If you ask Darling Son what his favourite dinner is, he would say pizza and pizza and pizza! This was always restaurant pizza or shop bought pizza kept in the freezer for those moments when I just did not know what to make for dinner. The adults were luckier as we have superb Italian style pizza available from a few different sources in our locality. So pizza for us was a touch of Italy.

When I think of pizza I  reminisce about the summer holidays in Umbria lovingly making our own pizza in the roaring flames of the outside oven. The men with their sleeves rolled up and sweating from the heat of the oven while the females kneaded dough. Then the pizza was delivered to the table, piping hot on a huge shovel, with the smell of food mixed with the charcoal and with various critters making noises as the sun went down with the pizza and the chianti and the peroni. Yummy, yummy.

 I also remember having a boss who was a nineties man, as every Saturday he made pizza with his children, buying the yeast and selecting the toppings greedily. It was like Little House on the Prairie to me, such an idyllic family centred approach to a Saturday night. So the time has come as I now want those leisurely, harmonious, pizza making, hazy, lazy, Saturdays in my life!

En route to this idyll, pizza bases became available in the supermarket and we had great success creating our own pizzas in the comfort of my own home and boy did they taste even better that the takeaways from the designer pizzeria. Then there was a shift and next thing I found myself looking up recipes.

 However somehow or the other, I lost the essence of these experience in my own kitchen this week. Neither experience were transferable. The mess was everywhere, the dough had to be coaxed and cajoled, warmed and rested, stretched and then delivered to the table, spongy. What a disaster. Pizza must be crunchy and light, sunny and well got. Where did I go wrong?  As I pondered this I realised ‘Had we a bread making machine in Italy or a super mixer?’ Something that may have pummelled the dough into submission. Or maybe it was the liquid chianti starter that kept the show on the road. Either way there was no spongy pizza base under the Umbrian sun.

So for myself the  question is…. buy the bases in the supermarket or rise to the yeast challenge?Mamma Mia!

I burnt the midnight oil a few times last week. Various things were happening and I stayed up just that extra twenty minutes which left me going to bed the next day to the day I got up, if you know what I mean. What I find is that extra seemingly innocent fifteen or twenty minutes can play hell with my routine, such that it is! Those few minutes have a knack of cumulating and catching me on the hop when I am yawning at just nine thirty. It reminded me of the old days when I worked construction. My ten hour day plus two hour commute would catch up on me on a Friday evening when I never managed to get past the nine o clock or if I was lucky I was lulled to sleep by Gay Byrne’s dolcit tones. Boy, that is going back.

 So here I am in a similar crux. There is no avoiding those extra hours and the fact that they have to be caught up at some stage and another week has gone by without sticking to my sensible bed time with resolve. My mother used to say that an hour before midnight was worth two after. And I do believe she was right.

 However last night I did not go to bed until after midnight and I had a good excuse. This was because I had three hours sleep yesterday afternoon and they were worth ten! However they were essential compensation rather than extra curricular.

 I had a very late night, for me, on Saturday night, as well as an early start and an even earlier wake up just because my body was afraid of having a hangover. My body clock woke me at seven thirty after four and a half hours sleep, just to remind me that I had been out late the night before, I think. The other bit of anxiety was about being late for Darling Son’s performance at 10am. So I cat napped until 9am, got up did my duty, came home and despite the sunshine beaming in the windows, I fed myself with a comforting lunch and wilted. I did feign an excuse of tidying my bedroom but as soon as I saw the bed, I crawled between the sheets and pulled them over my head. It did not take long to nod off and I was eventually woken at four with a text form the party girl my F&FF (Fifty and Fabulous Friend who had just got up, remember childless and husbandless!

 So tonight I am wondering will my resolve be any better? Or will I wonder on again until I crash and burn on Friday night? Oh please let me be sleep sensible this week.

I was at a dinner party on Saturday night. It’s not something myself and Mr. Mack get invited to…usually we go out to restaurants with friends, when we do, and visiting each others house usually revolve around Sunday lunch or even early dinners with the children in toe.

So, to my surprise, I was eventually invited to a sophisticated dinner party without children and husbands! What a treat. One of my friends was fifty and her sisters threw a dinner party with the only proviso being that the potential guests could number no more that sixteen of her nearest and dearest and this number had to include her four sisters. So there it was, sixteen exuberant women exuding until the wee hours, not a chicken dipper in sight and I made the cut!

