Boil

I am summoned to deal with a huge boil that has erupted on my brother's forehead. I reluctantly cancel a playdate with a friend's baby pigs to call in at my mothers on the way home from yoga where I find him sitting in the kitchen in his pants; braying softly as he rolls his already large and now expanding head from shoulder to shoulder.

The patient could previously have been described as one of heavy brow. Now a huge hard lump above his right socket lends a lopsidedness that is more elephant man than homo robustus. For one reason or another I have a ready supply of sterilised needles and syringes, which are not specified for the lancing of boils, but we agree that their prescription is merely advisory, like the traffic lights at a set of roadworks, and that our Trust could only applaud us putting them to multitask in these austere times.

He flinches as I approach with the needle but the pressure on his eye socket is affecting his vision and the horror of a life half lived: a status half posted; the instructions on a protein drink cannister half understood....but I can't do it. It is bizarrely impossible for me to stab my brother in the eye even though he's been asking for it for years.

Going home

Packing to come home is nothing like the adrenaline-fuelled homage to OCD that is PACKING THE CAR TO GO ON HOLDAY. From 3.30 in the afternoon on the day before we leave I am on the phone to Prophet of Doom, begging him to come home so that we can start the joyful yet judicious game of 3d Tetris that will fill the boot , with: all components (only cubes and cuboids admissable: all irregularly-shaped items, such as a hairdryer, to  be packed into a cuboid-shaped recepticle and packed out with other items of the same product family: brushes or foam rollers say, not cheese triangles) stacked at the same height; picnic and overnight bag accessible from both in and outside the vehicle; magic blanky spread evenly over the load but not blocking fridge vents; and my things not squashed. The cubby hole between the two front seats is loaded with frozen water. Glove box contains IPods, chewing gum and baby wipes. It is how you would travel to heaven.

For our journey home the task could not have been attempted with less good humour. Obviously this is mainly because it is the journey home. But also because: the boot of the second most expensive and yet least reliable seven-seater on the market is jammed and everything has to be hauled over the seats in 33 degrees with four horseflies for company. Somehow, all right angles have been pushed into ugly lumps by the stealthy introduction of PACKING MISCELLANEOUS ITEMS INTO THE NEAREST SUITCASE/BUCKET/CARRIER BAG/HAT; a heinous Prophet-led practice that supports the juxtaposition of items in a piece of luggage that are clearly NOT FRIENDS: Camembert, cotton buds and wet trunks for example. Seriously if I wasn't half-drunk eating a slice of cold pizza in the bath I'd give a shit, but the closure of a holiday affects us all in different ways. I cram half a bag of melted and reformed Starburst into the glovebox and pick my way through the torn maps and used wipes that cover the floor and off we go.

You'll never unwrap those

Tortoise

After weeks of exhibiting tiresome behaviours we dismiss as broadly attention-seeking (refusing to eat and constantly burying itself under the compost/dog's bed/dirty washing) the tortoise disappears at the beginning of June. After a frantic search, which encompasses dredging the pond and employing three teams of working dogs ("Have you got an item of erm..clothing or something...?") all hopes of finding him/her are abandoned; everyone returns to work/school and we try to rebuild our lives.

For the next few weeks there are desperate flashes of hope: "The peg bag! No-one checked the peg bag!" But we all know that even if the tortoise could scale the washing line post, it could scarcely conceal itself in a flimsy fabric pouch that was half its size and full of clothespegs. As I have seen one of the children writing on the underside of its shell at the beginning of the summer in permanent marker I an vaguely reassured that it has our phone number on the underside of its shell. But it turns out that he had just written PTO. We never even gave him/her a name.

Attention seeking

Then, on August 3, there it is. In the middle of the grass, completely filthy and blinking the soil from its eyes. After several warm baths, a bag of curly kale and a mani-pedi he/she's in tip-top condition and tearing around the garden spitting at the dogs with a ferocity that belies his/her sixty years. A day later and we would have been away on holiday. It doesn't bear thinking about.

