Good day Sunshine

Can there be anything that can escort Much Love Monday in to the week as well as a happy Beatles track and the promise of sunshine?

The thing you don’t know is that I spend a good thirty minutes or so finding a track that suits my mood, and that means listening to thirty minutes of happy tracks. Mondays never started so well.

It is, I admit, always nice to wake up and hear the dogs snoring. I read a haiku once about snoring concubines, and whilst I don’t think it’s the same thing, there’s something reassuring about hearing the snoring of other creatures. It means the world is at rest. Heston’s usually awake first – well, he is a baby after all – and spends a good ten minutes staring adoringly at me. My bedroom and living room look like a war zone of shredded items. He shredded Dexter. He’s shredded several toilet rolls. Andrex puppy, he is not. No cute rolling around, just lots of shredded pink paper and little piles of pink vomit here and there.

He generally knows what to chew and what not to, but there’s a good collection of ‘not to’ things in his living room nest after yesterday. I spent the whole day in bed with some kind of stomach bug. So Much Love to Zantac and Solpadol, too. It reminds me of those days when I had stomach ulcers and constant stomach griping. I don’t get that so much now. Stress definitely plays itself out in my belly. Contrary to popular myth, this is why I left teaching. I have a letter from the Department for Education that says I am NOT a sex offender, so that’s all good. It’s true. I really do. It says ‘Mrs …. is not a sex offender’.

Everybody needs a letter like that. Just for their own reassurance.

Much Love to a peaceful life, where illnesses and bugs are a once-a-year occurrence, rather than a weekly one. Mainly this is because I meet three people on average each week here, as opposed to the millions I met in Manchester, but if it means an end to nights waking up in stomach turmoil, it’s all good. I still remember those nights where I slept in a chair so the stomach acid maelstrom in my gut didn’t work its way up to my throat.

Much Love to the Powers who gave me a wonderful week of fun and chaos and life. Deb is very lucky to have three such lovely boys, even if middle boy makes rude words in Scrabble, youngest boy has a penchant for exhibitionism and eldest is a teenager. Despite this, youngest one is a dreamboat with a vibrant and highly entertaining imagination, middle one is a clever, clever soul destined for some great leadership position (if not quite as brave as he’d have you believe) and eldest is gentle and kind and a darling to the animals.

Much Love also for the blast of Lancashire. I’m surrounded by Southerners, Scots and Foreigners, which is better than being surrounded by Scousers, the Cheshire set and Yorkshire folk as I was in Manchester, but nothing is quite as nice as homefolk when you’re in a world away from your own. No offence to the rest of the world outside Manchester. You’re just not Manchester, that’s all. I realise I’ve offended potentially everyone with the second sentence of this paragraph.

Much Love to Facebook which is awash with photos at the moment. Now I know a lot of people have a beef with Facebook, but it’s my lifeline. It keeps me connected in ways nothing else does. I don’t have to write 100 emails to update interested parties, and I don’t have to receive 200 to find out about their lives. Not only that, right now, it’s littered with photos of beaches, of happy families, of wedding photos, of truck festivals, of new babies, of holidays. Now that might not be your thing, but I love looking at all of these. It’s so nice to be able to look through people’s lives and share in their happiness, if only a little. And it’s not as if I can just go into people’s houses and root through their photographs any time I like, is it? I can’t just sneak in, break open ‘wedding photos’ and spend half an hour smiling at people’s happiness and funny expressions and lovely dresses and smart outfits. Well, I could do that, but that would make me way weirder than I already am. And it’s a shame these photographs end up on dark shelves in closed albums when they are meant to preserve and share a moment.

Not only that, photographs take all the good bits, the happy bits, and turn them into something smiley and wonderful, even if there’s yelling and crying and sulking in the background. It makes families look eternally happy and smiley. Not that I’m saying families aren’t like that, but I’m pretty damn sure most families have yelling and sulking and tiredness. I’d say all, but then I’ve seen my friend Emma and her boys too many times to think that there is ever a need for yelling in that household. And her boys just don’t ever seem to be overtired, or crabby or grumpy. Maybe she drugs them. More likely, she’s learned that balance between ‘cool mum’ and ‘strict mum’ that brings harmony upon a household.

Anyway, here’s hoping your Mondays is filled with Much Love too. I’m hopefully off to a pool party for a lovely friend’s birthday, but I’m not sure my stomach is up to it yet. I want to go anyway, just so she knows she’s loved, but I don’t want to give her any bacterial infection as a present.