It was great fun and although I knew only one female there, my F&FF (Fifty and Fabulous Friend), we were all best friends over the first glass of bubbly. After that, the night got better and better, there were numerous overlaps with the women and as was inevitable we all had lots to talk about. So the company was great, the glamour comfortable, the food was superb and we even got to toast my JTFF twice, or three times, just to be sure.

This made me think, there is always something interesting about going out with strangers. It is free and easy and non committal. It never caused me any stress although I know it does not suit everyone. I like nearest and dearest even if they are someone else’s nearest and dearest. So for me, this was novel. New people, living life as we all do but with different things going on. We must have had forty or fifty children between and God knows how many dogs, cats, canaries and hens and hamsters! I met a woman who was going to Kampala next week to visit a friend, I met a woman who’s son was an Actuary and another an Architect, I met a woman who’s Dad has the same birthday as my Darling Son.

 So at about seven hours later, three taxi’s came and took us all home, and the sisters kept going childless and husband less until the wee hours of the next day, fifty and fabulous!

I went to bed last night feeling ok, my biggest concern being what I would eat today and whether or not I should bite the bullet and phone a friend I had a mini row with a few days ago.

Porridge for breakfast sorted my food situation for a while and I felt sufficiently replenished to turn my attention to the phone call, deciding to just go with my gut instinct and pick up the phone and touch base. Life is too short and friendships too precious to argue over nonsense. And then I learned of the Japanese earthquake.

I spent two hours glued to the TV admiring the organisation of the Japanese. If there is anywhere that can cope with such devastation, it is Japan. For every harrowing scene flashed across my TV screen, there was another image showing the industriousness of the people faced with this crisis – emergency centres opened, little packets were distributed to people containing foil blankets to keep them warm, tannoys communicated instructions of where to go.

I got into the car to collect my children from school and turned on the radio expecting coverage of the earthquake. Instead, the programme was about organ donation. I heard a lady and a gentleman describe how they donated the organs of their dying children in order to give a quality of life to those in need of organs. The lady spoke of how her daughter’s kidneys, liver and heart helped a 22 year old girl, a 26 year old girl, a 33 year old mother of 2 who was dying and a 56 year old man. She described how the 33 year old was back mothering her children within a week of receiving a kidney, the man still sends her a card every year thanking her for the gift of life. I struggled to hold back the tears as I sat in the school queue.

Today I commend the media for  reminding me that life is precious and it can be taken from us in seconds. When it is gone, we can’t get it back. Two messages – embrace it while you have it and give it when it is over for you. I carry an organ donor card in my purse and so should everyone.

It’s official – my life is governed by technology.

I now hurtle through days from laptop to phone, where a text message can propel me to the heights of happiness one minute and another plummet me to the depths of depair the next. Where tweets and facebook status updates can be the cause of an international incident. Where a typo or a missplaced comma or failure to re-read before sending a predictive-worded text can lose you friends. Or where a cluttered contact list can lead to you sending an email or text to the wrong person, especially shameful when said text or email contained material appropriate only to the intended recipient.

We’ve all seen the denouements on the front pages of the tabloids – personal emails sent to work colleagues in error, text messages picked up by celebrity wives rather than celebrity lovers – and yet most of us find the immediacy of texting or emailing just too tempting to resist. I don’t know how many times I’ve typed something, read it, re-read it and, knowing I’d regret it, pressed the send button.

There’s something in all of us that makes us feel dishonest if we don’t send what we clearly wrote because we felt a certain way and wanted the recipient to understand that. If we had picked up the phone and said it, we wouldn’t be able to take it back so why should we delete something that we write from the heart or in the heat of the moment? Personally, I find it difficult to hold back when something is on my mind.

That’s one side of it but there’s the other side where you don’t intend to say something and where the recipient puts their own interpretation on the way you have phrased a text or email. Perhaps you were curt but only because you were running late and now you are classed as not caring or being critical. It’s a minefield.

This stuck me today when I received a text from someone I hadn’t heard from for over two years, someone I don’t know very well, asking for advice on a particular subject. I had a minor panic attack and spent 10 minutes writing a list of answers to probable questions and, when I felt I was as prepared as I could be, I picked up the phone. Even as I dialled the number I worried that I might have missed something and did some deep breathing as I waited for her to answer. “Hello”. “Hi, this is Miss Giving, you texted me?” “Oh, you know what, I texted the wrong person, sorry about that”.

Ok, so I’m released, feeling calm again, no awkward advice sought or required. But my phone partner is now feeling the need to explain who she intended texting and why, because, well I guess the question was hanging there. And so, rather than feeling relieved and calm, the calls ends with me feeling embarrassed that she felt she needed to tell me something that she clearly would never have shared and her probably feeling mortified that she was stupid enough to text me in the first instance and worse still that she felt she had to explain herself.

