Would you believe that my Darling Son was so full of his own independence today that he decided to have a second sleep over tonight, with his other cousins!! He is obviously enjoying it even if my sister ‘is very nearly strict’ as he told me this afternoon between sleepovers, and between admiring his new fancy dress costume and asking for a change of clothes for tomorrow. He is going to my brothers tonight.

Did I mention that I was at my mother’s? This is possibly why I am not able to distract myself. She has been clucking around me saying that ‘I have you all to myself, this evening’. Granted, that is novel for both of us to be fair, but I’m not sure how it makes me feel. She even had an emotional moment this morning telling me that she and Dad always thought I was special, mostly because I survived all their parenting inadequacies being the first child and all that. Ramblings, tinted with guilt. I can only imagine that I was a very good natured baby and my parents were very incompetent by their own admission. J.

But what is going on here? It is usually the children’s entitlement to judge their parents in hindsight of course and not the mothers role to chastise herself especially when the end result didn’t turn out too wrong even if I say so myself. Irish mothers, maybe?

And where does that leave me with my DS? It is different for us, he is an only child. In some respects it is less complex although on the opposite side of the coin the relationship can be more intense. He is the eldest, the baby, the son the daughter and most of all he is everything; the sun, the moon and the stars! Mr. Mack and I have him all to ourselves, all the time and hopefully we will be happy to share him when the time comes.

Maybe the other idle wives and mothers of many may have something to say? Do you love your children more or less or maybe just differently? Is this based on your own competencies or the nature of each child? Will you be able to share them? When they are forty something, will you have some emotional ramblings for them?

I can hear the protests from here. Am you mad? What am I talking about? To explain myself, I suppose I am looking for an unconscious answer rather than a conscious answer. It’s like our children are with us for such a short time.

It’s been a long hard day’s night! My Darling Son went on his first official sleepover, sort of. He has stayed at his Granny’s before without me or Mr. Mack but that was not usually of his own accord, if you know what I mean.
Last night was different. This time he went to stay over with his cousins, without his Mum, at the ripe old of seven and a half and it was of his own accord! The plan had been on foot for a few days but I really thought he would baulk and change his mind at the last minute. I even expected a phone call all evening to say come and get him. And if I was being totally honest, I wished the phone call had come.
It was a long day’s night because I did not have a plan to distract myself. I had no immediate use for this night of freedom and I really really thought the phone call would come. So how did I spend the evening you may ask other than wrestling with my separation anxiety?
Well, to start with, I went to the supermarket with my mother to buy wine, i.e. get in some supplies for her. ‘Shall I get some Chilean wine’, she said, reading the label in earnest ‘omg, mother, no!’ as I still have bad memories of the pain inflicted by some Chilean merlot in 2000. Next, I had to dissuade her from buying two bottles at five euro fifty….an okay bottle at that price would be luck, buying two of the same and it being okay would have about the same odds as winning the lotto.
Our next pit stop involved me spending time going through Halloween costumes for DS. He is away from me only three hours at this stage and I am still spending money on him! But guess what? I found a roman solider costume, which was just what he had wanted. Nice one!
After dinner, I phoned a friend who did not answer and I checked my email (nothing exciting) and then proceeded to google flights for imaginary weekends away. I You tube-d and Facebook-d and still no panic phone call from Darling Son.
Now, next morning, with one hour left before pick up, I can’t wait to hear how he got on, on his twenty two hour sleep over. All twenty two hours! What am I like?

I hate it when someone accepts your invitation to an event and then something better comes along and then they go for that one !  Without even bothering to pretend otherwise.  It’s just pure bad manners and yet I accept it and get over it but it REALLY bugs me.

What is it about Halloween that is such good fun? I love it.

This is a bit strange because I was always a scared-y cat growing up; everything about Halloween and the supernatural was nerve wracking. I still hate scary movies, and even thoughts of the spirits from the other world can spook me late at night.  It  helps having a cat though, who I firmly believe would know if there was something bad going around. And be able to protect me of course!

