Stuff

I know a woman who has a website to try and get her son to eat vegetables. She's going through the A to Z of vegetables and has generated interest from all over the world. People send her recipes, she posts them onto her site and Freddie, her veggie-phobic son, has a go at eating them.

It's a great idea for a website reaching out its global arms. She'll probably land a book deal through it, like wife in the north did.

I don't mind that no one reads my blog. When I started it, I was eager for advice maybe from people who'd been through the same.

But now it's taken on new meaning. The only person I've told is my sister who spends her life climbing cliff faces where computers don't come easily. She read it once and I think has forgotten about it now.

Country jaunt

Life rolls on and I'm a month and a half closer to the end of my fertility since I started the stopwatch.

I think I'm starting to lose the panic and accept the inevitable. It's either that or I get eaten up with anger and fury and want to leave the Prince. I have to rejig my priorities.

Also, everyone I know with two kids is exhausted all the time. My friend Fleur, the one who tricked her bloke into having another baby, says she's always spotting people with one kid and envying them. She gets up at 5am every single day and says by 10am she's a wreck.

And last Sunday was spent in the country where Lucrezia has just moved to from Stoke Newington. She held a 4th birthday party for her little boy Louis, who is Rosie's best friend, and a barbeque for everyone else. The Prince chose not to join us because Lucrezia doesn't have Sky and he would have missed the Chelsea match. What a bore.

The location could not have been more idyllic, set in the back garden of a quaint little cottage surrounded by green fields where pigs roamed gaily. Bluebells swayed in a gentle breeze in the woods opposite and bees buzzed. The townies drank beer and talked about property prices while the locals discussed how wonderful Lucrezia was.

"Oh she's simply a marvel," one woman with bouffant blonde hair and glasses said. She was about 55 and lived next door but one. "When she found out my back was bad she brought round a beef bourguignon in a casserole dish that she'd cooked - isn't that just so sweet?"

I nodded. That was sweet. But then I thought "I bet they've never seen her lying drunk on a pavement puking in the kerb."

Loads of the Stokey mums went and all of us who had just one kid lounged in the sun while our children played beautifully. Those with toddlers glued to their hips were on their feet all day rocking, soothing, chasing, mopping up, changing nappies and preparing baby food.

So I question can I REALLY be bothered to go through that again? The answer is of course Yes, if Rosie will then have a sibling to grow old with. But I'm not sure I want to wreck my relationship over this, which is what could so easily happen. The most important thing for Rosie is to have happy parents. What's the point of having a little sister but parents who hate eachother?

If I can't beat the Prince, I'll just have to join him and become a Princess. I'm still pondering it.

Sexy, Not

Have to write this quick as the Prince is on his way home from work. It's all freezer stuff tonight - sausages, peas and brocolli.

My sister says I have to stop mentioning the "B" Word. She says this is tarnishing our relationship. She has also said I must go to Agent Provocateur and try to seduce him. It's true. Our relationship/sex life has been dominated by this baby thing. And of course the more I mention it, the further away he moves. I need to try and get back something of what we had at the beginning when, caught up in the excitement, we threw all caution to the wind.

Obviously, I must still exercise caution to his wind, which is worse than ever. And the snoring. But that's another story.

The botox paradox

“You’ve got to love the lines,” I said to these women.

“Oh we do, we do,” they replied.

I was talking wrinkles, they meant cocaine. Which baffles me because these are people who belong to the Stoke Newington organic clique. They are lawyers, media people and music bosses who go to the gym, eat five portions of fruit and veg a day, drink green tea and buy magazines called “Men’s Health” or “Healthy Living”. They scrutinise food labelling in shops and throw down in shock any product that contains an E number or aspartame.

Yet all these grand efforts to be fit and healthy get forgotton in a dash if someone produces a tiny packet of the white stuff.

So the other night there I was at a posh gallery opening surrounded by Stokey mummies. To those who don’t know what Stokey is, it’s slang for Stoke Newington, an area of London said to be the baby capital of Europe. If you don’t own a baby in N16 then buy one quick because quite frankly you are totally out of place. The Prince and I lived there until Rosie was a year old.

Every Saturday they meet at the farmers’ market where they spend £5.00 on a bunch of stinging nettles, drink soya milk lattes and discuss Steiner schooling. And you can literally hear the gasps if a neglectful mother takes out a bottle instead of her breast to feed her baby. It’s a crowd I have little to do with now except for the odd occasion, like the gallery opening. The invite came from Lucrezia, a member of the yoga ante-natal class who’s now my best friend. It was Lucrezia who invited the Stokey mummies.

There we stood holding our glasses of wine with nothing to say. To discuss children at such an event seemed wrong. But we had nothing else in common. So after an awkward silence someone said, “Oh man I was out of my head in Barcelona. Brendan and I took two days to recover. It was wicked.” She was talking about her recent wild weekend when she and her husband “lashed it” with cocaine. That inspired someone else to share their latest drugs escapade and before I knew it they were on to botox.

What disturbed me was the way talked about it as though it was as familiar to them as making a cup of dandelion tea. These women – who think nothing of spending £25 on a bottle of organic olive oil – are content to have poisons injected into their face because they can’t face up to life. That’s how I see it and it annoys me.

“I have botox all the time, especially on my frown line,” said Sam, pointing at the area between her eyebrows.

“But you have to know HOW to botox,” she continued. “For instance, I don’t have all my crow’s feet done because otherwise my whole face would look unnatural.”

Sam loves it so much she’s just invested in a beauty franchise offering plastic surgery and botox treatments. The other girls then piped up that they too would use botox when the time comes, including real die-hard organicites – bunch of fakes. They asked Sam if they could get a discount at one of her beauty centres.

So am I the only person in the world who hates the idea of botox and plastic surgery? Virtually everyone I know thinks it’s totally normal and fine to be injecting poisons into their skin every six months. Yet by doing this they are shoring up the attitude that women must forever look young, while men with wrinkles can continue to enjoy the advantages of looking "distinguished".

One of my friends has it on her forehead, another in the lines next to her nose. The Prince wants botox in his armpits like Tony Blair because he has problem perspiration. But what is that doing to your armpits, clogging up the sweat glands like that?

I think in about 30 years time there’ll be one little old lady left in a world of plastic faces and that will be me.