One Direction

Our small town was once the home to Winston Churchill: an honour much referenced in the naming of local dogs, schools, shops and so on. The great man himself sits immortalised in black granite, on the town green: his knees worn smooth by clambouring children over the decades. Other famous residents nearby have included Adam Faith, Judi Dench, Gloria Hunniford, Jackie Gold (the boss of Anne Summers) and the woman with a bun from How Clean is Your House? Even in the case of the latter this is a town that remains sniffy at best about celebrity.

Until we had a visit from ONE DIRECTION. Oh yes, the boys were in town recording their first single (Simon Cowell's record company SyCo - see what he did there? owns a studio here). Girls quickly establised a fan camp on the green, sending out for pro plus and water when the going got tough and jumping up on shaky legs that have been folded for too long when one of their heros was spotted through a window. It was like waiting for Duran Duran to land at Gatwick in 1982.

I fear for the price of a full English in the cafe. A sustained pop idol incursion could push it pass the £10 mark.

Music lesson

Little OCD is having his first piano lesson. We arrive twenty minutes early for the normal one's music lesson so that he can have a go. I have had three hour's sleep and am righteously hungover. The doorbell goes right through me. This doesn't bode well for the saxophone class to come.

The impossibly cheerful Justin and Jane have been teaching our children to play various instruments for eight years. The middle one seems to have an undeserved fortitude for this; and continues to fly through a series of music exams with merit despite the fact that he hasn't been able to access any of his instruments since converting the room they live in into a scooter workshop last year.

We are gaily ushered into the house and the child is parked on a stool at the piano. I need a cheese twist and am frantically tracing spirals up and down the arm of the sofa. "Let's start with Middle C," trills Jane. She demonstrates gently how he is to play the note with the thumb of his right hand. After a belligerent pause he jabs it with the index finger of his left.

"Shall we put this helpful hand on our lap?" she beams brightly, removing it gently from the keys. "He's sad that he can't join in right now but we'll ask him very soon." He scowls at the unnecessary personification of a body part, but it is the announcement of an imminent rhythm game of Tadpole Frog that sends him off down the deep end. "Listen," he says, "It's Jaws. Daa da daa da dadadadada." Or," she bats back, "It's Frog, toad, Frog, toad. Tadpole tadpole tadpole tadpole tadpole." A rapport is struck. There goes £32 a week. Respect.

Street party

It is Royal Wedding day and we are having a street party. This will begin at 2 o clock. At 1.00 a few of us gather in the road to decide where to put the tables. Of the five households who have volunteered a table for the event, three are unable to squeeze them down the narrow alleyways that link their back gardens to the street. There is a car parked in the way. Sources close to the organisers of another street party on the other side of town reveal that this rival community has steadfastly adhered to an itinerary devised by committee, which opened with a directive that all tables would be in place and fully decorated by 09.15. They are to enjoy an egg and spoon race at 14.50.

A 1.10 everybody including next door, a woman ordinarily so hardboiled she would chop her kids up and feed them to her dogs if there was no coupon on the Bakers, buggers off indoors to watch the balcony kiss.  The car has been moved and tables of various heights are jammed together to form a raggedy line that swells at one end and is an infuriating 20cm longer than our banqueting roll. A balloon bursts. Next door emerges to fret about the obscured gap left between the curve of the end table, an oval, and its rectangular neighbour. Someone could lose their drink if they put it down there she points out. Balls of mismatched bunting are batted up and down the road by the wind like tumbleweed. All the balloons burst. A jelly that I have been building up in different coloured layers in a sandcastle bucket for days slips from its mould and is perfect for a second before it quivers and then collapses entirely into jewel-coloured flob on the floor.

Neighbours start arriving as the last bunting is tied into place. They bring flags, dogs, babies, barbecues, beer, Pimms and piles and piles of food. We have towers of fairy cakes decorated with red white and blue sprinkles and topped with tiny flags.We have a pavlova decorated with blueberries and strawberries in the pattern of the Union Jack, a bouncy castle, table tennis, Dennis the Menace plasters, the floor jelly and Jazzy Jeff and the Fresh Prince. Smoke from a bank of barbecues curls around the bunting. It is time for children at the other end of town to select teams for a tug of war. Ours are engaged in violent Nerf warfare around the ramparts of the bouncy castle, they are filthy, and one is being sick. A boisterous crowd grows, swelled by passersby unable to resist the offer of a burnt sausage covered in grass and a warm can of wifebeater. Dogs snatch food from the elderly and parents snatch sneaky cigarettes away from their children.