That aside, Halloween is different nowadays anyway. When I was young you did sit around the fire and tell scary stories that were definitely true. That is …a friend of a friend really did see a banshee or hear footsteps or know a haunted house or a bird who flew in the kitchen before someone died! But now, at Halloween you see cute little two year olds in vampire outfits and there is ample garlic around to protect me and half the nation from any threat from the after world.

There also is the sweets and treats aspect of Halloween. Pumpkins and trick or treating has replaced the nuts and fruit treats of the past. Halloween has been Americanized.! And all the better for it I would say! Bring it on! Get out your broomstick as there is a witch in us all!

I have struggled with this one for a few weeks now. What will I call myself ? Or more correctly what do I want to be known as? Well, how hard could that be you may ask? It is for a blog and it is anonymous anyway, surely.  Somehow that did not make it easy for me!

To begin with I remembered when I was ten or eleven and we had a CB radio in the kitchen. Trust me it was the Wii of the seventies. …remember Convoy with Kris Kristofferson and all that…

Cause we gotta little ol’ convoy, rockin’ through the night
Yeah we gotta little ol’ convoy, ain’t she a beautiful sight?
Come on an’ join our convoy, ain’t nothin’ gonna git in our way
We’re gonna roll this truckin’ convoy, cross the USA
Convoy… Convoy…

Uh, breaker Pig-Pen, this here’s The Duck
Uh, you wanna back off them hogs
10-4, ’bout five mile or so, 10-roger
Them hogs is gittin’ in-tense up here

My brothers handle (name) was the Red Baron and I was so jealous. It was a great name and added all sort of possibilities to his image. If I remember  correctly my name was Blue Bird and that always seemed in second place to his Red Baron. Anyway, back to the present….

Firstly, in my search for a handle for this blog,  I was thinking of all the famous wives I know. What I came up with as being the most famous wives of all, was the wives of Henry the eighth! As most of them came to a sticky end, one way or the other, I decided to steer clear.

 Then came the descriptive names. I tried ‘Mrs. Best’ which I liked, a lot, but my One and Only (husband) didn’t! Need I say more? ‘Mrs. Not the Worst’ which was his description but he did suggest that it did not sound the same as ‘Mrs. Good Enough’.

I even tried known characters:  Mrs. Money penny (currently active in the Financial Times), Holly Go-lightly (single) or even Roxie Hart (the worst wife in the world). Mrs. Blogg, Mrs. President… But I was getting nowhere. Then when I was least expecting it, it just came to me.  Mrs Mack. Knick, knack, Mrs Mack, gave the dog a bone!

 So, let me tell you about Mrs. Mack from whom I plagiarized the name!  Mrs. Mack is a character in Roddy Doyle’s The Giggler Treatment. The Gigglers are little Elf’s who protect children by punishing adults who are mean to them. The central character is Rover the dog who is integral to delivering the punishment and the Mack family. Mrs Mack is married to Mr Mack, a simple man, who works in a biscuit factory taste testing cream crackers and other biscuits. What I remember of her is that she spends her time looking after her children, the family dog and also is training to climb Mount Blanc or some such high mountain. Her training consists of running up and down the stairs in her home with her youngest child on her back. She has set herself a dream and is working towards it.

Let me pull it out and refresh my memory……

We own an awful lot of books in our house. We thought when we re-designed the house last year that we had provided ample shelving to accommodate those that we already owned and those that we would buy in the future. I have to say that I like nothing better (slight exaggeration) than browsing in a bookshop. You can lose yourself in the biography section or even the gardening section for hours. I generally flit between all sections, pulling random books from the shelves and occasionally marvelling that I have found something I never knew existed but suddenly feel I cannot live without. And aren’t those the best? Those treasures that have sat on that shelf for ages until someone plucks them out, deigns to peruse the blurb on the back of the dust jacket, has one’s curiosity sufficiently piqued to open the cover and read a few pages. It’s like finding a new friend, someone who comes out of the blue in the most unexpected of encounters and you just know that you won’t be disappointed. Sometimes of course, first impressions can be deceiving and you might get half-way through the book only to discover that the story that looked so promising is let down by the author’s lack of imagination or heavy-handedness or inability to bring the reader along or continually draw the reader in. But when you come across that treasure that makes you long to get home to continue it and everything else becomes unimportant and suddenly you have forgotten to eat and are waking early and going to sleep late in order to find out what happens next, well isn’t it the best feeling in the world?

