To say the past month has been a rollercoaster of epic proportions would be an understatement. From seeing no family for six months to having nearly every single one cross our path or intertwine with us in a way I haven't known since I was an ever-perplexed but for the most part carefree teenager, it's been emotional.

Just a thought

What would hap’ if I went back home
Packed up my bags, upped, left and roamed
I could smoke
Could dance
Could wake with a smile
Knowing life would be good for a while

Don’t get me wrong
Life is not bad here at all
Glimmers of laughter, tickles hee hee
A veritable, sporadic spree of glee

And most importantly
I don’t cry really these days

But inside my heart, deep down in my aorta
Something yearns
Something burns
For a love that’s my own

He’s not mine
Never thought he would be
Really
And most probably
Never wanted him to be

But we do some good for each other
Him and me
Me and thee
Ever the dutiful Siamese divorcee

Can’t be bovvered to worry
To hurry, will tarry
For I’ll find you, my love
The one I will marry

As my mum did :)

xxxxxxxxx

Rocketing up to Cloud Number 9

Learnt today my own mumma has been reading my twitterings on here and liked it! Brought a tear to my eye, I admit. Maybe because I assumed I'd kind of let her down by not becoming a teacher or an ecologist or a saviour of wilderbeasts.

But a writer I am and, as my beloved tells me often, while words leave my fingers like lightening, their vocal siblings sometimes get lost on their way out of the voicebox. So thank you mum. It really does mean alot.

Saying that, I'm almost finished building that rocket....

Through a stepdaughter's eyes

Off to Mumbai in three days and a new continent to discover.....

Glistening naked boys running along the laughing beach
of Mumbai,
sitting in the third class women’s carriage on the train,
oceans of miles
a snake charmer at the police chief’s birthday party
terrifying,
throngs gathering
when I get off a train,
geckos scurrying across
my bedroom walls,
monkeys at the screen windows,
water buffaloes, not friendly,
mimicking curious children to make them laugh,
a visit to a Maharaja’s palace,
white marble, glimmering in the sunlight
dozens of preening peacocks on the lawn, luminescent,
rickshaw rides, tonga rides, dusty scooter rides,
bacshish memsab, bacshish,
I give bacshish
though many disapprove
Air India, the stewardesses
in luminous saris,
Mumbai – Windsor
so many, many time zones away.

Donna Bamford

Taxman's on his way......

Good morrow. Funny old day really. Up and down like a teenage bride's nighty, to coin an uncle S-ism. Owen did his usual zone out before little one and I left for school and work in a fluster of wet hair, crumpled clothing and stale sandwiches. So, in true girl power fashion, turned on heel, muttered whatever and slammmmmeeedd the front door. Wrote him foot stamping email halfway through morning and he had the audacity to rudely interrupt on stanza 31. "Why haven't you called? Don't tell me you're busy?". "Actually I am," I managed, being way to busy writing his email to talk. 10 hours later? Yes alright. In love again. But it's his fault. Bugger.
Another evening of Lizzyisms and laughter. Mid arguement with Owen on the impossibility of calculating tax credits and dividing households bills fairly (yawn), Lizzy points to Tax Credit Form and says "T...A...X. Tax." Ok. First word I've ever seen her spell out followed by the word in its entirety and it's tax. On the day Blair officially stood down. Terrible omen perhaps? Bring it on Mr Brown. My daughter's got your number.

Summertime and kids are jumping

Summer's officially here. Well ok, its only May 1st but the sun in Blighty is blissfully warm way ahead of schedule. Twenty degrees and counting. Has been so for weeks now. Pubs across England are fearing the looming smoking ban and basking in global warming ('In an English Public Gaaarden'). Meanwhile in Oz, according to mum, kids are playing in car washes (as in Esso) to cool off as the drought continues to wreak havoc with the landscape.
Got the job with Proactive - you know, the cardy, the girl with the scraped back hair, sleepy eyes, fear of relaxation. It's tiring so I won't embellish here other than to say I'm sick to death of beans without even eating one. Cryptic.
Lizzy has been whirlwinding around the Black Country, Brum, Hinckley and London like Drew Barrymore but still manages to squeeze in time for Heather next door. Spotted them out the top window the other day jumping like jack rabbits on the enormous trampoline next door. "What you two doing," I fishwifed loudly. "Did you ask if you could go on there?". Guiltily, they looked up and my oh so sweet Snoop put me right. "Yes mumma, we asked the grown up in there and it said we could." Once again, the Snoop put it all into perspective.

Mexican stand-off

So, off he goes into the night to work off some aggression on the squash court, another day passed with women dogging his day. First me, anxious, twitchy and frankly grumpy about not having a job and fearful of being branded a substandard candidate (not shitly incompetent but not quite good enough). So, yes, I was twitchy and annoying even myself.

Poor Lizzy bore the brunt of it. "Mumma, can you play with me?", she asked for the 10th time since getting in from school, me ignoring the little girl who only wanted a companion to play horses at a birthday party with. "No. Go play elsewhere," I snapped, not looking away from the computer screen where a Hotmail message was slowly taking shape, a reply to a good friend at present literally tightening her own noose by indulging in a dangerously complacent extra-marital. Lizzy hung her head and walked off.

Oh, dear Lord, that awful feeling when all the whingeing and moaning, whingeing and moaning you did about your own 'self-obsessed', head in the clouds, deluded parents goes out the window and you find yourself behaving like a 'self-obsessed', head in the clouds, deluded parent. I ran after her. "I'm sorry Pop," I say genuinely, striding into the spare room where she is perched on the edge of the bed looking blankly at animated Justin from Something Special as he signs the word 'cow'. I crouch down and hug her. She smiles weerily, not taking her eyes from the TV, and I eventually sliver back over my own silvery slime into the dining room where my dreaded Hotmail reply lies waiting.

An hour later, however, Pop and I are thankfully back on top, folding pants carefully into her top drawer. We like this game for some reason, checking out whether it's indeed a princess or a butterfly that adorns the front as we stack each pair neatly onto the last.

Then tea-time comes and minced beef, taco shells, pots of chopped onions, salsa dip and grated cheese, tomatoes and guacamole are dished up by Owen, looking simultaneously fearsome, tired and dejected. Lizzy, on the other hand, is full of beans, not of the re-fried variety. "What's wrong?," I asked the head of the table, trying to be compassionate but knowing Victor Meldrew was not about to divulge. "Just don't even ask," he said firmly while at the same time making it understood it wasn't on this occasion my petulance or Lizzy's which had upset him.

Fiona. His first born. Gotta be. Ok, bearing in mind I've said before he has two children, it should be known he has a third. A 16-year-old bi-product of a one night stand in a high rise in Inverness. A blip in an otherwise exemplary record and one which didn't go down at all well with father-to-be's famille. And in comparison to the self confessed Mr Ultra Sensible, who rarely allows emotion to get in the way of a practical solution, the ultra volatile, angry teenager who's led like a lamb to the slaughter certainly doesn't seem to be chip off the old block. I've never met her as she is hundreds of miles away in Scotland but, from what I've been told, this pair may as well be different species.

This particular 'I'm at the end of my tether' moment had been a few days in the offing. Twenty-four hours earlier, Fiona had been turfed out of her rented accommodation for the young and displaced, needing a place to call their own and guidance on how to survive in the big, bad world. With a free bit of Christian preaching thrown in. She'd had a chance after being hurled out of her mother and Owen's ex' home six months earlier, a flat incidentally crammed full with lizards, cats and benefit forms, and was doing well at college on an agriculture and rural management course. She'd also given up the fags and