Mummified

Joanie: My kinda muvver

Look, I've got to admit something, OK? And if you're a Mothercare catalogue kinda kraken-lover you'd better gird yourself. Here you go: I can't stand talking to other mothers. No really, I can't fucking bear it. Now I don't mean my mates who are mums and I don't mean the few mates I have made through Kraken Junior. I mean the whole school gate brigade. I just want them to leave me the frig alone.
I felt it this morning when I took KJ to her new school for a link-up sesh and I feel it every day when I pick her up from her current venue of enforced labour. Seriously, when there are 30 mums queuing up for the 3pm bell, all nattering about the cost of kids shoes or their vaginal sagginess, I'm the one deliberately standing on my own with anything from a good book to a lengthy nose-pick. It's infinitely more interesting.
Now, I know this makes me look like a standoffish kind of kraken but that's the way I like it. I have no fucking interest whatsoever in any child except my own and those of my dear mates. I really don't give a shit all the others. And the thing is, until their mothers start talking about something of interest, I really don't give a shit about them either. See, I told you to gird yourself, didn't I?
Thing is, expecting women get on just because they are mothers is like expecting all brown-haired people to be mates or all disabled people to forge lifelong friendships. The only thing we have in common is that we've shouted obscenities at a random midwife and that does not a friendship make. 
Anyway, talking about kids over and over again is not what I want from my chumships. Who in the fuck wants an entire afternoon's discussion about the firmness of Little Johnny's turds? I want to talk about politics, careers, music, art, sex and cake and any other subject that actively doesn't get out of bed at 4am just to ask me when Santa's coming back.
Y'know, I recall being coerced into attending a mother and baby group when Kraken Junior had just emerged from her festering shell. It was one of the most hideous moments of my existence. After weeks of fuck all but leaky tits, soaring bewilderment and clambering exhaustion I thought it would be a chance for intelligent conversation with other wimmin. Fuckadoodledo, was I wrong. It was a room bereft of intelligent anything. It was, however, a void into which a collection of females all pitched their random thoughts about feeding, sleeping, nappies, feeding, sleeping, nappies. And as I watched I had the most horrific thought: "Is this it? Is this what I should talk about now that I have spawned?" needless to say, I wrestled the live mouse out of KJ's mouth and took off, never, ever returning to that lair of the damned.
So, yeah, I sound like a kraken hag but spare me, will you? More importantly, spare me the endless kid chat. I don't care now and I never will. Really, readers, you have been warned.

Girl Talk

Go the frig away

I was the distraught recipient of terrible news today, care of a certain Kraken Junior, for she has informed me that when she grows up she wants to be a...princess.
A princess. A fucking princess. What sort of ambition is that for any sentient being? After all the times I've talked about space travel and authoring and construction and athletics she has still decided that she wants to be the equivalent of the horrifically benign Kate frigging Middleton.
In much the same way that I would be mortified if she were to become a Tory, KJ's preferred career choice makes me want to sob into the balled up hopes and dreams that I have for her. I know, I know, she's four and she's going to change her mind a thousand times (Christ knows, I'm 41 and still don't know what I want to do when I grow up), but what if this is it? What if KJ has already decreed that her life is to be one of pouty tuffet-sitting, X-Factor entries and professional vajazzling?
What if this candy-floss career attempt actually pulls off? I blame those horrific magazines she's seen. No, not Heat or Hello but Princess, that schmaltzy and offensive rag that's stuffed with coy looking Princesses from Disney films, you know with names like Belle and Aurora. 
On the rare occasion that she's managed to get her sweaty paws on this ambition-smothering shit I've been forced to take things into my own hands, namely by finding pictures of said princesses and drawing  mortar boards, books, test tubes and trainers on them. I then go on to explain to KJ that only dimwits want to be princesses and why don't we get the chemistry set out now?
Look, it's not that I'm a pushy cow of a kraken. It's just that I can see how, at every turn, girls are force fed these stinking fucking images of what society wants them to be; pneumatic, silly pushovers. It's my job to create a balance by offering KJ the opposing image of women as intelligent, strong and go-getting. Princess magazine sure as shit doesn't do this so I'm having to do it instead.
So I've decided not to fret over this crinoline draped beast that KJ wants to become. I have every faith that she'll be the lucky recipient of common sense and run a mile from anything that involves a lifetime of daintiness. Or she'll have me to answer to and, guess what? Dainty I ain't.

