Chez Spud

I haven’t joined in with The Gallery for a while. No particular reason, just ‘off’ blogging really. But ‘shoes’? Yes please. Thought I’d open with The Shoe of Doom which, be still my beating heart, is now in my possession. Yes, school sent it home with Bertie’s work from last year. Strange that they didn’t want to keep it as an example of a pupil’s outstanding artistic talent, non?

Then there are my shoes

The boys’ shoes

And other people’s shoes

And this, my favourite ever shoe shot. I think. Taken in Paris, where else? It’s the orange socks that clinch it for me. Dreamy…oh, and check out the buttons on his cuff. Four. Real class.

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[Hushed tones] oh dear [/hushed tones]. Woe is me! Regard the lovely offerings of Bertie’s class, clay shoes made as part of a project they are doing about Cinderella. How charming, I thought as I wandered past the display, how pretty they are. Some are really very elegant, quite 19th century in style…others are funky with block heels and bows. Roll over Manolo and Jimmy…Christian you can keep your oh-so passe red soles…here comes the Reception Shoe Design Team..hot on your towering FM heels.

‘I wonder which one Bertie did?’ I pondered…hmmm…no not that one…no…nope…’OH! OH THERE IT IS! OH!…OH! OH MY EYES! What in the name of all that is good and true is this HORROR masquerading as Cinderella’s shoe?’. Yes, that big, enormous, clumpy, GIANT shoe at the front is the one made by my child. Now I’m not sure which version of the story he was working to, but I’m confident that the traditional version has Ms Cinders throwing shapes on the dancefloor with HRH in teeny tiny glass slippers. Bertie seems to have crafted a kind of hybrid Croc/Doc Martin/orthopedic boot type number. Whatever it is, it’s as ugly as sin.

I pointed out the Shoe of Doom to a friend of mine. She laughed, actually she was helpless with laughter. Then I started too, snorting and whimpering in equal measures. Bertie came over, I swallowed the giggles and told him how lovely all the shoes were.

‘Look Mummy!’ he said, excitedly pointing at the Shoe of Doom, ‘That one’s mine. I made that. It looks JUST like one of your shoes, doesn’t it?’

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I am frantically clutching at these last few precious weeks of having two pre-schoolers, just knocking about at home, pottering around together, chewing the cud and testing my patience to its very limits…

Today we decorated spoons, made houses for pandas, built improbable flying machines, ‘biffed’ a legion of imaginary Romans, invented our own version of drum & bass, used the decorated spoons to turn MrSpud’s guitar in to a cello, played ‘extreme train wrecks’ and discovered that the Ninky Nonk WILL get wedged in the train wash if you shove it in hard enough. And that was just this morning.

Later their crazy mother, oh wait…that’s me…,took them out in the mid-day sun on the hottest day of the year to the park. I lay down in the shade and enjoyed the gentle breeze. They ran around like lunatics in full sun. Here they are, pictured above,  in a moment of enforced stillness edging slowly along the balance beam because it’s, ooooooohhhh, about a 20cm drop there you know.

Just to round things off we engaged in a high octane 3 hour play date this afternoon. And yet Diggy, 3, insisted, “I’m..not…TOIRED!!!” in his strongest Suffolk accent at bedtime. The child has been up and bouncing since 5am with no rest or nap. Must be something in the water. I need something in MY water believe me, something alcoholic…

Today my son sacked the wife’s husband. That’s a complex sentence. Freud might have something to say about it. Certainly Shakespeare could have based a play on it with which to torment generations of school children. And ITV could make a shitty mini-series out of it for sure…

We were discussing the process of how houses are built and that you use an architect, like my best friend’s (AKA ‘the wife’) husband, to draw up a plan of how you want your house to look. And then the builders use the plan so they know how to not bother and do as they please what to build.

“Oh but that’s EASY!”, quoth Bertie, age 4 going on 44, “I can easily do that. Don’t let the wife’s husband do that. I’ll do it. I’ll draw the house and the builders can build it and that will be nice”.

Um, yes…but I don’t want to live in a 2 dimensional wonky house with perma-curly whirly smoke coming out of its impossibly tall and twisted chimney , with 70s hippychick flowers in the garden almost as tall as the house and a Mr Potato Head style ‘person’ squatting in the garden forever.  [hand on hip ] Am I being unreasonable? [/hand of hip]

But the main news of today is that I am a truly outstanding parent. As well as eating veg my children now eat SALAD LEAVES and have declared them to be, “YUM!”. I win…I win…punches air in manner of tragic person. Bertie has been flirting with the occasional lettuce leaf since we started harvesting our crop a few weeks ago. Today Diggy ate his own bodyweight in rocket at lunchtime and MrB ate at least two whole little gem leaves. Stands back awaiting parenting accolades, fame, fortune, book deal etc etc.

Bertie won’t eat cucumber or melon. Diggy won’t eat tomato or chicken. These things are a puzzle, but I saw actual LEAVES go in to their mouths today and not come out again. Ah, what smuggery is this? Who cares, I’ve got a 4 year old leaf eating architect. Beat that…mwha ha ha.

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Look look look! It’s hard to know which to love more…the purple sparkly shoes or the purple heart tights…but the combination is a winner. Helpfully Little Miss Stylish was snapped on these yellowish tiles, oh so Wizard of Oz. So I called this photo ‘Dorothy’s Weekend Shoes’. Perhaps she flirts with purple sparklers on a weekend?