Eight hours later a hardcore contingent remains on the drive, swaying drunkenly to Amii Stewart (Friends not Knock on Wood) between bags of rubbish, one of which happily yields an unopened packet of burgers for a survivors snack at around midnight. We round off handing out slightly damp sparklers and setting off a rocket that whizzes into the side of the house where it explodes leaving a dirty great scorch mark and the children in tears. Best of British.

Puffles

Little OCD has built up a collection of ten puffles on Club Penguin. I tell him it's too much. He says it's better to have more then you don't get so attached. Until now he has had just two puffles. They have been quite over-indulged. One has his own dancefloor. I think with 10 he's biting off more than he can chew, what with the feeding and everything.

He appears, blinking, in the kitchen. I'm thrilled that he has torn himself away from the computer. With a carefully managed reintroduction to daylight and human interaction he could go on to lead a normal life.

"I'm banned. For trying to use the wrog password. For 72 hours. That's 72 times three thousand and six hundred seconds."

We have this thing about breaking all timed events into seconds, which can then be drummed out on the side of the bath with a triceratops before bed. So far the compulsion has been limited to the reconstruction of , say, boiling an egg or Pass Out by Tinie Tempah. I'm worried.

"What will happen to your puffles? Can someone else look after them for you?"

"No they'll die. I'm going next door can I have a bag of crisps?"

Club Penguin

Little OCD wants me to text Harrison's mum to see if he can meet up with him on Club Penguin. "How nice," says Nana. "You mind that road though and do your coat up."

Harrison and his mum are on their way back from the supermarket. He will log on to Club Penguin when they return. There she is now. Can he meet Harrison in the Dojo Courtyard? Sorry the baby's pulled the dongle out so just need to log back in.

We wait for 10 minutes. Still no sign of him. Apparently he could be on a different server. This is annoying. More texting:

- Sorry can't find him. Is Harrison on the arctic server? x

- Where's that? x

-It's on a list where you first log in. Is it too early for a vodka? x

- Def not. On way to servers. There it is. Harrison is on the arctic one now. Back in the dojo courtyard but no sign? x

- Had to go back to his igloo. Will be in the nightclub after he's collected his puffle x

-This is a nightmare. Ok Harrison's going to the nightclub x

- Can't see him in the nightclub. Tears. We're out of tonic xx

- He's gone to the giftshop. O hold on we've come out of the arctic server and gone into abdominal. Shall I pop some tonic round? o sorry its abonimal x

- ok. no dont worry found concentrate for sodastrm x

- ok. O there he is!

-Thank god xx

Skaterham

We have arrived to collect the normal one and three of his friends from a local church that has been converted into an indoor skate park. He is aghast to see me as I don't usually leave the house on a Saturday. "What are you DOING IN HERE?" he hisses. "Don't speak to anyone." His well-founded fear is that I will humiliate him by attempting to engage one of the organisers in a 'down with the kids'conversation about tattoos or dubstep or how they've missed a trick by calling the place Skaterham and not Sk8terham.

He needn't have worried, because I can't see a thing. It's as dark as Hollister in there and I am wearing sunglasses to placate the hangover that has hauled me out for salty fries dunked in black coffee. We bundle them and their scooters into the car and make for KFC. They all want a popcorn chicken snack box. Little OCD enjoys the way this rolls off the tongue, as he last week enjoyed 'Michael MacIntyre' and the week before 'chicken dhansak' and softly murmers 'popcorn chicken snack box' repeatedly for the rest of the weekend.

Denial

"I can't believe you take your lenses out to weigh yourself." The eldest has snuck up behind me in the bathroom. He is wet from the shower and wearing a gas mask. He is smug to have lost a stone since December and steers most conversations toward weight loss if he can.

The scales are wrong, probably the batteries are going. Or it could be the uneven floor so I take them into the bedroom where they are still wrong. Actually my hair's a bit wet. We place a damp towel on the scales to replicate the weight of wet hair but it doesn't register.

