Tonight, GG and I had a night off from cooking – our older son, Handsome, has decided that he wants to learn to cook during the summer holidays and likes to start sooner rather than later once he has an idea. So, this evening, he cooked (for the whole family) baked fish (river cobbler), boiled new potatoes and also prepared a salad from scratch. It was really nice! I’m not the biggest fan of fish, so I had some Levi Roots Reggae Reggae sauce on the side, which camouflaged the flavour sufficiently!

Tomorrow, apparently he’s making a carbonara pasta dish, and then on Monday he’s thinking about a beef stew in the crockpot. Not bad for eight years old! Maybe the summer holidays won’t be such a trial, after all!

With all the recent kerfuffle (to put it mildly) involving our neighbours, I’ve not been in the mood to post happy thoughts, or really, thoughts about anything else. This could be because I’m still seething about the whole affair, especially as our door has not yet been fixed, and since the door was broken, the lock has also, mysteriously, been damaged beyond repair.

Anyway, I need to move on, and try to ignore the annoyance I feel, and so I want to tell you about the lovely weekend away that GG and I had, courtesy of his family, as a birthday gift. When you live in a flat, there’s a limit to the number of actual objects that you can fit in. I think it’s safe to say that we have reached, or are incredibly close to reaching, that limit, and so this birthday present was especially welcome.

On my birthday, we were presented with a card containing details of Bridge House Hotel in Wilton near Ross On Wye where we would be staying on the last weekend in June, and also enjoying a lovely dinner. The gift also included free babysitting from my mother in law, so how could we refuse!

We were blessed with a very lovely weekend, weather wise, and enjoyed every minute of it. I don’t think I’ve ever been to Ross On Wye before, and I really liked it. I was surprised by the number of independent shops in the town centre, being accustomed as I am to Cardiff and it’s identikit city centre. We had a lovely cream tea in a little cafe/gallery, and also managed to buy a Christmas present while we were there – how efficient was that!

After checking in to the restaurant’s bed and breakfast, we decided to go out rather than waste the rest of the afternoon by hanging around the local pubs, and so we went to Hereford, another place I’ve not been before. There was a fair on in the castle grounds which we visited. Lots of lovely examples of handmade items for sale, such as glassware, garments, woodwork and some hand made goats milk soaps. I bought a soap for my mother in law to say thank you for having the kids, and asked if I could take a photo of the stall as the detail in the decoration of the soaps was phenomenal, and I really wanted to share it with you all. The stall holder grudgingly allowed a picture to be taken, after I promised that I had no plans to copy her soap designs myself. After that, I didn’t feel that I could ask if I could share the picture on my blog, as she seemed very touchy about it. A shame, as it would have been some free advertising for her, and I don’t feel very inclined to return to buy any more. She has a website, and after looking at it, I’m surprised (given the visual attraction of her soaps) that she has no pictures on immediate view. However, that’s her business, and her loss.

We had a good wander around Hereford and then made our way back to the restaurant, where we enjoyed the most sumptuous dinner, mostly produced with local ingredients as well, which was a bonus. I’ll not describe each and every course, as I’d be here a while, but here’s a photo montage of the meal that I made earlier!

Yum yum!

After a truly scrummy breakfast on the Sunday morning, we were having too much fun to go straight home, so we decided to visit Hay on Wye. I’ve not been for a good few years, so it was lovely to go back. We made a few purchases; a haematite bracelet for me from Satori (to try to ease the pain and stiffness in my hands that the doctors can’t explain), GG bought the original, much scarier version of Grimm’s Fairy Tales and we also bought a couple of things from the food festival with which we were lucky enough to have coincided our visit.

After this, it was time for home (with a slight detour en-route due to GG’s notorious lack of direction!) and we arrived just after the first drops of rain had begun to fall. A lovely time was had by both of us, and if my in-laws would like to repeat this present next year for our birthdays, it would be more than welcome!

So, I guess that my pessimistic assessment of my upstairs neighbours’ consideration of our feelings was about right. Last night, they invited another group of friends around and had another all-nighter, including an impromptu karaoke session at gone midnight. I managed to sleep, on and off, from about 1am on, but GG and I both woke up at intervals and this morning were able to tell each other that they were still going at 5.30 and 6.30am. Handsome (eldest son) was woken at “three minutes after quarter past two” (he’s very exact with the time!) by the shouting and music.

I think I’m past anger now. I also think that I’m resigning myself to sleep deprivation in a way that has been unnecessary since Cheeky started sleeping through the night. This in itself is competely unacceptable. Why should I (and my family) have to put up with this?

