Not only that, but the kids had a recent eye test (you guess it, on the NHS), and we discovered that not only did #1 need new glasses, but #2 needs them now for reading and close-up work.  He was not impressed.

He was more impressed, however, when it turned out that he could have funky Quiksilver ones (to go with his recent purchase of skinny Quiksilver jeans from T K Maxx, and enormous DC skate trainers that, combined, make him look oddly like Mickey Mouse’s slimmer brother).

I also had to have a new pair.  I’d had my old ones since 1994, it turned out, so it was probably time.  Later,#2 was on the phone to his Dad:

#2: I’ve got this new pair of glasses – I’ve got to wear them for reading and stuff – they’re wicked!  They’ve got Quiksilver on the side!  And  #1 got some new ones too – his are Red or Dead.

Hubby: And what about Mummy, what are hers like?

#2: They’re okay.  They’re kinda brown and they say ‘fercuck’ on the side.

The lovely folk at MyFotowall have done their deliberating and cogitating, and decided the the winner of the photo wallscape wallpaper is this entry:

Congratulations, CarolineSweetie!  If you’d like to send me an email to: contactenglishmum@gmail.com I’ll put you in touch with them so you can claim your prize.

So the other night, I was mostly talking total waffle on Twitter, as usual, when I was tweeted by a TV chef.  Yes, that’s right, a TV chef .

Twitter’s a bit like that.  It’s one of the reasons I love it.  Yes, you get to chat to your buddies, but also you get to chat with people who would normally be a bit inaccessible.  This chef was someone whose talent I have long admired.

I grinned.

This grin was short lived.  The TV chef made a snidey comment about my ‘arsebiscuits’ recipe.  More accurately, insinuating that I hadn’t credited the originator of the idea, a fellow blogger.

‘What?’, shouted Hubby from the other room, ‘tell them to get their bloody facts straight before they start hurling accusations!  Tell them to f*ck off!’, he said, reasonably.

But, I am not naturally a very confrontational person (thank god or this house would be like a bloody war zone).  Instead, I merely pointed out that I had, actually, credited the originator (I’m sure she wasn’t actually the person who thought up the idea that it would be funny to put rude words on biscuits, but it was where I’d first seen it).

I said words to the effect of this: ‘If you read the post, you’ll see that I’ve credited her in the text, and also in my sidebar I have linked to to her original post.  I am one of her biggest fans, I said.  And I am not a plagiarist.’

And the reply?

‘Glad to hear it’. (I looked back to get the exact wording, but quelle surprise! they’ve deleted them all.)

Not, ‘oh sorry, my mistake, I just wrongly accused you of stealing someone’s idea on Twitter’…

Not ‘ahaha there’s me going off half cocked before reading things properly…  Sorreeee’

Not ‘oopsy, I seem to have made a dreadful mistake, how rude of me’

Not ‘how silly of me, of course I should have read the post first before I dissed you on a public forum’

Just: ‘I’m glad to hear it’.

Whatever, you might think.  It’s just Twitter.  But my question is this: is that person just naturally rude and confrontational: hyped up on their fame and drunk on their own PR,  or do people feel that they can be rude/confrontational by tweet because it’s not really like ‘real life’, they can hide behind their ‘online persona’ and be that strong, fierce (or just plain rude) person they’ve always wanted to be?

Another very sweet friend of mine had a recent project complimented by someone on Twitter, whilst all the time the very same person sent direct (private) messages, criticising the project and picking holes in it.  Such bile!

Coincidentally, recently, I received a PR approach from someone who represents said TV chef.  Would I be interested in being kept abreast of what they’re up to?

No.  I said.  Not really.

So it’s Mothers’ Day on Sunday.  I was looking back at my old posts and came across this one I wrote in 2008, when I was living in Ireland and missed my Mum so much.

