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