No computer, no facebook page, no blog, no film, no TV show will ever replace it. A good book is a friend forever, one you can read once, put away, find in a year’s time, dip into it again, and in which you see a little more each time.

I’m a hoarder and especially a hoarder of books. I can’t bear to throw any out, even ones I know I will never read again. Invariably, there’s the one that was given to me by someone important to me, another I bought at a specific time in my life that I want to remember, another that was found on the floor of a friend’s flat in college and brings back memories of that friend letting a fillet of mackeral fall on the kitchen floor in that flat of dubious cleanliness and promptly scooping it up and serving it for dinner. But today I decided that I will never again need “The Law of Tort” or JCA Gaskin’s “Quest for Eternity”. Granted they looked very impressive in my living room and defined me as someone of great intellect and intellectual endeavour, but I’m beyond impressing people with books that I neither read when I was actually in college nor intend to read in the future, and thus I decided to cull my rapidly expanding book collection earlier on today so that it would fit on the shelves that were designed for it. And that was when a slim little paperback ended up on my bed amid all the beautiful, leather-bound, hand stitched volumes that have been passed down through generations and the Richard and Judy recommended holiday reads and the German dictionaries and the scores of lifestyle books (I admit to an obsession with reflexology – three separate books on the subject) and at least fifty foreign language books (one day I did read them, well some of them, and some day again I intend to try and finish most of them). But there it was in the middle of that mass of literature, a book that I dip into again and again but haven’t had time to for some months, “The Little Prince” by Antoine de Saint-Exupery. If you haven’t read it, treat yourself. Don’t do it on a day when you are rushed, don’t expect to find within its pages the answers to all your questions but prepare to be inspired and prepare to be jolted a bit and prepare to shed a tear. This is one of the most innocent books you will ever read, it’s one of the most gentle too, but behind that innocence and gentleness are some astonishing revelations about human nature and you will find yourself in it along with your family, your enemies, your lovers and most of all your friends. It might even change your outlook on life. Today it changed mine, again.

I wrote about camouflage and disguise a few days ago and it got me thinking – how often do writers hide behind masks and disguise what they really want to say but can’t for any number of reasons. So I’m going to talk about football today because that’s what I want to talk about.

Yesterday was match day, an important one, although every one of these last few games is now important. A win for us would have really kept our collective head above water, a draw would have us coming up for air, a loss going down for the third time. I predicted a one all draw. At one goal down, I still had hope. I had a small exchange with the fellow supporter to my right, one of those nice moments where fans start relaxing a bit during a match and share a joke. Several moments later, I had my forehead pressed against my knees and was hugging my knees to my chest. 2 down. The two lads to either side of me remained impassive and just stared blankly ahead of them, striking poses that said “what did we expect? Here we go again”. It’s been all too familiar this season, silly goals conceded just when things were looking positive and there was some nice play going on. Of course, it ended badly. It always does when we relax and start thinking that it might work out. It only takes one stupid mistake to upset the apple-cart and then there seems to be no way back no matter how hard we try. And of course at two goals down, who could really blame a team for giving up.

It’s now at a very delicate stage. With just six games left and crippled by that kick in the nuts of a 4-0 defeat last night, we’re going into the next crucial game on Saturday with our confidence at the lowest possible ebb. It’ll take some will to get us through this and I wonder is it there, or is willpower even enough at this stage. Perhaps there are some things that simply aren’t meant to be and no amount of desire to succeed can change that. Perhaps we’re tired trying. Perhaps those silly mistakes are down to the pure inexperience of youth. There’s certainly some truth in that. But do I believe that we can’t very quickly learn from those mistakes and turn things around even at this late stage? Not for a minute. As sure as night follows day, we’re meant to be and it would be a cruel twist of fate if we didn’t make it. We’re an honest team and we’ve all worked so hard this season both on and off the field to save this club. So, I’ll be sitting on the terraces next Saturday night willing us on as usual and hopefully hugging my fellow supporters in triumph at the end of 90 minutes and not my own knees.