Now, however, I’m back in the same town and happily inviting myself to lunch much more than strictly necessary, but my words still seem fitting:

Dear Mum,

Here are a few thank yous that I owe you.  I probably owe you more than a few sorrys too – for sleepless nights, teenage tantrums and other broken, borrowed or generally ruined things over the years, but hey, let’s concentrate on the positive.  Firstly, thanks for all the years of being cook, nursemaid, chauffeur and teacher.  Thanks for letting me bake cakes, make dodgy quiches and generally wreck your kitchen.  You’re an inspiration (and I still need to call you to find out how to get a runny boiled egg!).  And thanks for every lovingly prepared dinner (rice pudding..mmm!), every perfect present (and the odd dodgy Christmas jumper!), every birthday cake, every shopping trip, every shared bottle of something cold and white; for hours of listening, for every phone call, letter, postcard, email and visit, for every wonderful holiday, every day out, every game, every time you helped with homework, every kind word, every time you’ve kissed it better, every plaster, every frantic dash to A&E (both mine and my children’s!) every thoughtful deed and every prayer (even though I’m a total heathen).  Then there’s the thanks that I owe you for sometimes having to tell it like it is, for every midnight lift given, every pound spent, every puppy, kitten and hamster, every time you said yes when you wanted to say no (and every time you had to say no even though you wanted to say yes).

And thanks for every snorty, belly laugh you’ve given, every tear you’ve shed, every hug, every time you’ve been on my side, and for being my biggest fan (and sternest critic!), most devoted reader and loyal supporter.  Thanks for setting a good example (and a sometimes hilarious bad one), for being the coolest Grandma, and the best Mum a girl could wish for.  In your own words, though none of us are perfect, we do what we can.  I love you, Ma.  Have a great Mothers’ Day x x x

The lovely chaps at Tree2MyDoor are sending my Mum a gorgeous Wild Cherry tree for her garden.  If you’d like to treat your Mum to a beautiful, everlasting reminder of how much you love her, remember to get your orders in before the deadline dates:

My sister in law (who is a sweet, gentle creature) once told me that many moons ago, during a lovers’ tiff with my brother, she was so cross she took the tomato sauce bottle and wrote ‘SHIT’ on the kitchen floor in ketchup.  You see?  Naughty words are a form of therapy.  And with this in mind, laydees and gentlespoons, I bring you the arsebiscuit.

I’ve been banging on about them for so long, and have now persuaded so many of my Twitter followers to rush out and purchase arsebiscuit kits (nope, I’ve no idea why they don’t do them on Amazon.co.uk either), I thought I’d better crack on and get you all a good recipe upon which you can work out all that existential angst (or just write rude words).

Here we go then:

100g butter
100g caster sugar
2 tbsp golden syrup
200g plain flour
30g cocoa
1 tsp bicarbonate of soda

Firstly, preheat your oven to a measly gas 3/160 degrees. Make sure you have either a well-greased baking sheet or a sheet of Bake-o-glide, as these buggers will stick if you let them.

Now, beat the butter and sugar really well until it’s pale and fluffy. Then beat in the golden syrup (remember, dip the spoon in boiling water first):

Sieve all your dry ingredients, then work them into the butter mixture with a fork (don’t use the processor, you want crisp, snappy biscuits, not concrete).

This does make quite a crumbly dough, but remember you’re going to mess it about with your hands, so be patient, it will come together.

If you’re using the bake-o-glide, you can roll and cut straight onto it, otherwise, you’ll have to be brave and make your biscuits then transfer them to your baking sheet with a spatula.

So just roll your dough out until it’s about 1/2 cm thick, pushing the edges in with your fingers until you get a rough rectangle.

Now you can let rip with your lettering machine, or just use biscuit cutters to make shapes (if your children aren’t quite at the ‘SHIT’ biscuit stage), or even just a knife to cut them into squares.

Bake for about 15 minutes. They obviously won’t change colour much but will be firmer to the touch.

For your delectation, I produced for you (insert fanfare):

The ‘tidy your room or else’ biscuit:

The ever-popular ’shut your face’ biscuit:

Or maybe you prefer the brevity of the ’shut up’ biscuit?:

Sadly, the ‘oh shit’ biscuit cracked a bit, but somehow this adds to the overall message:

…the Englishmum.com biscuit:

And sadly my actual ‘arse’ biscuit didn’t come out very well:

First one to provide photographic evidence of selling these beauties at the school fete gets a prize.

