How much money do ya need for pete's sake?

How much do you need to be happy?
The question pops up from time to time in our house when redundancy or unemployment beckon. (Which they do roughly twice a year - hey, it keeps us on our toes) Now I know that if we couldn't make the mortgage payments and lost our house I'd be pretty miserable. And I know that if I had to feed the kids on economy white bread and ham made out of kangaroo entrails, that would make me exceedingly depressed. But beyond a secure place to live (and by that I mean when you open the front door you don't have to step around the syringes and pools of blood) and nice things to eat, how much do we actually need?
No-one needs two cars per family, and no-one needs a spare bedroom, nice as these things may be.
Holidays abroad can be just as shit as camping in the UK - in fact in my experience much shitter.
If no-one had a haircut or a new pair of shoes, these things would cease to matter.
And of course if you have two toilets, you have to clean two toilets.
Who in their right mind wants to clean two toilets?

Now sometimes I go all materialistic and I want nice bath products and nice clothes and posh wheat beer and stuff. I'm not like Ghandi or anything. But it is a really nice feeling to know that if anyone broke into your house, they would take one look and decide not to bother. And if there were a fire, the only things I'd bother to save would be Pooky and Puggle. (I can't lift my Beloved - he weighs 11 stone or something, but I'm sure he'd get out)

The more you have, the more you worry; the more you're tied down to the earth.

But.........
It'd be nice, when the council threatens to shut down a project to increase literacy in children in care for the sake of £5K, to throw the £5K at them and say "Here, you mean fuckers, take the pissing money and shut up".
It'd be nice to take out a hit on George W. Bush.
I would really really like to build an arts centre and give all my friends a job.

I reckon about £15000000 would do.

I do not want another baby.

Repeat two dozen times daily until convinced.

Ok, so Pooky and Puggle are the cutest things in the universe. They skip about holding hands and declaring "We love each other and we love Daddy and we love you, Mummy, you are beautiful." (Well Pook does. Puggle just nods and blows kisses) but I wouldn't want to push my luck really. The third would probably be some kind of Sunny-D crazed psychopath. And besides, if I had to go to mother and toddler group any longer I think I'd go on a machine gun rampage.

Anyway, yesterday Pooky was reading a book with kids in it who slept in bunk beds. He decided that he wanted to sleep in a bunk bed with Puggle.

"Mummy we want to sleep in a bunk bed. Can we have a bunk bed and I sleep on the top and Puggle sleep on the bottom, please Mummy. Why we not have a bunk bed? We want a bunk bed. " This went on for about twenty minutes.

Puggle backed him up by pointing at the book and crying "Bed! Bed!"

I explained to them that they each had a bed of their own and it wasn't really necessary. I said that kids only had to sleep in bunk beds if they had another brother or sister.

At which point they turned up their little angelic faces, focused their huge dark rockpools of eyes on mine, fluttered their eyelashes and pouted.

NO, NO and THRICE NO. Sorry guys, but the answer is a big NO SODDING WAY.



But they are really, really cute.........

I should have been in advertising

I thought I'd never get away with it. I thought that the average bunch of corporate bastards would surely see through any thinly-veiled sabotage that I wove into their marketing 'literature'. Which I would have done. But it seems that I have missed my calling in life. When in Maidstone recently on our annual visit to my In-Laws, we drove past one of those plague-raddled chain motorway 'service' places. It contained some indistinguishable bunker of a motel, a bar called 'Salingers' (as in JD Salinger? Author of one of the world's most famous novels about an isolated loner? You 'avin a larf?) And this is the best of all. It contained the most stunningly fabulous example of ad-agency sabotage I have ever seen. It contained CAFE COPRA. Yes, copra. As in coprophilia, as in an attraction to shit. See? I knew there was a job out there for me.

I wonder what their coffee tastes like...................

Come into my story tent

I have found out what my new job is. Yesterday I went into the library as usual and found that they'd finished building The Inside Story, a fabulously bizarre 'installation' based on three epic tales - the Haggadah, the Ramayana and the Shahmane. But what the blazes is it? It's a big tent, full of amusing things like a TV in a tree which spouts random facts about Hanuman the monkey God. And a seder plate that talks to you. And a big book full of clip clopping and growling beasties. I went in there yesterday and listened to a Yiddish storyteller who told me what happened before I was born, something about plagues of flatulence and a story about a frog princess. It was fantastic.
Now I have to book some writers groups in for workshops and such.
So, who's up for it eh? Writing in a big scary tent full of cool stuff. Any takers?

Now We Are Scary

I found out today that the same man voiced both Pooh bear and Kaa the python in The Jungle Book. Now why doesn't that surprise me?

Born to it: A theatrical update.

Puggle was a star. She sat and watched the whole 1 1/2 hour show. As did Pooky, although he did insist on wearing his Superman costume (Superman? More like Retro-Boy.) She did regurgitate 25 dolly mixtures down her top at one point, but it was dark, and not very many people noticed.

I was wrong about Pooh.

For years, nay decades, I have hated, hated, HATED Winnie the Pooh with a vengeance. Winnie the SHIT I used to call the waddling, obese little underachiever.

I blame Disney. The Disney Pooh bear is so far from Milne and Shephard's as to be a different species. Disney's Pooh is a vile, sunset-yellow freak with large, greedy eyes, a smooth, furless body and a prudish little red jumper. Oh and the voice they've given him makes him sound like a kiddy fiddler with a faulty tracheotomy.

