X FACTOR AUDITIONS AND HOUSE CLEARANCE

What a stressful few days. After watching my son break his nose in a football match I had to drive to my mother’s in order to help her empty the contents of a house and garage full of my Grandparents stuff. Obviously leaving the children on a Sunday night is stressful in itself because lots needs to be arranged for them to go to school the next day, but in the end Builder Bloke came to the rescue and stepped in to help out. Obviously what he didn’t need was for youngest child to be dropped back late from his dad’s and then throw up in his bed from eating too much. He sent me a text saying “2:1 on the vomit front now”. Yuk. Other children’s vomit. Nothing worse.

Meanwhile hundred’s of miles away, with the help of two men and a van we moved the entire contents of a garage and some of the house to a storage centre. Where it will fester for a little while longer until we all find the time to sort it.

I found the whole thing very depressing. It seems somehow tragic that my fabulously glamorous Grandparents who travelled the world had amounted to a houseful of stuff that nobody seemed to want. It just felt sad. Then I turned it around and looked at it from another angle – how depressing that my fabulously glamourous Grandparents had amassed a complete pile of shit that nobody wants. Where were the heirlooms? All I’ve come back with is a cut glass ashtray and a manky old thermos flask. Rubbish.

My Grandmother now lives in a care home and my mother is having to sell her house – it’s all far too hard for my mother to do on her own given the recent death of my father and so we are all doing what we can to help out – but even being back in my parents flat is hard enough at the moment. It still smells of my father and just being there feels wrong without him making sarcastic comments from the corner of the room.

I went to see my Grandmother – blissfully unaware of all the sorting going on on her behalf. She seemed quite happy. She was in bed. Smiling away. 97 now. Told me she was exhausted from having been Sailing and Thinking. “How do you stop yourself from thinking so much?” she asked me. “I had a lovely man called Peter pop in earlier – in fact all men called Peter are lovely – it’s such a lovely name – and he has commissioned me to sort out some of his problems – to think of solutions, but frankly I’m struggling to work out what to do with all that washing – I mean there are still going to be soap suds everywhere even if I do invent a machine to get rid of them…..”

and so on…..

I was going to stay another night with my mother but my youngest son felt sick at school and had to be collected and because I was miles away his father had to drop everything and go and pick him up. Oops.

My son’s nose looks ridiculous and we have to go to see an NHS nose specialist on Friday – does anybody know much about broken noses? Is it best to get it re=broken to set it straight again? Or do they just go back to normal as Builder Bloke is suggesting they do. He’s had a broken nose before but not this bad.

ANYWAY, the good news is that my teenage son got through the first round of X Factor! EVEN WITH A BROKEN NOSE. I told him to tell them about it in case they thought he was born that way but he forgot! Good grief. Having spent ALL day queuing and texting me saying things like “still nowhere near the f*cking dome and SO hungry I’m going to have to leave” he hung on in there and had to sing in a booth without any music just to one man. Doesn’t sound very glamourous does it. Then he got given a golden ticket and had to go and queue somewhere else. Now he’ll have to spend another day of queuing no doubt for round two. He told me the man behind him was practicing for the entire 8 hours. Once in the Dome my son sat down and went to sleep but listening to man behind singing away in preparation – and he didn’t get through. How sad…

I got back late last night. Just as a matter of interest (to me anyway) here is the top 10 list of Google searches on my computer done in my absence:-

Google Translate
Actor broken nose that looks like a willy
Broken nose
Wolfram Alpha
countrys in Spanish
bedrooms in spanish
bbc bitesize revision
It’s the motherfucking do double g
american top 100 songs
Gmail

It’s really not very good is it.