Anyway, changing the subject, I woke up (most recently) at about 8.30 this morning, and at 9am felt the strongest urge to practise Handsome’s violin (I like to be able to pick out tunes on any instrument). Then I did a bit of music making on the recorder, followed by a short burst of spontaneous singing of “I could have danced all night” from “My Fair Lady”. Then I had a quiet half hour, since when I’ve been listening (and singing along – I was a soprano in the university choir) to Verdi’s Requiem – a very loud, stirring piece of music! I do hope that none of my (upstairs) neighbours were trying to sleep, especially if they were worn out with partying all night, as I imagine that could have made it a little difficult .

Disbelief

Definition – the way we feel this morning after our upstairs neighbours invited a group of friends round for another all-nighter last night, after last week’s incident which necessitated calling 999 and getting the police in their riot van round here.

Well, it was in our block of flats last Friday night.

As you may have guessed, this is the follow on from the ‘definitions’ post of Sunday where I defined ‘anger’. In recent months, our upstairs neighbours (directly above us) have taken to inviting friends round from time to time to get drunk. Now, I don’t know whether it is as a result of thoughtlessness and stupidity, or whether they really don’t care, but they are extremely noisy and of course all of that noise transmits down to our flat beneath. I’m generally far too passive to make a stand, and so, as they’ve not disturbed my children before, I’ve not personally complained to them. However, Friday night (into Saturday morning) opened up a whole other level of anger in my personality.

As most of you will know, the quickest trigger to spark the anger of most parents is to threaten the health or happiness of their children. This is why I got so bloody angry on Friday night.

The party started at 8pm, and revved up until well after the 11pm cut off in our lease for loud noise. Some time after midnight they calmed down enough to allow us to sleep, only for us to be woken up before 3am by a woman literally screaming as if her nearest and dearest were falling off a cliff in front of her eyes. A man’s voice joined in the shouting, and I genuinely at that moment thought that one of the party guests was trying to hurt themselves, or jump out of a window or something. I found out later that this was when the fight had started. GG and I sat in our room, telephone in our hands trying to decide whether we should be calling the police. Then the hullaballoo calmed down, and so we put that plan on hold. I went to check on the boys and found Handsome wide awake, sitting bolt upright in bed and obviously disturbed and upset by the commotion. I brought him back into our room to try to soothe him back to sleepiness when all of a sudden the noise started up again, but to a new level.

At the front of our flats we have security doors, fitted about seven years ago, with toughened glass panels and a remotely controlled lock system. Well, the guy who had been fighting upstairs had gone away, returned with some friends and (I later found out) a golf club and proceeded to hammer seven bells out of our security door. The glass broke with a sound like an explosion, which terrified our son, still sitting in our room with us, and GG, on the phone to the police at this point, reported later that the police telephonist couldn’t quite believe what she was hearing down the phone line. The vandals carried on up the stairs (I’m glad they didn’t have to pass our door) and kicked in the door of the flat above us. There, the fight recommenced, although it was reasonably short lived, as the criminal ‘guests’ were well aware that the police would be on their way. So, with a parting threat of returning to put other windows through, they scarpered.

The police arrived fairly quickly in a riot van, although everyone had gone home by this point, so I think they hung round to try to deter the drunken vandals from returning and doing more damage. I had got dressed and gone to clean up the glass in the communal hall. I needed to do something, as I was just so angry at our neighbours for bringing this sort of trouble effectively to my home. My heart was racing and I could feel myself heading towards either tunnel vision or seeing red, so I figured that vigorously sweeping the hall might calm me down a little. I didn’t get any more sleep that night either, as I thought that I’d better stay up and stay on watch in case the vandals carried out their threat of returning to break windows – at least I could have phoned 999 as soon as they came near.

Nothing of this nature has ever happened on our street before, so a lot of my neighbours are pretty shaken up at this incident, and reflecting on how much worse it could have been. My imagination runs riot at times like this, and so I can see all sorts of alternate happenings: One of the neighbours could have gone out to intervene and been seriously hurt; the vandals could have decided to randomly break any of the windows in the building as well as the main door; they could have vandalised all of our cars as they approached or left the flats; the alternates are endless and still playing on my mind now. And I still don’t feel completely safe, which is a brand new and wholly horrible feeling for me – in the eight years we’ve lived here I’ve never felt at all uneasy about personal safety for me or my family. I think this is a major factor in the perpetuation of my anger.

The fact remains though that my neighbours were in direct violation of their lease agreement in allowing this to happen – we have to take responsibility for our guests when they are on the property – and I’m hoping that they will now see sense and restrict any gatherings of their so-called friends to pubs and bars, rather than above my home. Luckily, Cheeky slept through it all, and although Handsome was very upset at the time, worrying about his brother being in a different room to us and wanting me to check on him constantly, after he had had a couple more hours sleep (when he eventually got back to sleep at about half past five) he was fairly OK. The door is still not fixed though, so I’m glad that we have strong locks on our own front door and are not reliant on the broken main door for our own security.