Will we never learn? Check, double-check, treble-check or perhaps just pick up the phone in future.

Last weekend, we were in a bit of a spring clean mode!  Some might say that is the strangest thing; given my aversion to house work, but generally I enjoy the big effort big result jobs rather than the mundane day in day out, ‘I only did that yesterday and it is dirty again?’ kind of jobs! I am not sure where the impetuous came from, possibly the good weather or maybe even pure frustration, we were still tripping over Christmas presents that had not found a resting place in our home.

So the pile was gone through, once by Mr Mack and then by myself. ‘Who gave us that?’ he asked and ‘will we ever use that?’ Yes it was a long afternoon, but one particular present stood out! Someone (who can’t be mention for obvious reasons but I would say are related to Mr Mack) gave me a copy of Nigella Lawson’s Kitchen! Which is obviously the domestic goddess’s most recent offering. I found this very peculiar for some reason and felt misunderstood even. What can I say? Domestic Goddess I am not nor do I aspire to be! My recipe collection is usually cut out of magazines rather than being bamboozled by weighty tomes and my favourite cook book is one that I collected coupons for and has been on the go since I was a teenager.

So what about Nigella’s Kitchen, does it have a place in my kitchen? Her big eyes, pinched in waist and sexy finger licking fingers. What can I say….it is more like the green eyed goddess meets the domestic goddess! Is it just me or does Nigella have this habit of batting her eyelids and saying in her sultry tones…’I confess blah blah something or the other’. How can men resist!

While I am definitely a Ready Steady cook myself I do enjoy Masterchef. I like watching the grizzly pressure ridden, competitive cooking which seems so purposeful. Rather than the finger licking, eyelid batting celebrity mums who cook and assure you that you will have a very happy family if you can nurture them with grasshopper pie, no crunch pina colada ice cream, no ordinary tiramisu but Frangelico’s tiramisu, Mexican lasagne, sunshine soup, Indian rubbed lamp chop, and lastly pigs in blankets (which is sausage rolls to the rest of us). What chance do I have?

Idle wives is right! Clearly bone idle when it comes to blogging. So, after Mrs. Mack and I had a spontaneous cuppa together this morning and she waxed lyrical about her exciting holiday plans, business ideas and all sorts, I felt the least I could do was tap on the keyboards for half an hour this afternoon. It’s not going to be inspirational but inspirational is not where I am at this point in time.

The start of 2011 has been about the re-assessment of one’s lifestyle, re-adjustment where necessary and then a bit of stability.

Now anyone that knows me will know that I’m hardly a stable kind of girl. No, I’m more the all or nothing type. Up until a month ago it was a phone to my ear, a laptop in front of me and a frightening dependency on chocolate. Today I stand before you four weeks into a vegan diet and a stone lighter.

This morning a friend of mine posted Jennifer Aniston’s latest viral advertisement on his facebook profile with a comment “sigh” above it.

This morning was also the morning that I had decided that my vegan diet was over. But having watched Ms. Aniston (who happens to be the same age as me), my resolve has returned. But it’s not the resolve of the fanatic or faddist. It’s the resolve of someone wanting simply stability and balance.

Of course it’s about looking great but, more than that, it’s about feeling great, feeling calm, feeling capable of dealing with anything life throws at me. If you are stressed, pressured, sluggish and emotional, you achieve little that is worthwhile. You end up constantly playing catch-up, unable to separate the important things from the unimportant, unproductive and ultimately unhappy.

If I were to remain true to type, I’d be putting the smoked salmon that I bought last night in the bin and re-embracing veganism. But, what I have learned during this hurly burly period that I’ve just lived through, is that all or nothing is bad for you. Maintaining balance is good. It’s good in chemistry and physics and it’s good for the human psyche.

I’m not going to dash out to the gym to start pounding the treadmill because whilst some people might find that exhilarating, being cooped up in an airless room with sweaty bodies just doesn’t do it for me. And that’s ok. I enjoy swimming so I’ll do that instead. Nor am I going to throw the smoked salmon in the bin and make a butternut squash creation for dinner because I have grown to despise its texture. Instead I will have a crunchy stir fry with some rice noodles and I’ve already had a slice of salmon for lunch.

Today also happens to be Pancake Tuesday and I think I’ll allow myself just one, maybe with just a smidge of chocolate sauce.

The main thing is I won’t fret about any of it anymore.