Breaking Bad-shaped hole

We are baking banana and chocolate cake from the Rose Bakery cookbook, and all smells lovely and I am sure to the casual burglar (who may or may not be lurking outside my flat, trying to look inside to see if we have replaced the laptop and iPad) that we look like a very well-functioning family who don’t just watch telly on a Monday afternoon, but who BAKE. With the kids, even. Except that, beyond the dirty t-shirt and harassed-baking-face,  I am actually broken, a shell, a trembling sorrowful tangled mess of nerves and achy bones and bruised knees. That is because the children are quite awful. I have just been out with them and they have alternately bitten me, rode their scooters into a disabled woman, broken some signs, screamed so loudly that the smiling Brazilian staff at Rodizio Rico came out and clapped, thrown nectarines around Waitrose in a temper, pulled an Elmo from a window display and broken his tag off, and OF COURSE both of them kept turning on the whirring fans in the hardware shop and yelling into them, laughing at their voices sounding all choppy, while the man said “Don’t let them do that, their fingers will get cut off” while I kept crouching down and pulling them roughly away, as I attempted to find the correct-sized lightbulbs for our bedside lamps and it was all SO TERRIBLE! So embarrassing. I could feel the tutting as palpably as if someone had pinched me on the bum. You just know people think you are a mess of a parent, and that those kids should have better behaviour in public, and that the only one to blame is you. And then my new Zara sequinned jacket started to pull at the threads, and I started to shout a bit and grab arms and get that sweaty upper lip and then we went home and I had to sit in a darkened room for a bit to calm down.

I do know that this is part of the job but I do wonder sometimes if everyone’s children are quite so feral and quite so embarrassing. On the way to the Shopping Trip Of Shame I met a mother from nursery who recognised Casper. She quickly launched into telling me that Casper wants to marry her daughter, and that Casper and his best pal H try to kiss her daughter, and they have been displaying their bottoms to said daughter. She wasn’t laughing, so I took my cue from this and said I would have a few words with him about appropriate bottom-displaying.

Casper! Do you want to marry L?

Yes, mum, she is a girl. We try to kiss her. but she doesn’t really like it.

Do you show her your bottom?

No. 

Well. Good. Let’s keep bottoms for home, shall we?

And I have left it at that. I am assuming he is telling the truth about the bottom-sharing. I hope.

Enough about my parental anxieties. It’s a bit boring and I expect I am not the only one to have accidentally raised violent delinquents. (I just re-read that as “Violet Daiquiris”. That would be quite a bit nicer, all in all, don’t you think?)

Anyway, I did this to my eyebrows last week.

I think they are a touch too BLACK and SCOUSER. I have been wearing my sunglasses everywhere, indoors, outdoors, night-time, daytime, while I wait for them to fade into something a little less black. Casper asked me to take off the ‘black things’ and that I looked like a man, while Noah interjected with “She doesn’t look like a man! She looks like a lady dressed up as a man!”

Sigh. Anyway.

And as for me and my spare time, when I am not weeping from the shame of tantrumming nutters, I have a huge traumatic Breaking Bad-sized hole in my heart. We have watched four seasons and it is so good I nearly choked. I am trying to find a replacement but I fear there is no better TV writing in the whole wide world. Please do correct me if I am wrong. I know that I could always read of an evening, or talk to my husband, or do the books, but, on balance, those violet daiquiris render me incoherent at about 8:28pm and so lying down on the couch, self-medicated and silent, watching a morality tale set in a meth-lab in New Mexico is all I can manage. Honestly though – it’s better than The Wire.  Big statement, I know.

Right. Time for some photos.

He does my head in:

And he does my head in:

So do they:

So I tuck into this:

And in other sports-related news, we have tickets to go and see the taekwondo at the Olympics. How excellent and completely odd is that? We are taking the older violent daiquiris. It will be all a bit martial-arty and foreign.

That is all. Please send me box-set suggestions to help me cope with the loss of Walter White and his increasingly genius evilness.