Blogging, it seems, is a useful tool. Especially when it comes to communicating with one’s spouse. I recommend it. And here is why:
Everyone is busy these days. Busy doing whatever. I am not really sure what I do but I know that I am very, very busy indeed.
Big Seymour is also busy. When he is not renovating The Funny Little Bungalow, he is Washing Machine Man, dashing round the country in his Laundromobile, saving vulnerable people from stinking sheets. Sometimes, he fits lasers. And occasionally, he can be found geeing up the crowd at a failing disco.
But yesterday, unusually, he came home before I did. The Four Little Seymours, Grandma V and I had an important event to attend – The Horsham Schools Country Dancing Festival. It was epic.
Curiously, Little Seymour Number Two absolutely loves country dancing. She loves it so much that I really need to find the youth branch of the Chanctonbury Morris Men, and sign her up. Or maybe, she’d prefer to join the ones that paint their faces with boot polish and adorn themselves all in black? They’re pretty cool. Mythago Morris, that’s who they are – and strangely seductive under all their crows’ feathers they are, too.
Little Seymour Number Two was so excited about a festival that, to be honest, most of her peers, plus their parents, were probably dreading. Country dancing doesn’t really have that much kudos, and the skirt/neckerchief combo that they make you wear is inclined to be ill-fitting, at best. Plus, for me, getting out of the house after a rushed tea on an otherwise-free week night with Three Reluctant Little Seymours is a downright pain.
Incidentally, I also have a personal fear of country dancing, since a nasty accident in 1986 when Richard Bennett and Paul Field swung me so hard onto the hard school floor that I smashed my face in. I forgive them – they were most apologetic, and besides, we were all only nine at the time. Plus, I got a lot of sympathy from our wonderful headteacher, himself a great Morris dancer, the legendary Mr Salt. But the mere mention of a do-si-do has always left me with a slight shudder ever since.
Regardless of my feelings about it, Little Seymour Number Two is a fan, and the terrain in Horsham Park is safe – no hard floors to knock your teeth out on. So, off we went, and tried not to lose anyone. (Another fear of mine, in large, crowded, public places.)
And guess what? We had fun! We even joined in, and with do-si-dos done, Four Little Seymours and Grandma V accounted for, we made our way home to find that Big Seymour’d had a rare period of two hours when he sat still without falling asleep.
During which time, it appears, he read my latest blog.
I only discovered this when Little Seymour Number One forgot about the elbow she managed to land on when a high kick went wrong just long enough to look up at the roof of The Shed. She shrieked with joy, for lo! There was a new hanging rail! The very thing I had been hankering after, and the solution to part of The Garment Crisis!
So, after yesterday’s semi-successful clothes cull , which is still ongoing (the culled items have only made it as far as the boot of The Shiny Van), I now have somewhere to hang stuff. OK, I must climb a ladder to get to it, and I am rather worried that The New Rail will appeal to Boy Seymour as some new kind of PE apparatus (which would be very bad, given its height), but it’s another small step to functionality in this temporary-yet-permanent existence of ours.
But what this whole business did highlight is that, whilst talking is great, in our case, blogging might be better as a way of communicating. At least when I type, I have some kind of filter on what goes out, and any hostility I may feel about a situation is tempered. My brain works in a very odd way, and sometimes, when I speak, stress comes out. So I’ll write instead!
Dear Big Seymour,
Thank you for my hanging rail. It is marvellous.
By the way, did I mention? Little round windows in tops of sheds are always nice during summer months when it’s hot. You know, for breeze purposes.
I think you’re very clever.
Yours,
R
0 Comments