I take the dogs on a long walk, 5k, and vow to do so every day. According to the pedometer app on my phone, this burns off 254 calories, or a Kit Kat Chunky. But I have even lied to the pedometer about my weight, so it's probably more.

Tesco

Little OCD is fighting sleep so that he will be able to tell his dad about our visit to the new Tescos when he gets in. "There was a Costa there, at the front, and saucepans, and slipper socks and a man going around with a machine that cleans the floor. I think they've got those Scuba Doo bikes that you use underwater. I'm going to ask for one of them for my birthday."

They didn't have, however, printer paper, fresh mint or a working passport photo booth, which is annoying.

Bad habits

I am smoking during the day again. This hasn't happened since six builders moved in with us for the best part of a year and turned the house into Fraggle Rock. But the dogs keep escaping through a Tom and Jerry dog-shaped hole in a neighbour's fence and there's not much else to do while supervising them in the garden. As long as I'm standing there they'll pretend to play with  a stick or something. As soon as I turn my back they're off through the comedy hole and showing me up all over town.

Yesterday I found one of them sharing a packet of scampi fries with a drunken old codge in the pub, but it's the bins behind the curry house that they love. The black one can get away with it, but the grey one's face is now stained chicken tikka massala orange and he stinks like the messy end of a friday night.

Chair

We need chairs. I think we need Vitra's Eames DSW chairs, but at £280 a pop they're not in the bag yet, though "a bit toppy" is far from the discouraging "NO WAY YOU'RE OFF YOUR HEAD" response that I usually get when suggesting an expensive purchase that has no wheels.

Spot the difference

There are copies. A trillion of them, on ebay. The colours are vile: red, baby blue, mint green and black (the genuine model comes in putty, ochre and ocean, natch) but the white's ok. And they're £45. We buy a cheap one and try out an expensive one in Liberty, to compare. For the life of me I can't tell the difference but as I stroke the Vitra sticker every bone in my body is screaming at me to spend £2,500 on something I could get for less than £400.

To complicate matters I have just met an Annina Vogel vintage charm bracelet on the ground floor (there's actually a toaster that pops toast out, and a weeny weeny music box that works, swoon) and if I could present it in the context of a saving made it would be helpful.

Harry jumps the shark

Is the forensic lushy dead? One Silent Witness viewer commenting on on Digital Spy hopes so. "The alternative is a Deux ex Machina of epic proportions that is so ridiculously implausible it "jumps the shark", says Phil Solo.

"Deux ex Machina?" It's hardly Othello Phil. In last week's episode all the characters were revealed to have a powerful link with the same hole in a field just outside Sheffield. If the hole had filled up with water and sharks were in it and they started jumping over them we wouldn't bat an eyelid. Bugger your disbelief. It's about making do. We're still  a long way from Masterchef and there's nothing else on.

Anyway, according to reports there appeared to be a shadowy figure of Harry's build limping away from the body. Was there? I missed this, probably because the ghosting on our telly is so bad that I would have just taken it to be a character from One Born Every Minute over on Channel 4. Most likely mum-to-be Julia's partner Dean, who initially supplies a "healthy dose of humour in a bid to relieve the tension in the delivery suite".
Anyway Phil says for Harry to be the mysterious figure in the background requires the gunman to either let him go and burn a handy wino, or for a third party to swoop in, kill the gunman, set him alight, bandage Harry's shot-up knee, and fade into the darkness. "All in the few minutes between Leo seeing the shooting from the cab window and him scrambling down to the riverbank. And all while wearing, or changing into, the same clothes as the assassin."

BUT, Tom Ward who plays Harry allegedly refers to the scene's climax in this week's TV Quick as "a moment when it looks like Harry's dead." And Viv in the post office says there was no gang tattoo on the gunman's hand.

Can't wait. Pass the magic blanky.

Wait up Dean! It's a boy!

Battenberg

We are in Dean Street Townhouse for Battenberg. Little OCD received an HMV voucher for Christmas, and as the company has literally closed every provincial store as we have reached its doors we have had to come up to Oxford Street to spend it on a pair of headphones that we could have bought more cheaply on Amazon.

