Lyrical Disharmony

Howdy partners. I am back in sunny SE23 and the children are back at school after the break. My day of reckoning is tomorrow when I shall find out exactly how much weight I have gained over the holidays. I am enjoying one last bottle of wine before I have to get back down to business on that front. From tomorrow on I shall be a dieting superstar as I push on through to goal. My aim is to achieve that before the summer holidays so I can properly indulge over the summer. You are allowed to be up to five pounds plus or minus your goal weight and I intend to take full advantage on the plus side. Thankfully I am not planning to take over any meetings in the near future so no one will be judging me any time soon. With any luck I won't start proper work until September when G starts in Reception which means I am only stuck with one child to offload.

The good news is that K's job is going very well - he seems quite happy and is getting on well with The Employers (much to our surprise). There is much excitement in the household as we await the arrival of his new company car which was purchased today. More on that later, but fingers crossed for a good one. He has even been paid for his efforts so far which was jolly thrilling as it meant the Tesco man arrived fully armed today and the fridge is full once again. It also means that Bea's recorder lessons will be paid in time for her first lesson of the term on Thursday. Who could ask for more? Life is peachy.

Although my bank account is not. My card was declined for the princely sum of 99p today. Mercifully it was in the comfort of my own home as I tried to make a purchase on itunes. Not that I am unaccustomed to it being a public humiliation. I think people are always surprised at how well I take the news of my card being declined but it is far more of a surprise if the transaction is approved. The main issue with this unauthorised transaction was that it was for Justin Bieber's 'Baby' song. Thanks to an older cousin, Bea is now obsessed with bloody Bieber and I have had to listen to her singing 'Baby, baby, baby oh, I thought you'd always be mine' for far too long now so I decided to treat them all to the official version (the boy I look after in the afternoons was also quite excited so I thought it would be a crowd pleaser). Suffice to say it was quite tricky to explain to the four happy faces in front of me that my purchase had not been successful. Although I was actually slightly relieved. Even I can't stand The Bieber. It is a shame Bea has inherited my terrible taste in music (along with my penchant for terribly cliched films) as G seems to have bypassed it entirely. We were driving back from Kent on Sunday and I was desperately searching for a nice easy listening station to help pass the time when G piped up and asked me to get back to the cool guy singing about making someone sweat. (He didn't use those words exactly but I wanted to cut to the chase). So I had to sit through a deeply inappropriate and, in my personal opinion, a particularly lazily penned song about wanting to make some poor woman sweat. It was excruciatingly bad but he really likes all that modern inappropriate stuff. He is a huge fan of the 'lazy song' as well. I fear we shall clash massively when he has money of his own and a music system capable of high volume.

Give me Magic FM or BBC Radio 2 anyday. In University I had quite a reputation for my hideous taste in music. I tended to buy CD soundtracks almost exclusively, not to cool 'of the moment' films (although I did get the Lock Stock one - is that cool?) it was more the Dawson's Creek, City of Angels, Friends, Sleepless in Seattle, Hercules genre. (Annoyingly they always seemed to include a lot of incidental music and I used to point out the music that was on the soundtrack when it was heard on the film so that it became a running joke with my housemates that any 'plinky plonky' background music on a film would be on a soundtrack somewhere in my collection.) I do feel terribly old but I can't stand all this lewd music - especially the one about liking to do 'it' outside. I just don't want my children listening to it. Mind you a lot of it will probably go over their head. When I was a teenager I didn't twig for a very long time that the Shaman's Ebeneezer Goode song was about Ecstasy. Even with the line 'Eezer good, Eezer good'. I am ridiculously innocent. It would never occur to me to think someone was singing about drugs. I hope the Hanson 'Mmmm bop' song wasn't about anything sinister. That would really shake my belief in popular music. I know that I shall have to move with the times and that there is a time and a place for Christina Aguilera and her Dirty song (my hen night was ideal - as was her Beautiful song which I murdered over and over again) but I can't bring myself to let the children's innocence be corrupted so early on in my mothering career. I shall have to try harder to get them interested in the Carpenters and my own personal collection of the Grey's Anatomy soundtrack.

I am so tired I cannot write more. I had a lot of children through the door yesterday (four on top my own) and even though it is only 9pm the wine has now gone to my head. I shall retire gracefully and leave you to the theme song for today from the masters of easy listening, "I'm on the, top of the world looking, (boing) down on creation and the only explanation I can find is the love that I've found ever since you've been around has almost put me on the top of the world". Now isn't that nicer than hearing the word 'sweat' over and over again?

I'd like to teach the world to sing, in perfect harmony... (insert incidental plinky plonky music and fade......) x