Boris Johnson. Thursday 1st May 2008.

Thursday 1st May.

Boris Johnson

I voted for Boris Johnson. 

I know that it was a bad thing to do.

Saturday 3rd May 2008

Blame. Tadpoles.Study Day. Puberty.

Boris Johnson won the Mayoral Election and I feel I ought to take the blame.

Down the road, by The Green, there is a Car Spares shop. 

In the window with the WD40, the T Cut and the tree-shaped car fresheners is a bowl of tadpoles, with this message:

‘Come and take some free tadpoles for your pond, make your kids happy.’ it says. 

I get in the car armed with our old goldfish bowl and set off with Maisie. I am determined to make my kid happy with a tadpole. 

The Turkish man who runs the Car Spares shop scoops lots of tadpoles out of the tadpole bowl and into our goldfish bowl with a tea strainer. Maisie begins to look happy.

Maisie sits next to me in the front seat. On her lap is a goldfish bowl half full of water and in the bowl are lots of very jolly tadpoles. I shut my car door. It won’t shut, I slam it, it won’t slam. I get out of the car and try to slam it from the outside, my car door is broken.

This is a major problem. Maisie begins to look less happy. The man from the Car Spares shop comes out of the shop. He slams my car door, it swings open.

‘You, gonna hafta take it the the garage.’ he says.

The garage is miles away.

Maisie fixes me with a long, ice-blue stare. She looks quite cross.

‘I really don’t want to go to the garage.’ she says ‘The garage is miles away. It’s Saturday, I don’t want to spend Saturday in the car or at the garage. These tadpoles will all die if we drive around London with them.’

She has a point.

The man from the Car Spares shop offers to phone a tow truck.

Maisie looks miserable. ‘Do something.’ she says.

I tell the Car Spares man that we’ll be fine and that I will ring my husband. The Car Spares man shrugs and goes back into his shop.

‘Maisie,’ I say ‘Put the tadpoles on the floor and lie across my lap, that way you can hold my door shut and I can drive home and ‘phone the AA.’

Maisie lies acrss my lap and holds the door shut. It is very funny. When we go round a corner she lets go of the door and it swings open almost killing a cyclist. I swerve left and Maisie catches hold of it again. The tadpoles are slopping about like mad. 

Maisie has hiccups from giggling by the time we get home. 

My kid is happy.

Ellie comes over to do a study day with Abigail. They log onto MyFace and check the social scene. They talk about Glastonbury. They lay all their books out on the kitchen table next to the tadpoles in the goldfish bowl. 

‘Ugh, tadpoles, gross.’ says Abigail.

Ellie says she quite likes them. ‘I really hate history though.’ she says.

‘Don’t you think Abigail is too thin?’ I ask Ellie.

‘It’s always people who are too fat who think other people are too thin. Thin people never tell other thin people that they are too thin.’ says Abigail. She shoots me a warning glance.

Ellie is beginning to look a bit tense.

‘Ellie,’ I say ‘Don’t you think size 6 is too small for someone of Abigail’s height?’

‘Ellie says that she doesn’t know.... really.

‘Ellie,’ I say ‘Just look at her. She is your best friend...’

‘It’s not normal Abby.’ says Ellie and she begins to cry.

Abigail begins to cry too.

John comes into the kitchen. ‘What’s going on?’ he says. 

‘They are going to talk to eachother.’ I say ‘And we are going to Hampstead Heath with a picnic, that’s what.’

I shove bread, wine, orange juice and cheese into a bag and  we drive to Hampstead. 

It is such a beautiful day, the first beautiful day of the summer. 

We play rounders and we are hopeless at hitting the ball, we play football. Zac and John are very good at football. We run through the long green grass with Evil gambolling at our heels and we read The Telegraph, just to get the other side of the argument.

Then we come home.

A Perfect Doctor comes over. She has been pick-pocketed on a Bendy Bus. She has had her bag stolen with her keys in it. She blames Boris Johnson. 

‘See,’ she says, ’He’s only been in charge five minutes and this happens.’ She decides to stay and have coffee until her husband comes back from playing badminton in the park, he has some keys. She can’t ring her husband because the Bendy Bus pick-pocket also has her phone.

To be fair, Boris Johnson’s only policy is to get rid of Bendy Buses.

The Perfect Doctor has a son the same age as Maisie and they are doing sex education in PHSE at school.

‘How’s Maisie responding to all this sex education thing?’ asks The Perfect Doctor.

‘I think she finds it all a bit confusing.’ I say. ‘The other day she said I would have to support her through puberty because she would be having mood swings. She said lots of her friends have hairy armpits and that she had been told to expect 20 physical changes.’

‘20?’ said The Perfect Doctor. ‘I think that’s very confusing. I can’t think of 20.’

I couldn’t either.

The Perfect Doctor told me that the other day her son, Archie, had called her littlest daughter ‘so gay’. The littlest daughter had asked her father what ‘gay’ was.

The father had explained that ‘gay’  could refer to ‘two men having a relationship and loving eachother’ or that it could mean that you are simply ‘happy.’

The littlest daughter said to her brother ‘Well Archie, I am not a man and I am certainly not happy.’

I said, ‘You could always get her some tadpoles.’