I had to mess with the original photo a bit to get it looking like this. The original, an iphone snap, was ok but Dorothy’s mama’s black shoes really bugged me and her papa’s shoes had sneaked in too, plus her skirt was quite distracting  and the colours were rather muted. Other than that I loved it ;-)

So I processed it ‘lolo’ in Camerabag to give it a square crop and vivid colours. I saved the ‘lolo’ version, opened it in Fotomuse and added a frame and a texture to (a) mute the mama’s shoes and (b) make it look really, really cool. My name is Spud…I’m an iphoneapplicationaholic.

Here’s how it looked before:

I like my edited-to-within-an-inch-of-its-life version much more, although I wish the mama’s shoes weren’t there. Next time I’ll just push her out of the way. You know, for the sake of my ‘art’…

And with that I will wish you all a contented week. Mine’s getting off to a fearsomely early start…we head off with the pigs tomorrow at 4.45am. It’s time for them to be exited and we are taking them to deepest Norfolk to do the deed hence the unspeakably awful time of departure. I’m hoping fatigue will mean I don’t notice ‘the business’ that we’re there to do.

Over and out. x

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I think I’ve cracked it. World peace, I mean.

Or rather I’ve stumbled, literally, upon a major barrier to attaining said world peace. High heels. Ban them and the world would immediately be a happier place and thus peace and harmony would surely be a step nearer?  Women would be cheerier, no longer tottering around with red hot pokers attached to their trotters, every step of the day squeezing and numbing toes, throwing their weight on to the balls of their screaming feet, shortening leg muscles, arching backs in a way to make every osteopath on the planet rub their hands in glee. And men would be cheerier because women would not longer be terminally snarkish and snipey, a condition brought on by the daily discomfort of hurty shoes.

This truth was revealed to me at about 9.00am on Wednesday, approximately 2 hours  after I’d popped on a pair of skyscrapers and decided they were appropriate footwear for an 11 working hour day. Huh huh huh….that’s my hollow laugh by the way. I could NOT have been more wrong. Those evil instruments of torture plagued me all day and brought on the snarks and snipes big time, only eased by regular periods of sitting down and taxi rides. And my feet, legs and back bitched about it for two whole days afterwards. So, all in all, a split second decision that a pair of heels would be just the thing to boost my confidence/height/ego cost me three days of agony/pain/embarrassment at my own stupid vanity.

Here I am, at about lunchtime…look…definitely snarkish & snipey.

So let’s just make a pact to cut it out shall we? Ladies, let’s ditch the red hot pokers….gentleman, get ready for us ladies to make nice. World peace…we’re a [gloriously painfree] step nearer to achieving you.

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Final treasure…my pink, moire silk Anya Hindmarch shoes. I doubt I will ever wear these again as they are too high for me these days thus, in theory, they could be left to burn in the imaginary house fire. But they are so elegant and are beautifully made, so I might have to brave the flames to rescue them. I’ve worn them quite a few times and thus the internationally agreed measurement of ‘price per wear’ is acceptable.  I snuck in another treasure contender in to the photo…the shoes are sitting on a beautiful Temperely lace and bead top which I have never worn. Thus the ‘price per wear’ is totally unacceptable and it should be ebayed. But it’s too pretty so I am hoarding it.

Hope you enjoyed the Ten Treasures…next project TBA but will be a whole lot less fluffy than this one. Think, spikey…

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Only a French chap could get away with this – drain pipe blue trousers, pale orange socks and tan boots. The whole outfit was super chic (French again). Ideally I’d have snapped the entire ensemble (look, French yet again! I’m on a roll) but I’d passed out on the pavement, swept away by his Gallic good looks. The man was a dream boat, just sitting there sipping un cafe solo like something out of a movie.

Paris, j’aime your really fit blokes.

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New mini project…’Ten Treasures’…ten things I would grab should my house be on fire,  assuming all the Spuds were accounted for, my handbag, my photos and my MacBook. Some of the treasures are materialistic, some are sentimental, some are both. Some are pretty things that serve no purpose anymore, I just keep them because I like them. Others are things that remind me of people and days gone by, and I cherish them as much as I cherish my memories.

First up, my pretty, sparkly Chanel party shoes. I bought these a few years ago in New York, in about 5 minutes flat. I had a black tie work function to attend one evening, and realised mid-afternoon that the skyscrapers I’d packed to wear were completely impractical for an evening when I actually had to zip about working rather than just floating, drinking and making small talk. Note, these are the shoes which I was wearing for that ill-advised foray in to air guitar.

So I zooooomed to Saks, thew my credit card at a delighted looking sales assistant,  hurried out with these beauties and made haste to the Waldorf. Ah, happy days. These days I throw rice cakes at small children and zoom to softplay.

I totally heart them. One of my anxieties during pregnancy (as well as the usual ones about the babies!) was whether my folded over legs feet would go back to their usual size post delivery, otherwise my Chanel shoes would be for the chop. Well, other bits of me didn’t fare too well but at least my feet shrank back to their usual proportions. Alas opportunities to wear them are now few and far between, but I like stroking them every now and again.

For the pedants among you it should be CHANEL not Chanel. BUT THE CAPITALISATION BOTHERS ME. And it’s my project, and they are my shoes. Poor Coco is probably turning in her CHANEL NO 5 scented grave.

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