In my incredibly important position as Disney Blu-ray Ambassador *cough*, I get certain perks.  A rather fab one recently was a nice parcel containing the specially released Toy Story…

…and Toy Story 2, newly released in Disney Blu-ray

The first thing I’ll say that, as always with BluRay, the quality is AMAZING.  We were constantly fascinated by the little details, like the weave on the skipping rope, and the shine on the floor – bits that we didn’t notice before.  As a family, we love Toy Story (I think it’s our favourite Disney movie), and these new BluRays are worth the purchase just to watch the quality in HD.  We also loved the sneaky peak at Toy Story 3!

Toy Story and Toy Story 2 are released on Disney Blu-ray on 8th March 2010.  Toy Story 3 is out on general release on 18th June 2010.

It is with some apprehension, I suspect, that English Mum has handed her blog over to me for the day while she guest posts on mine.  She has given me free reign over her corner of cyberspace and permission to write whatever I like.  Only in the rather surreal world of blogging would anyone invite a friend over despite the fact they have never actually met in real life.  Thankfully, English Mum is a great ‘virtual’ friend so I’m comfortable visiting here and she has left her fridge well stocked for me.  There’s even a cupcake or two with my name on.

My own blog is generally a light-hearted look at life as the single parent of a six-year-old who thinks she runs the household.  However, I do catch people off guard at times by throwing in a very heavy post or by attempting to tackle issues I feel strongly about – like six year olds taking SATS exams.

As a result, English Mum really has no idea what angle this post is going to take or where any of this is heading…

Well, it’s all about the surreal and unpredictable world of blogging.  Several months ago I received an email from a fabulous blogger whose posts I’d read but had never had contact with before.  She asked a group of us if we would be interested in using our blogs to raise money for the Haiti earthquake victims.  Naturally, we all agreed and between us we managed to raise over £4000. That blogger was English Mum.  We have emailed and tweeted ever since and have become good friends.  I’ve read her posts with interest, she has commented on mine, and I’ve also become friends with @EnglishGrandma on twitter, who I must add is a gem.

Now, thanks to Little Mummy’s Guest Blog Day, I have been given this unexpected opportunity to guest post on English Mum’s blog.  Only in Blogland could things like this happen.

My life is slightly different to English Mum’s.  For one thing I cannot bake – a fact that may alarm many readers.  So, there will be no recipe suggestions here.  Also, I am yet to enter the slightly scary and unpredictable world of parenting teenagers.  My daughter is just six.

So while English Mum tackles the issues of secondary schools, homework, adopting greyhounds, dog training, handling sleepovers, writing sensible book reviews, producing incredible recipes, and tackling the issue of political correctness with a teenager on her own blog, my life is a little different.

Conversations with a six-year-old tend to start with questions such as these:

• Is Santa watching me?

• Why is Grandpa’s hair grey but Granny’s isn’t?

• Why can’t I have chocolate for breakfast?

• Is Granny the same age as you?

• Can I have a pair of high-heeled shoes?

• Where do babies come from?

So you see, slightly different, for now at least, although things will change of course as they always do.  You never know, one day I may become inspired to start baking.  Stranger things have happened.

For regular readers hoping for a more food-themed post, my daughter has obliged by posing with her favourite party cake book:

She has also chosen a complicated Mermaid cake with elaborate blue icing that I suspect only English Mum could bake.  There’s time though, her birthday is not until July

If you want to find me today, I’m over at Rosie Scribble’s blog making Lemon Meringue Cupcakes – pop over and say hi!

EM xx

Okay, so this is quite possibly the most fabulously, amazingly brilliant competition I’ve ever run.

Think about a photo you really love: a treasured picture of the kids, maybe? A beautiful beach scene?  Or maybe it’s trees that float your boat?  A fabulous sunset?  Or maybe you’re a photographer and have created an amazing image?  Maybe there’s just one photo that always makes you smile?