Food Fight

Just. Eat. It.

Here's my horrifying secret: I've been trying to poison Kraken Junior. You know, slipping digitalis and crushed yew berries into her Petits Filous, watching her wilt and pale over the following months...Well, at least that's what you'd think had been happening if you were to overhear her squealing tones during any given frigging mealtime. I mean, what in the fuck is with her increasingly queer culinary demands?
It's like feeding a panicky Saddam Hussain: the peas can't touch the gravy; the sauce can't touch the sausages; the mash can't have potato skin in it; the parsley sauce mustn't contain 'bits'; the spag bol must have the onion picked out of it; the yoghurt must be pink; the mice must be alive; the goats must be virgins...Jesus Christ, Karen Carpenter would have been easier to feed. 
So what, exactly, will happen if any of these arbitrary rules are suddenly and recklessly transgressed? If Kraken Junior's bug-eyed terror is anything to go by a hole will be torn in the fabric of the universe and the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse will gallop through. If my bug-eyed frustration is anything to go by the social services will be called in and I'll make headline news with my swirling cudgel. 
I don't give into 98 per cent of these deranged grumblings. I'll be utterly fucked if I'm going to spend ten minutes of my time plucking the parsley out of the fish sauce. If I wanted to serve royalty I'd enrol at Eton and toss onto a digestive. 
Course, this whole frigging rigmarole happens every day and, worse, with food Kraken Junior loves. So it matters not if I knock up a glorious pile of sausage and mash. Should the gravy be pooled around the curling bangers rather than over them the sun will suddenly darken, locusts will start battering at the windows, and Kraken Junior will be greeted with a stout, "For fuck's sake!". An Enid Blyton picnic it ain't.
I'm going to start presenting Kraken Junior with the contents of a compost heap to show her what it's really like to be fed inedibles. A couple of slugs and decomposing pondweed should do it. Oh and some digitalis and yew berries. That should really give her something to holler about. 

Twitchers

On a quiet day

Why in the fuck didn’t anyone tell me that when I gave birth it would not be to a human being but to a perpetual motion machine? You know, I once saw a perpetual motion machine at the Boston Science Museum. I thought it was a work of genius. Genius, my hairy arse. Next to four year old Kraken Junior it’s got all the motion of my lower bowel after a large omelette.

Jesus, how can anything move so much and so often without being experimented on in a laboratory? Kraken Junior is never knowingly conscious and still. She jigs, twitches, dances, waggles and jerks and that’s just when she’s sitting at the table to eat. I’m seriously wondering whether she’s missing a substantial part of her sweltering brain.

The fact is that this endless bouncing of hers is driving me around the fucking twist. It’s like being tortured by the Iraqis, you know where you get woken up every five minutes to partake of disturbing images. I swear I have to leave her company at regular intervals just to rest my eyeballs. They spin in my ocular nooks like an aging raver on bad skag.

Course, it’s great that she’s an active little kraken but she’s burning off calories faster than I can wedge them into her. I’m starting to wish she was one of the fat kids who spend eight hours a day glued to the telly. At least she’d be in the same position after each of my fevered blinks.

So, is this normal? Does every four year old twitch as if they’ve wedged a piece of Lego up their fundament? And if so, how in the frig am I, the Kraken, expected to survive it, especially seeing as polite society frowns upon the use of basements and restraints?