It's a bit grown up,Townhouse. We have made a mess: a crumby jumble of inside-out coats, chewed straws, and spilt drinks, within seconds of our arrival. The eldest returns from the toilets smirking about the "no step to mind" notice over the door. (The ladies does have a step to mind). "It's like one of those wooden signs that people hang up in their kitchens," he trills. "I cook with wine...Sometimes I even put it in the food!"

Oxford Street is distressing, as always. Little OCD is pleased as punch with his new headphones and looks properly retarded nodding rhythmically with his hood up as we sit down to a gimmicky Mexican. We meet a friend. STS is a sportswear designer. Each of the children has made an effort with his appearance on account of this. The middle one has styled his hear into a kind of quiff with what smells like Cillit Bang.

The eldest has now taken to speaking entirely in domestic comedy phrases. I am amazed at how many he can call to mind. Perhaps he should carve his history revision notes into wooden rectangles and suspend them around the house, like a 3d spider diagram.

We go for ice cream. I am irritable because I don't like ice cream, my dinner was horrid and the friend who has called by our house to let the dogs out has been unable to set the Sky Plus for the Tudors, which begins in an hour, and which I have been looking forward to since March. The kids are fighting and getting covered in ice cream. My husband offers STS a lift home; a detour we can ill afford given the Sky Plus situation. The eldest turns to me "Raising children is like being pecked to death by chickens," he beams sagely.

New car

Confused on Friday. He's left his car, my car and the motorobike, but seems to be at work. "How did you get to work?" "Got the bus. Picking up that car on the way home." "What car?" etc etc. Apparently barking from the computer: "Look at this Audi, just like our old one inside, but different colour seats," equates to a conversation in which we sensibly put forward our thoughts on the purchase of a new vehicle.

Anyway I don't care. The last time he came home with a new car: "Man, look at this it looks just like your first Golf. I thought it was it," I was annoyed. The thing was manual. "What the fuck it's going to BLOW UP," "Mum, change into second..." and high maintenance. It changed the whole lexicon of our journey-based shared experience:

‘Won’t be long, just pulled over to get some petrol’

Head gasket’s gone. Waiting for recovery.

‘Fun’ as in ‘just a bit of fun’

Money pit/death trap. The only people likely to experience an element of fun with this vehicle are your neighbours as they bat off frequent requests for jump-leads and engine oil with smirky comments about how their Mazda’s windows never get frozen shut/open and how they’ve not needed to charge a battery for years since they had that old Passat but that of course was just for running the dogs to the woods and they’re both dead now.

‘Holds the road like glue’

Slow punctures in all four tyres.

‘It’s just for driving to the station’

Where it will be broken into on a weekly basis by some little chav using nothing more sophisticated than a paperclip. This is how you will lose three digital cameras, an Iphone, a month’s supermarket shopping and a small child.

‘It’s just a small thing needs fixing with the suspension’

GET IN air-ride. Whoop whoop.

‘Project’

Fun x 50

 ‘Sweet’, as in the gear box/battery/starter motor is

Fucked. The words ‘brand new’ can also be used in this context.

Anyway, as I said I don't care. It's not a motorbike.

Doctors and nurses

After a stressful early evening ("Grade 5 is WAY too hard"..."The teacher said we NEEDED to do this in Photoshop") we see moderate success in convincing little OCD that me cutting into his verruca with a blunt scalpel in our dimly lit bedroom, followed by the administration of some worm medicine, constitutes a game of ER. He is compliant only while distracted by the rising compulsion to place a lego man's head in the round hole at the top of the Wartner aerosol.

See the hole in the top? That's where he goes

Quite unbelievably, the only lego man that comes to hand within the required timeframe (QUICKLY NOW) is Steven Spielberg. He is summarily rejected for being, like, a real person. While searching for a more generic character ("a builder or doctor or something but not a motorcyclist, the helmet won't fit") I wondered if Spielberg was the only lego Steven available. Check out lego Stephen Hawking.

Bridge and tunnel

Lo carbing continues with a breakfast of three marinated anchovies (H, a friend of the eldest believes anchovies to be extinct. At the same time he is slightly OCD about sell-by dates. Tinned and jarred variants are acceptable to him but we have to hide the marinated kind that come in a tub) and a piece of disembowelled cheesecake (about seven minutes on the plate-as-a-clock basis).