Now, picture that favourite photo adorning a whole wall in your house.  Imagine the possibilities!  And if you don’t have the exact photo in mind, the lovely people at Myfotowall have tons of stock images.  So if you fancy a fluttery feather on your bedroom wall (I love this one), just say the word.

Down to business, then.  Being as creative as you like, leave a comment telling me which photo you would choose to adorn your wall and why, and you could win a 4m x 2m wall, worth up to £400 of your very own.  Be as creative as you like (but if you rent your house, remember to ask your landlord first.  Heh.)

Off you go, then.

The small print:

Myfotowall.com – the company that can transform your most treasured photos into larger than life wall coverings is offering one English Mum reader a unique wallscape worth £400, for free.

The ultra simple process involves simply uploading the dimensions of the wall you want to cover, be it your bedroom, bathroom or nursery wall, and your selected hi-res picture. If you need to crop and scale your image then the Myfotowall website provides you with the tools to do so.Your desired image can be scaled up to 16x its original size and still have amazing quality.  Myfotowall will deliver the pre-cut lengths of top quality, washable, vinyl wallpaper printed with your picture, together with a hanging guide customised to your environment.

For further information visit Myfotowall.com.

I’m angry.  I’m just so bloody angry.  Let me explain:

Recently, #1, The Mad Professor, came home with a face like thunder.  He’d been given a detention, he said.  Now, firstly, this is unheard of.  As far as I remember he’s never been in trouble at school.  He’s an achiever, more motivated in his schoolwork that I or his father ever were.  He has endless potential.  And I’m not just saying that as his very proud mother.  Since moving back to England he’s had to contend with learning a whole new system, moving from Irish Junior Certificate to English GCSEs.  He’s had tons of coursework to catch up on, and he’s never once moaned or complained, he’s just cracked on.  The teachers have been brilliant, helping him after school and during lunchtime to work on the stuff he’s missed.  He’s often to be found reading text books late into the night, if I don’t stop him.

So, as you can imagine, the detention was a shock.

Apparently, although the school didn’t bother to inform us, there was some kind of school maths challenge, where schools across the country enter their best pupils.  All good, you’d think.  But when do the geniuses schedule this inter-school p*ssing contest?

During the school day.

Worse than that, it was across two of #1’s GCSE  lessons, in particular a French lesson where he was working on a very hard piece of coursework, which had, incidentally kept us up rather late the night before.

So I’m proud to say, my teenager made a choice.  He chose his coursework.  He duly attended his lessons, told his teacher what he’d decided, and worked hard.  He then attended this next lesson as nomal.  He was then confronted by a maths teacher asking why he didn’t attend the maths challenge.  He explained that he was worried about his coursework and had decided to attend his normal lessons.  He also told said teacher that he’d informed his GCSE lesson teachers of his decision.  He was then given a detention and told that the school ‘cannot condone children making their own decisions’.

WTF?

So the school would rather they were allowed to ‘pimp out’ my clever child in a maths competition, rather than let him get on with his work?  What’s wrong with common sense? By all means allow children to enter competitions, I’m all for it, but schedule them at the end of the school day, or send a letter home informing parents and allowing them to decide, with their kids, whether they want to attend.  Furthermore, I wonder if there’s some kind of ‘league table’ or ‘winners board’ in all this that’s motivating them?

I was furious.  What’s more, a quite civilised email conversation about it with his maths teacher where I explained our position was ended abruptly, and next thing we knew, we received a letter from the head insisting the #1 do the detention to ‘draw a line under the matter’.

Well, we chatted to #1 about it, and assured him that we would support him 100% whichever way he wanted to go.  At the end of this, it was decided that for the sake of his classwork (and for the sake of the 4 or 5 of his compadrés that also decided not to do the challenge and had already accepted the detention), he would attend, and get it over and done with.

And does it end there?  Sadly not.