He has been marketed to DEATH. You can now clothe your sprogs in WTP clothes, buy them talking WTP toys, (yup, with THAT voice) decorate their rooms with him, make them watch his 4000 spin-off movies, feed them vile biscuits called 'Pooh's rumbly tumblies' (I am not kidding) and even scrape the resulting excreta from their tiny little arses with WTP disposable nappies.

But now I am making a public confession. After all these years of Pooh hating, (coprophobia?) I have actually got around to reading the books. I have read Winnie the Pooh to Puggle and we are now halfway through The House At Pooh Corner. They are really, really good. The characters are well observed, the writing often sharp and witty, and the illustrations, in their proper context, are superb. This has come as quite a shock to me. I have even flicked through the poems in the back and they are funny and sweet. Puggle agrees.

One by one, the things I railed against are shuffling up to me with fluffy paws outstretched to offer a truce. Soon I shall have to rename this blog Friendly Little Terrapin or something.

Sorry Pooh.

Am I Insane?

Aw c'mon, no cracks about working for the council, please!

No, I ask this question specifically because this afternoon I am taking four year old Pooky and one -and-a-half year old Puggle to the theatre. Many fellow parents have questioned my relationship with sanity. And in fact it was a cock-up as I am so bad at maths, I thought I'd booked for Saturday, not Friday, when my beloved would be on hand to entertain the Pug.
But do I care?
NO.

How are kids going to learn how to go to the theatre if we never take them? To eat in a restaurant? To go camping?
I am of the opinion that parents give in too easily. So what if miserable passers by and fag-scented bus drivers tut and make stupid comments (on a bus once, I heard "They never used to allow buggies on the bus, using up all the space" Wow, I sure wish I lived back in the day when mothers were shot on sight if they ventured out of the house before their kids turned five)

I don't want to wait till they're ten before I can go and see a play again. I want to share that magic with my kids, the way it was shared with me. When I was eleven, my dad took me to see Hamlet and somehow life was never the same again. One of my earliest memories is of being at infant school and seeing a theatre company perform the story of the Firebird.

So this afternoon Puggle will see her first play. It will be Little Red Riding Hood. I hope it will change her life. I hope she, and Pooky, have a fabulous time.

And I hope the dolly mixtures I plan to bribe her with don't run out before the end.

Sweepstakes of the Day

Inspired by the fact that Puggle (bless 'er) didn't hurl at nursery yesterday, thus allowing us both to enjoy a fun-filled afternoon at our respective lunatic asylums (or 'work').

1. How long will it take me to bring Pug's buggy back in the house?
I wheeled it through a small piece of dog poo earlier. I was trying to avoid a large piece of dog poo at the time. Now my pet ocd has kicked in and despite my cleaning the wheels, it is still outside.

2. How many people will show up to Page to Stage tonight?
Every fortnight I run a scriptwriters' workshop. Every fortnight two people show up. They are never the same two people. WEIRD.

Betting slips to be addressed to God and posted in a shoebox painted red that you made in the prison workshop.

Of Redeployment and Retching

Monday morning bounds in on plastic loafers from the Shoe Warehouse and makes me wonder what the heck happened to the weekend. In fact what happened to weekends in general since that heady night in the Olde Starre Inne when we decided around closing time that it would be a really great idea to have babies.

Beep Beep.
On Saturday we ferried Pooky around to various luvvie engagements, and on Sunday we gained an extra child, Pooky's future wife Lucy, and ran around the National Railway Museum after them. Puggle spent the entire two and a half hours shouting 'beep beep' every time she saw a train. Which was often. I love going places with three kids under five, just for the amusing array of pitying looks we get. Cheap thrills, huh?

Blaaaaaaaaaaarghh
Puggle threw up three times yesterday. Touch wood she is ok today because I am callously planning to stick her in the nursery and cross my fingers. I have an intriguing meeting today at work. After having my job axed by Pork Council, I have been offered a temporary job looking after a travelling exhibition. In this meeting I am hoping they will tell me what I have to do before the job starts next week. The meeting is at 4pm. Place your bets now on Pug throwing up at precisely 3.45.

The First Post.

Good Morrow, good readers, and welcome to Angry Little Bat, my blog. Actually it was going to be called Cuddly Pussycat but that username was already taken.

I hate cats, which leads me conveniently onto my first Petty Suburban Conspiracy Theory of the Day.

Petty Suburban Conspiracy Theory of the Day:

Next door's cats are trampling on my crocuses.

Today is Saturn's, and I have no plans. I was going to go to Leeds and meet the director of the play I'm writing, but she mailed me to say that the 3rd draft was actually rather good and we should just speak on the phone.
My plans for escape have been foiled. I am just too damn good for my own um, good.

Kids

Today Pooky is off being a sickly stage school brat at his drama class (Oh but he's so CUTE he makes me cry) and Puggle is drawing with a biro on my diary, on my third draft and on her own feet. She too is cute but I have a sneaking suspicion that she will grow up to be a tattooed lady in a circus.

Gizza Job

As a tattooed lady, Puggle may have more job security than most of us. My Love has just been roundly spanked by his boss for writing a blog in company time rather than doing something normal like downloading porn. I have just been laid off by Pork City Council for being expensive. If anyone would like to employ us in some nice artsy fartsy job that doesn't involve fish gutting, anal penetration or being yelled at by drunks, please do get in touch.