A dumb sort of drought

Last night I felt a deep sense of foreboding as I tucked my baby in. She looked up at me with big innocent eyes and sucked contentedly on her dummy. Her very last dummy.

I woke to the horrible blood-curdling screams of a dummy-less baby at the bleak hour of not-enough-past-five. My baby is an expert in vaporizing dummies, so I considered running away. But that seemed like an awful lot of effort.

Somehow a thriving herd of approximately nine thousand dummies has completely vanished from this flat. I am starting to suspect an international gang of dummy thieves.

A baby's dummy is her castle. 

A dummy-addicted child has a worse oral fixation than a 40 a day smoker. A dummy-addicted child will morph into Cthulhu and bite your leg off if she doesn't get her fix. Which is why I had no choice but to deploy what is known by medical professionals as 'pediatric methadone', or 'lollies'. Luckily we had a stash of strawberry ones on hand.

We ran out of lollies by 8am. In spite of a torrential morning downpour of cats, frogs and other biblical creatures, we had to make a run to the store. To date, we have already spent our family savings on replacement dummies. We are currently negotiating a dummy mortgage with the bank, to replace the lost herd of nine thousand.

Unfortunately there is a lot of speculative tit interest at the moment, and dummy prices are quite high. As is becoming customary in Britain today, the bank has demanded our firstborn as a down payment.

The reason I suspect an evil gang of teet thieves is this: how else could nine thousand dummies could go missing from one London home? Your typical London dwelling is an old house that was subdivided into thirty flats and a pile of money, leaving each flat with approximately three square feet of living space.

In spite of what an estate agent might say to you in a moment of deceptive speciousness, you can hardly fit nine thousand dummies into that kind of habitat, let alone lose them there.

I would phone the police regarding my suspicions, but I worry that they would just refer a recording of the matter to News Corp, who is rumored to be already quite over capacity on such matters. Anyway a doubt crept into my mind today when we returned from the shop with four precious new dummies to tide us over until the dummy mortgage comes through sometime mañana.

While contentedly slurping on one, Ali made a bee-line for the rubbish bin. Then she stopped in her tracks when noticed me watching her. She casually pretended to be checking out some shiny object in the kitchen cupboard.

Ali has previously proved herself to be a bin-enthusiast. So I've had a new idea: maybe my bank can sell me a dummy insurance policy. Perhaps in exchange they will only ask to borrow my firstborn.

This week at Chaos HQ

Spoon full of sugar for the medicine. 

We've been dreaming in bi-cultural cupcakes and munching on Transatlantic flags. I've been humming one of my favourite American tunes. 

As the founding mama of this great modest house, I have been stubbornly clinging to the self-evident truth that all humans are created equal and endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights.

The right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. 

Be they young or old. Unlucky or lucky in the lottery of life. 

Woody Guthrie, one of my favourite patriots, says it best. 

The Dust Bowl Troubadour spent his strange and fascinating life showing fascists what hillbillies can do. This July marks the centenary of his birth. 

The timing is fitting: where their parents had job and housing opportunities, young people now have ample time to cultivate their folk music skills in the great outdoors. Fortunately, a folk music kit is pretty cheap and folds up easily for storage in a leaky bedsit, or under a park bench.

Happy birthday Woody - you are still the man for your time and place. 

Swimming with poets

I did something unusual last week - unusual for me in this season of life anyway. I went to a poetry reading with my friend Truffle. It took place in an auditorium full of well-behaved adults that was - I am told - built from a single tree.

The evening began with with a journey to King's Cross. I walked out of the underground and found myself swimming in a huge school of hip London fish. In spite of my yocal instincts, I wasn't alarmed, but rather thrilled to be surrounded by such an interesting, busy school of humanity.

Four years ago our little family left London as two and a bump for the cheaper burbs. Back in those boom days, I once heard someone sum it up perfectly on The Now Show by saying that London only remained  affordable to rats and investment bankers. As a pair of twenty-somethings, we were generationally out of luck. But things change, and somehow we swam back.

