippin’ Grazia)? They did have Veronika Robinson down for an interview – she is interesting and has plenty to say (as, I imagine, do many of the other women interviewed for the “female tribes of Britain” piece) – but each woman was reduced to a couple of random questions and answers and a photograph looking glam.

Jo Brand was on Desert Island Discs last week and the fact that I was surprised to hear her say she believes there are women out there who are not interested in spending half an hour putting on their makeup but have better things to do (like, y’know, chat on MSN for hours) says a lot about the society we live in: I thought I was fairly immune to all that. Even the women presented as being super-smart, successful, ambitious, blah blah blah had to be all cleavage and legs on the front of the OWM.

Oh look! I’m ranting incoherently again! (Blame the 4 hours of sleep I got last night, but that’s another story; one that involves sprained ankles, flights to Germany and a child feeling lonely in her bedroom.)

*I admit I do not read the business section. But I reserve the right to read it should I so choose.
**So much so that I admit to being pretty horrified when one of the Badly Dressed Mums*** who hang out at the Methodist Church Hall**** turned up in shoes matching my Nice New Pair.
***All leggings and baggy jumpers – in an it’s comfy-and-it’s-worked-for-20-years way not a wildly trendy way – and woolly socks on the outside.
****Fair-trade coffee and home baking at a fraction of the Costa price and a big area with toys for the kids. But not cool.