Lunch was half a bag of Mr Porky scratchings. Was there ever a less glamorous snack? And some stale cashews hoiked out of the groove at the back of the baking cupboard.

I have clocked members of the family sneaking out for rice and pasta, the scabs, but I'm determined to press on with it and lose the half a stone-odd I put on in December. To admit to overeating over Christmas and crash dieting in January is in some people's eyes woefully suburban, like panic-buying petrol, going out on a Saturday night and PVCu front doors. I personally enjoy panic buying, especially bread, and ideally from the garage. It heralds an impending catastrophe (I can only think of snow) that makes it acceptable to spend whole days in the pub.

In other news, the new garden hose has arrived. It is 40m long, a record length for us, even if you count two hoses joined up (fraught with danger, will always fly apart when tap is on full and you are stepping over the join). Why it was dispatched in a box that for all the world could have contained a Louis Vuitton Petit Noe duffel in ivory is anyone's guess. Life is cruel.

But in ivory

Only available in green

Lifestyle issues

We are drunk on the sofa of our room in Soho House Berlin. It is the biggest and most gorgeous bedroom I have ever seen, with a giant's bed and a double shower. "Let's play princesses," I suggest. He is googling garden hose accessories. In our drunken good humour we have booked the most expensive villa in the South of France for two weeks in the summer and I text the eldest to tell him the good news. "The one with the computer-generated pool?" he replies. Last year we were the victims of holiday brochure wide angle lens swimming pool trickery of the most savage order and he is still shaken.

Photoshopped pool: needs slight clockwise rotation

An alternative, and more expensive, destination is sought and found. We recognise the name of the owner as someone known to my father who dabbled with property ownership in this part of France until he discovered that chucking money at the hair-brained business scheme of any muppet sobbing into a pint was a surer way to lose vast sums of cash at speed.

I call the owner of the second house. This is out of character on every level but the champagne is wearing off and, rather than spiral into the usual self-indulgent sobbing drawl that colours/ruins all events in which I a) drink very much indeed b) catch a glimpse of my husband in a work context (he made some baffling calls on the way to the airport), I am going to assert myself in a businesslike yet engaging manner in order to secure a discount on the basis of our common history.

Ten fairly demeaning minutes later (his memory of my family is vague and populated by characters I have never met: I suspect there may be more than one ex-investment banker with colonnial ambitions called Nigel in the St Tropez area) I agree to pay the published tariff, plus a couple of hundred quid extra for housekeeping ("Absolutely, it's no holiday for me otherwise..." I hear myself tweat compliantly).

It is a spectacular fail. An hour later he calls back to ask me to change our dates so that he's not left with an 'orphan' week that would be difficult to let at the beginning of the holidays. For fuck's sake. I agree. It merely means taking the children out of school a day early, and missing a hospital appointment, and that our housesitter won't be available. Not a problem.

Babysitting pandas

I am thrilled. Two baby pandas are coming to live in Scotland. The Royal Zoological Society of Scotland (RZSS) is working with officials in China to bring a breeding pair of giant pandas to Edinburgh Zoo. If successful, Edinburgh will be only the eighth zoo in the West to care for this enigmatic and endangered species.

We are on a flight to Berlin. "Look! they're going to have baby pandas at Edinburgh zoo. How fun is that?? Aw look at that one with the bib on. Bless." He flinches from the Daily Mail coverage of this unlikely collaboration with contempt. I am still in trouble for describing his most loathed publication as "the paper" as we boarded.

I am patiently told that the baby panda wearing the bib, the one holding a comic and even the one bouncing joyously down a slide in a childrens' play park, all represent the thin edge of the wedge. "The panda is an ecological cul-de-sac," he explains (this he's got from Chris Packham who used to be on the Really Wild Show) and I am reminded of the larceny of the Chinese. "Remember when you're wearing blue overalls and eating grass because they've guzzled up all our gas and laid waste to every square inch of arable land in Africa that we once paid half a million quid a year to babysit the pets of our future overlords. How we'll laugh."

Evil