Sorry that this has been such a long and ranty post – there really should be a prize for anyone who manages to read this far! – but I think I really needed to write it all down.

Anger

The overwhelming, pure and unsullied feeling experienced when your *?@@%&£ upstairs neighbours invite fifteen ‘friends’ round for an all nighter, some of whom end up being criminal vandal hooligans.

Details to follow. Suffice to say, I was not amused.

Continuing in my Definitions series, may I present

Consternation

The emotion experienced when, whilst sitting on the toilet and in ‘mid flow’, you accidentally knock the toilet roll into a rapidly filling bathtub. Only to discover that it was your last toilet roll.

Oops!

For your viewing pleasure, and musical entertainment and edification, I present Stringfever playing Ravel’s ‘Bolero’, on a cello…four guys, one cello!

I first met these guys when Neal (the one actually holding the cello!) was only about 4. It wasn’t long before my parents and I found out just how tremendously talented a family this was. I vividly remember, when I was in my early to mid teens, visiting the Broadbents in their home and being treated to an impromptu concert in their living room – it was the most fantastic performance I’d ever experienced at that young age, and it certainly gave me a lot of respect for the amount of work as well as talent that went into producing such wonderful music.

Unfortunately, I’ve not seen them in more than ten years (since before I left home, in fact) but I always keep an eye and an ear open for news of their travels and performances. I am still holding out hope that they will come and perform somewhere near to Cardiff soon, so that I can get to an ‘official’ performance! I’d really like to take at least my older son to see them as he has just started to learn the violin, and I think it would really inspire him and give him something to emulate.

So, as I’m sure you enjoyed their interpretation of ‘Bolero’, I’d also like to share ‘A History of Music’. There are lots of parts of this which I enjoy, but I especially like it when they reach the mid to late twentieth century. Hope you love it as much as I do!

I’m toying with the idea of a little series of posts involving definitions of words, but not those definitions as supplied in the Oxford English Dictionary, but more in relation with my own life. So, entry #1:

Exasperation

A feeling experienced when one’s husband drives the wrong way twice in ten minutes, both times whilst less than five miles from home.

Yesterday, at the beginning of our 30 hour mini road trip(of which, more later), GG managed to first take the wrong exit off the roundabout at junction 32 of the M4 motorway, putting us on the road to Brecon rather than the eastbound M4. He rectified this at the first opportunity, but then once actually on the motorway, managed to leave it at the very next exit as he hadn’t noticed that he needed to change lanes until he was half way up the slip road, having missed that he was in a designated lane for that very purpose! I suppose that amused exasperation would be a better description of my mood at that time, given how much I was laughing, but I wanted to narrow it down to one word. Bless him! You’d never think he was a scout in years gone by!

Nobody could accuse my younger son of being unenterprising. Recently, he took it into his head that he wanted a Buzz Lightyear costume. I (very reasonably, I thought) told him that he’d have to save up for it if he wanted it so badly. So we went to the Disney shop, only to discover that it’s going to cost £28! How ridiculous, for a child’s dressing up set. However, never daunted, Cheeky put his thinking cap on, and within a very short space of time, announced how he plans to earn the necessary moolah to buy the costume of his dreams.

Fleece his relatives. Swindle money out of them with his big brown puppy dog eyes, which when used to full effect, very few people can resist.

So, maybe I’m being  little cruel. His idea is that he’s going to create original pieces of artwork using a variety of materials and methods, then offer them for sale to the most likely and responsive customers.

Or, to put it a little more simply, he’s doing some drawings, some with felt pens and others with pencils and crayons, and then assuming that all of his grown up friends and family will be more than willing to part with £2 to own one. Not that I can talk. I was his first paying customer, shelling out my 1/14th share in a Buzz costume for a painting (upmarket, see!), done in school, of a church. GG quickly became his second client, bagging a very detailed drawing of the next (apparently) stage in the Star Wars epic. He was lucky. Cheeky spent a couple of days on that one. My mother in law is due to be offered this weekend a picture of three flowers which took Cheeky approximately a minute and a half to complete, whilst sitting under my chair at Handsome’s school concert. But being a doting grandmother, I expect she’ll be more than happy to shell out!

So, be warned. If you are known to Cheeky and an adult (which in his eyes means financially solvent, although we all know that ain’t always the case!), expect to be presented with a ‘masterpiece’ with an accompanying demand for remuneration at your earliest convenience. The sales pitch isn’t his strong point – as he sees it, why wouldn’t anyone want to buy his pictures?!

So, £4 down, £24 to go. Twelve willing volunteers, please step forward. Anyone? I should point out that he signs each and every drawing! It could be a moneymaker for the future, especially if he attains his career goal of becoming an astronaut or a knight!