Shakespeare, sickness and children

I thought I was dying earlier this month.

I was sick, sick, sick and SO COLD. I had two pairs of socks on and my pyjamas tucked into the socks to try and retain heat. I was in bed and covered in duvets and throws and starting to feel doomed. For some bizarre reason, I kept thinking about the bit in Henry V where Mistress Quickly describes the death of Falstaff. “This is it,” I thought to myself in that detached way you do when you are feeling really unwell, “I’m dying from the feet up, perhaps I’d better get Mr D to bring the boys in so I can say goodbye to them,” only I was feeling too sick to do anything about it.

Anyway, I appear to have survived and for a day or so I had a stomach that was so flat it was practically concave. The last time it was like that was the day after I’d completed the Three Peaks Walk. However, it’s not a way I would recommend losing six pounds.

One of the few moments I will cherish from this unpleasant episode is the memory of Eldest Son coming in to play his recorder to me. He hasn’t been playing long, and even if he had, I can think of more soothing instruments to play to someone on their deathbed, but hey, he wanted to share.

I lay there helpless, with my eyes shut, managing to whisper: “That’s really good darling.” Eventually Daddy came in and said that he thought Mummy had probably heard enough for the moment. . . .

It’s made me think about some of the things that I really love about my children:

• Eldest son’s legs in his shorts as he runs along the pavement to go to school: not skinny; not chunky; just beautiful
• Youngest son holding hands with Daddy and running. He’s wearing chinos and he’s moved on from the toddler’s run which is really a fall in slow motion but he’s still got that slightly out of control look
• Eldest son’s cuddles – you don’t get them so often now which makes them very precious
• Youngest son’s cuddles – much more frequent and invariably accompanied by “I love you, Mummy”
• Serving up something new for their dinner and them eating it without protest (it does happen sometimes)
• Their skin
• Listening to them playing together and laughing (it does happen sometimes)
• Chasing them and hearing them squeak!
• Watching them grow
  
  
  

Froglets, Food and Freedom . . . .

Frogs first: there has been great excitement in the Darnbrough household recently. Our tadpoles are turning into froglets! It seems to happen so suddenly. One moment they are big round tadpoles with big tails and big bodies and the next they have changed shape completely - and got smaller in the process. It has been so exciting to watch them climbing up the edge of the tank. We are SO glad the tank has a cover or we would have been scooping froglets out of our breakfast cereal.

I set the first lot free over the Bank holiday weekend. They looked so small and vulnerable when I put them down on a water lily leaf. It made me want to knit mufflers and booties just looking at them. Mr Darnbrough snorted and said they’d be much better off in the wild. But I notice that he didn’t mow the lawn this weekend . . . . even though he’d said he would. . . .

The tank has been a great success with the children and with visitors of all ages. We keep a magnifying glass next to it so people can have a really close up look. There has been much discussion about the differences between the tadpoles and the toadpoles and endless interest in tadpole poo. Watching the tadpoles tucking into one of their brethren over breakfast was not a particularly edifying experience, but the children seemed to take that in their stride.

My one regret this season has been that while we have at least half a dozen newts in the pond, I have not spotted a newtpole.


Food next: more muted excitement for me with regard to the veg patch. Last week I noticed that our remaining pea plants have actually started to form pods. Not only that, I cut the first lot of basil to put in a salad.

We should have had salad leaves by now but the packet of mixed baby salad leaves that I bought from Thompson and Morgan has turned out to be carrots . . . I did consider taking them back and asking for a refund but in the end I just couldn’t be bothered. I also considered pricking them out and growing them on, but one pot later decided that they would just have to get on with it in their overcrowded living conditions and we will see what comes up.

So far the veg patch contains onions, garlic, shallots, broad beans (a few) peas, broccoli, dwarf French beans, runner beans, little gem lettuce, tomatoes, early potatoes, courgettes, chard, strawberries, rhubarb and two or three beetroot and we still have a fair amount of ground to cover. I’m considering spring cabbage, spinach, Jerusalem artichokes and asparagus . . . The problem is, as I’m sure the order of the list of vegetables makes clear to those in the know, I havn’t really organised the plot properly in order to ensure an orderly rotation of crops. I feel that this year we are just seeing what happens. I will try and do better next year. Oh dear! I can feel some homework coming on.

Which brings us to Freedom. I have been conscious that this blog has been a little like Jane Austen's novels (now there's a claim!) in the sense that there is very little reference to what is going on in the outside world. While I'm not about to embark on a political career, I feel that some of the things that happen "out there" or at least they way in which they touch on my life, are worth including from time to time. Hence the following . . . .

A friend and I both caught part of Radio 4’s “Start the Week” programme last Monday. We heard a woman documentary maker talking passionately about the ghastly situation of women in Afghanistan. She spoke about the increasing numbers of women committing suicide by dousing themselves in kerosene. In a country in which they were invisible she said, they were choosing to die but refusing to do it quietly. We were discussing this and talking about our own lives and how hard it was to conceive of a world in which you had no voice of your own but were entirely dependent on male relatives to support you. I remember saying that it seemed positively barbaric.

Annie agreed, and then hit me over the head with a comment to the effect that it was less than a hundred years ago that women in this country gained the right to vote (1928 to be precise – I looked it up on Wikipedia) and only thirty odd years ago that equality in the workplace was finally enshrined in law.

It is a actually scary to realise that we are not so far away from a world in which a woman’s place was in the home and it was generally accepted that women were not the equal of men.

I suppose the two conclusions that I drew from this conversation were: that it will take something a lot more profound to change the position of women in Afghanistan than the workshops on Gender Issues they referred to in the programme; and that where our own recent history is concerned, we all seem to have a very short memory indeed.

One of the most apposite commentaries on the situation in Iraq that I have ever come across - and one of the funniest . . . .

http://www.glumbert.com/media/irack