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!

 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.

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!

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.

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.

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?

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.

This isn’t just the rant of some soccer widow who has to tolerate her other half glued to the box for the best part of every weekend. No, I am, as you know, an avid soccer supporter.

But when a jumped up gurrier dominates every newspaper I pick up, every radio programme that I turn on and every news website that I log onto, then I start to wonder what’s wrong with this country.

I thought I was safe tuning into one of my favourite radio programmes this afternoon on the school run. Not so. So, I pondered the issue and then it struck me.

Last night I watched the main current affairs programme on our national TV station. No, Wayne Rooney didn’t feature. And yes the figures were of an even more staggering magnitude than his rumoured transfer fee. I refer of course to the 4 billion in cutbacks that is required this year in order to make some effort at repairing the damage that has been done to the economy. It’s a terrifying prospect.

And now I understand. This country is sticking its head in the sand. It’s attempting to ignore its fate. It can’t deal with the reality of its children having to pay off its debts into the far end of this century. It doesn’t want to think about the fact that the pensions it believed it would have are now worthless, that 1 in 20 of its mortages are now more than 90 days in arrears.

Will Rooney go to Chelsea for 20 million? It’s not as much as others would pay but then again Man U would rather he went to Chelsea than Man City, wouldn’t they? I reckon this story should keep us all occupied until at least next summer when his contract with Man U actually expires and he’s a free agent or perhaps just until after the 9th of December! Come on, like, he’s the world’s greatest footballer after all!

 My duvet morning has clearly unblocked the literary genius in me and whilst it is a bit ideal the notion of blogging from my bed using all the technology the twenty first century affords, I have to reconnect to my mouse to be able to upload these messages as I find the touchpad mouse thing sooooo irritating.

 So, as my radio alarm has timed out again for the umpteenth time, I will bid farewell to my heated technological companion this morning, my four legged feline friend curled up at my feet and go and reconnect with my laptop’s outer mouse!

 Calling all Idle Wives, it’s September, are you idle enough to blog?

What a world we live in! First thing I did once the men left the house this morning was fill the dishwasher and put it on. This technology always brings a smile to my face and holds a place towards the top of the list of favourites, but was maybe piped to the post today!  I put on the washing machine with a load of darks comprising mainly of smelly socks and grass stained jeans and rubbed my hands with glee. Ah, a woman’s work is never done!

 So, after I put all the domestic machines in action, I decided to conserve energy myself and go back to bed. So I collected a bowl of cereal, my new book from the library and the good bits from the paper. One and Only had been kind enough to go out and get the paper and then leave it behind for me, love is! From the technology box, I collected my laptop which is not wireless as well as having battery power of two hours and my mobile for receiving texts and photo texts from the boys. I then turned on my clock radio and last but not least, my electric blanket! Yes you can guess, this girls’ best friend is her electric blanket!

 What an invention! I got into bed, had my bowl of cereal and switched on the timer. I got through the good bits from the paper but was asleep in five minutes after that. I went on to enjoy seventy five minutes of bliss in my half of the bed with my feline friend curled up at me feet. Sunny South East eat your heart out!

I am really just a simple girl at heart, if someone ever invents a clothes folder device, I will die and go to heaven.  No iphone, facetime, no apps for me. Not even the order a book or name a tune Shazam or Runkeeper, keeping runs and load up directly to facebook App for me!

 What is your favourite technology?