Oh, don’t tell me. Resistance is futile, isn’t it? So instead of fighting it perhaps I can turn it to my advantage. Once I get Conjugal Kraken to pin her down I’m going to surgically attach mop heads and dusters to her ever-frisking limbs before retiring to my bed. Kraken Junior can be put to good use, the cave will finally stay clean and I can sport a cold flannel over my eyes for the next ten years. Win win, innit. Well, innit?

Cling-Ons

Blimey. Splashed all over today's news is a picture of the missing Madeleine McCann. It's a mock-up of how she would look today at the age of nine, five years after her disappearance from a hotel in Portugal while on holiday with her parents and twin siblings. Fuckadoodledo if this isn't most spine-chilling story for anyone who's experienced an exploded vagina, or at least witnessed one. I have one nagging problem with it though...

You know, even five years after the event and the thousand times I have envisaged how I would react if Kraken Junior disappeared (badly. Terminally badly), I still can't get my sweating brain over how Maddie and her siblings were left alone in the hotel room while their parents went out for dinner. Yes, yes, yes, I know that the restaurant was just across the pool from the room and that the parents checked on the kids every half an hour but, fuck me...is that really a risk worth taking?

Aye, it's easy to become dangerously obsessed with your kids to the point that you could accidentally become conjoined. I never quite rest unless I can see or at least hear Kraken Junior, hollering my location across the house at her if I so much as go for a shit. It's the same wherever we go and whatever bollocks we do. In the summer I love evenings in the garden but my creeping fear that KJ could need me while I'm casually flicking my snot into the grass keeps me in earshot and close to the back door. 

So it's utterly beyond me that I would ever leave her in an unlocked room hotel room while I dined with mates, even if said eaterie was so much as a burger van ten yards away. 

Ok, Ok, so this says way more about my insecurity than it could about the life-changing mess the McCanns have been pitched into, but isn't just the vague perception of danger enough to make a parent careful to the point of insanity? Isn't it the same cold fear that drives us to always put babies to sleep on their backs and makes us rush, screeching, to A&E when our firstborns develop strange rashes?

This is in no way a condemnation of the McCanns. Fuck knows if they haven't already turned themselves inside out and punished themselves daily for what has befallen them. It's an existence that I can't even imagine surviving. Yet I still find myself taken by the urge to shake them and ask, "What? What were you thinking?"

Tragedies can happen to anyone. Shit slops down onto the most virtuous of parents. But sometimes it pays to keep up an umbrella, even if this makes us laughably and embarrassingly cautious. I realise how nuts my motherly radar makes me look and how I could probably do with releasing the reins but, on the offchance - even the vaguest most absurd offchance - that something goes terribly and horrifically wrong, I'll keep clinging on, thanks. 

KJ is the same age that Maddie was when she disappeared. I don't want to have to imagine her from her on in. I'd rather see her in all her snotty glory and for that I'll never, ever understand what the McCanns are thinking now, and most of all, when they were thinking then.

Motherly Madness

Chuck yourself on, why don't you?

You know, as a mother I've been privy to all sorts of child-rearing bollocks, but fuck it. If a mother wants to breastfeed until her kid's graduation, I really couldn't give a shit. Yet (yeah, you knew it was coming) there is one trait displayed by some mothers that makes me twitch violently: self-imposed martyrdom.
Sorry, but I find motherly martyrdom so fucked up that my brain sweats when I think about it. And by martyrdom I mean that thing when some mothers proudly announce that they haven't shaved their legs/ cut their hair/ moisturised in four years because they love their kids too much to spare the time. 
I'm not banging on about being too busy to take a shit. Jesus, that's all of us. I'm talking about the giant, flag-waving gesture of renouncing the person you really are because this, apparently, makes you a better mother. 
Look, motherhood changes everyone, and not just from the ladygarden down. But this notion that you have to sacrifice yourself in some ritual burning of your entire pre-kid life and personality is about as healthy as chewing glass. I've watched some mothers wither away after adopting this wild-eyed notion and it's abso-fucking-lutely terrifying. 
When I got knocked up I promised myself that, whatever chaos raged, I would always put on my mascara, just because it reminds me that I matter too. I know! The audacity! And fuck me if I've stayed true to my word, even when it's been done to the tune of infant shrieking. 
See, I'm the opposite of martyred mothers. I take pride in taking time to paint my toenails. And no, this doesn't make me a less caring, loving mother, as much as my blog makes some of you want to call Social Services. In fact it contributes to the notion that all of us, in this little kraken family, matter. Not just Kraken Junior, but I, the Kraken, and Conjugal Kraken too. And that means we all grab a slice of the happiness rather than handing it lock, stock n barrel to Kraken Junior for her to snot all over it. What in the fuck would be the good of that?
So can we pour cold water over these personality pyres that some mothers light when their offspring slop from their bodies? It's like some twisted form of imprisonment, with the kids rattling the keys. Fuck knows, motherhood can be cruel enough as it is don'tcha think?