If, by chance you did not appreciate the significance of the original boeuf bourguignon post then I will enlighten you, as I have just been enlightened. Yes, Football Mum, I can see why you were spurred you on to cook the boeuf bourguignon and blogg at the same time!

Last night, I went to the cinema and saw Julie & Julia the movie, which was a treat. It actually is a true story about two cooks, one of whom blogged about her cooking! This was interesting enough but what was even more serendipitous and motivating for me, was that the two cooks could also be described as idle wives in accordance with my definition.

In the movie, the modern woman Julie Power is a wife, a writer, a cook and the originator of the blogpage called The Julie/Julia Project. She set herself the challenge to cook over 400 recipes for the Julia Childs French Cooking Cookbook and blog about it as she went along. She literally created the idea and business at her kitchen table or sink, whichever suits you, and what an idea it was!

Julia Childs was equally amazing. She was married in the 1940’s to an American Diplomat. They traveled a lot with her husbands work and she was very interested in food. They did not have children. She seemed to have a thirst for doing things with her life and eventually was lucky enough to find her bliss. It then became her life. Her kitchen became a TV studio and from there she worked until she was in her eighties. What a joy!

Is that what we are all aiming for in our idle Dom? I know I am!

Today is a lovely, bright, crisp, winter day. It’s one of my favourite types of days, coming second only to dark with driving rain and, importantly, me wrapped in my dressing gown, in my favourite corner of the sofa, watching re-runs of Sex and the City with the stove glowing to the right of the TV.

I’ve just got an appointment with the hairdresser. Because the day is so nice and I slept so well, I decided to do my other favourite thing and have my tresses tended to for a few hours.

I had one of those life-altering moments a few days ago when I decided to put my make-up on in the light-filled corridor in my house instead of in my dimly-lit (and let’s be candid, lighting that does my complexion great favours!) bathroom. As I applied my eye-shadow, a shaft of light from the overhead window bounced off my hair and threw up a silvery-shimmer on my head. Simultaneously, a hot flush (NOT THAT KIND) rose from my chest up to my forehead and, with my nose pressed up against the mirrored wardrobe doors, I rummaged frenetically through my highlighted locks and discovered something that could be ash-blonde but, being honest, I’m not sure. I hastily covered it up but I know it’s there.

Anyway, fear is a great motivator. So, today I am going for not my normal honey-blonde highlights but rather various shades of ash-blonde. I may have a few years left yet but it’s never too early to start preparing the way. I’m all for camouflage rather than disguise.

For a fleeting moment, I considered that crazy fiery red colour that Jonathan Ross’ wife, Jane, carries off with great aplomb. I already have the boobs. Jonathan Ross has been in my head lately because I had to meet a footballing peer a few days ago who happened to be called Jonathan and whose surname also began with R. Once I had the connection in my head, it just wouldn’t go away. I typed up a report from the meeting two nights ago and printed it off. Fortunately, I proof-read it because the board would have been rather bemused that I had met with Jonathan Ross, especially had I come into the meeting with flowing scarlet locks.

I am doubting myself a lot lately. I came out of a supermarket last night and was suddenly seized with panic that I had worn my dressing gown instead of my coat. I hadn’t but I’m definitely not getting enough sleep.

I was reading something recently – probably on some fabulous parenting website for fabulous parents – about the fears that some parents have for their children in the future.

Of course there were the usual ones that we all worry about, health, happiness etc.. Some parents worried about career and money but none seemed to mention one of the huge fears that I have.

How will my parenting affect my kids in the future?  What about my psychotic pre-menstrual outbursts? or the rules that I implement that are probably doing no good at all.  None of these fabulous parents seemed to worry about the affect of their shouting at their kids and that’s probably because they’d never dream of raising their voices, particularly if it wasn’t anything the child had done but simply because the Mother was on the edge of insanity!

I do know thankfully that I’m not fully alone, (having actually spoken to others in the same situation – yes there are some!)  and while this doesn’t lessen the worry, at least in the future I can join with these other parents as we share the stories of how our grown up kids are getting on with their therapists as they go back and blame everthing that’s wrong with their lives on their childhood and their crazy distracted Mother.