At the end of the detention, the Head of Maths decided that she’d take the boys to one side and spend ten minutes having a high pitched rant at them.  One particular peach was a jibe about:  ’how much trouble you’ve caused the school’ (what? YOU caused the trouble with your crap timetabling) and, more seriously was the threat: ‘if you want to take maths at A level, you’d better stay on the right side of me’.

Er, pardon?  Now I’m sorry, but by the time a pupil is nearly 15 shouldn’t he be treated more like an adult, and in return be expected to act like one?  I appreciate if children ‘bunk off’ left, right and centre, or misbehave, they deserve punishment, but present a child with an impossible situation and then punish him for choosing his GCSEs?  And worse, shout in his face, insinuating, whilst screeching at him in a hormonal manner, that you could make or break his school career?  I never, ever shout in my child’s face.  And I certainly don’t expect his teachers to either.

What is it with schools?  Why take a perfectly good student and pursue a matter so far and so aggressively that you risk alienating him, turning him against the school, and almost encouraging him to rebel?

This, believe me, is not the end.

* * * * * * * U P D A T E * * * * * * *

And it wasn’t the end.  After firing off a ‘Mrs Angry’ email to the head, I got a call this morning from #1’s maths teacher (also Ms Hormonal’s line manager), apologising for her actions, and assuring me that she will be told in no uncertain terms that she was out of order for both her manner and her words.  I was told that it will be dealt with by him and the head, but if I wish to take it further I need to put a formal complaint in writing.  He said that he had to take some of the blame also, for the fiasco.  Now what?

My 40th birthday – there’s a fabulous Disney surprise in store, and we’re also planning a glamorous cocktails and dinner extravaganza with my two gorgeous girls, Foxy and Tums and their lubly men.  Wehay!

Coveting…

the beautiful dresses on  A Change of A Dress – the most fabulous girly website ever.

Surfing…

over to John Lewis’ new and revamped fashion pages, and wishing I could buy this gorgeous Coast Violette Dress to wear for my 40th birthday:

Baking…

a scale model of Mont Blanc made out of cake and meringue (it’s my only medium, I’m afraid) complete with sugar sprinkle contour lines for #2’s geography project.  He’d better get an A:

Eagerly anticipating…

my lovely mate Keris Stainton’s new book Della Says: OMG! (available for pre-order on Amazon now, and…

my review copy of Eat Me!: The Stupendous, Self-raising World of Cupcakes and Bakes According to Cookie Girl by Xanthe Milton.

Wishing…

I could get back to Ireland to participate in Dundrum Shopping Centre’s 5th birthday celebrations (and have a chance of getting my mitts on some of their €50,000 worth of prizes).

Discovering…

Fantastic new food blogs!  This month I’m loving the winner of the Cupcake Challenge:

Eggs Cream and Honey

Lay The Table

and the frugal food week over at Icklebabe.com’s blog.

Entering…

The Ideal Home Show’s fabulous competition to find the UK’s next Home Baker of the Year (get entering now, just click on the link!).

Cooking…

Cobra Beer’s Ultimate Curry Sauce (sadly, I missed National Chip Week.  Bad times.), but happily  if you swap the morel mushrooms for something cheaper and leave out the gold leaf, it doesn’t have to cost the estimated £36 per portion to make.  Find Cyrus Todiwala’s Connoisseurs Curry Sauce recipe here.

and Drinking…

well, to go along with a £36 quid a portion curry sauce, it’s got to be something pretty spesh, so Cobra sent Hubby some of their fabulously bottled King Cobras to try.  He wasn’t disappointed.

Nibbling…

on Marks and Spencer’s Colin the Caterpillar coca cola flavoured jellies and Cadbury’s new Dairy Milk Caramel Nibbles.  Nom nom nom.

Tweeting…

Not on Twitter yet?  Get connected, the come and say hi! (I’m @EnglishMum)

Shouting ‘YAY’!…

at the news that my much-loved fellow blogger and Cousin, Moon, and his beautiful wife Mrs M are expecting a baby.  Congratulations!  It couldn’t happen to a nicer couple :

So that’s it for Feb, then.  Onwards and upwards to March.  See you on the other side xx