Well-appointed rat-flat with far-reaching river views.  

From my time here four years ago, I remember charity campaigners outside tube stops. But since I've been away, 'chuggers' (charity muggers) as they are now affectionately known, have spawned like mad - their numbers are now so great that they are encroaching on the habitat of Britain's native red squirrel. King's Cross was awash with them.* 

As I awkwardly dog-paddled my way upstream towards King's Place (the Guardian headquarters), a chugger singled me out and extended the ko finger. I recoiled and did my best to parrot the 'I'm busy ignoring you because I'm an urban sophisticate' face that I saw other people giving him. Then he hollered: 'hey beautiful laaaaaady!'

Now in spite of the fact that he had just said this precise thing to both the nun and the poodle walking ahead of me, I was still quite chuffed (though not enough to stop and get chugged). You see, Ana often says 'fish fingers now', but she rarely says 'hey beautiful lady.'

The reading, featuring Anna Robinson and Ian Sinclair amongst others, was hosted by Poet in the City, a charity that aims to bring poetry to new audiences. The theme - urban life - couldn't have been more perfect. Elaine Feinstein, who read from her 2010 book Cities, said an off-the-cuff remark that really struck a chord with me. She prefaced a poem by explaining how she'd once found herself cornered in a house by two very small children. 'I felt my life was over,' she said slowly, 'but it wasn't'. And then she enumerated some of the things that came later - flights of fancy to Budapest, boozy dinner parties, Ted Hughes, navigating Singapore with broken ankles by wheelchair - a whole life.

Of course her comment wasn't aimed at me - but it felt that way - like she was a poet fairy godmother, who had apparated just to say: 'take heart - this story is still unfolding, and we are in early pages.' And though I may never hope to journey to Bohemia with Bohemians, or Singapore with invalids, I truly related to her in that moment (motherhood is the ultimate creator of common ground). I took heart.

Show me the way to your next London bar. 

Hanging out with a wise international food writer like Truffle has it perks - Truffle directed us to a pair of delicious grown-up fruit shoots at the swank Booking Office Bar, lodged in the newly-opened St Pancras Renaissance London Hotel. There - in spite of some rather kinky elevator music - we were able to relax in peace and talk in complete sentences about grown-up things like er, mothers and daughters.

My chair gave me a good line of site towards the bar, which happened to be housed in the skeleton of the old train station ticket counter. Architectural ghosts of the original structure abounded in the ceiling and the walls of the cavernous room, like dinosaur bones half-unearthed. I couldn't help but recall the words of Tobias Hill, one of the poets, who had repeatedly quoted Ralph Waldo Emerson: 'Cities give us collision.'

Perhaps that's what I've been missing.



*I should add that they have my sympathy - I have done similarly rubbish jobs where people shout at you all day. It ain't fun. You usually don't find yourself in such a job because you are a natural jerk, but rather because you are broke, which is to say young.

Deceptively spacious rain gods

Dear rain gods,

Stop it already. I know you invest heavily in Wellington boot production and clinical depression, but give us a break. Why don't you go on holiday to my eternally drought-stricken homeland?

How I wish you weren't here,

~Mama

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To the estate agents in my life,

Can we drop 'deceptively spacious' please? If I see that nonsensical phrase one more time I am going to spontaneously combust. And can we please let me be the judge of  'well appointed' and 'sought after location? I am not a turnip—I can diagnose overpriced 70's carpet and crap house near an off-licence all by my little self.

Thank you for your linguistic consideration,

~Mama

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Dear Nana,

I've slept more in the past three days since you arrived than I did in the entire year before that. The giant crows foot atop my neck appears to be melting back into a human face. You can stay. Or rather, you're not allowed to go.

Hugs,

~Mama

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Dear Kat of 3 Bedroom Bungalow,

Thank you for delivering my letters through the So & So post. This is especially helpful at the moment, as Royal Mail still appears to be dealing with a huge Christmas backlog (it's the wrong kind of post).

I look forward to partaking in this fun weekly event again,

~Mama