Again?

That bloody stork...

Tell you what is the oddest thing I've found about my single season of spawning, it's that getting knocked up after 20 years of infertility just isn't enough for some people. I still get asked when I'm going to have 'another one'. By another one, I take it to mean child rather than breakdown although there is certainly room in my life for another trip to the psych unit. 
So in an effort to allow the world to move on, I'm laying out my top five reasons for never, ever creating another human being ever again, ever. I said ever, d'you hear? Here, my little kraken lovers, you go:
1. As a woman who, post partum, lost her plot so profoundly that deep sea submersibles were drafted in to recover it, I will officially be fucked if I am going through all that again. 
2. One exploded vagina is quite enough for one lifetime. Women say that you forget the pain of labour. Ha, I'll be fucked. Every single day I remain grateful that I will never again have to feel a Winnebago reversing out of my love tunnel. 
3. Why in the frig would I want to be left in charge of a newborn again? It was the most horrifying, confusing and exhausting twelve-month of my existence. Jesus, it'd be like soldiers returning to Kabul for a reunion bombing, ie. plain sodding stupid.
4. No, I never understood which cry meant hunger and which cry meant taking a shit, so every time Kraken Junior opened her mouth I was pitched into a panic-stricken bout of tick-boxing. The guesswork. Oh Jesus, the guesswork. 
5. Creche fees. Do you realise that, had we not spawned, we could have spent the creche fees on three round-the-world trips on a cocktail-laden, gold-plated magic carpet and still have come home with enough change to buy an island such as Australia? 
So hopefully this is enough of an explanation to allay the fears of those who think we are taking our time in producing yet another little kraken. There will be no other little kraken. We are kraken-lite. Not least because the little kraken that we do have just can't be bloody beat.

Sleeptalking

Yeah, knackered.

Look, before I start, I want you to know that I've always despised this club mentality of parenting. You know the sort of thing, that because you haven't squeezed another human being out of your vag you can't possibly understand what it's like to live in chaos or rinse shit from under your nails. I hated all of that before Kraken Junior slopped into my life and I still hate it now.
However, and I am really fucking sorry about this, there is just one club rule to which I subscribe and that is to know the true meaning of sleep deprivation. Really, until you've had a kid or been tortured by the Iraqis you just haven't even got a vague understanding of what it means. That's because the term 'sleep deprivation' only tells half the story. The phrase should read 'sleep deprivation and an avalanche of screeching chaos to deal with as the shit-laden nappies and puke-riddled muslins pile up around your feet'.
See, it's because parental sleep deprivation isn't just about being awake in the night. It's about being awake and having an infant scream at you every hour until dawn as you feed/ change/ jig it through the tears of your exhaustion. For six days in a row. And then having to do all the usual kid-rearing crap during the day too. No lie-ins, no catch-ups, no cat-naps. Just endless mind-tearing torment. What the fuck the Americans are doing with waterboarding is beyond me. Just give the Guantanamo inmates a shrieking, purple, colicky newborn at 3am and they'd be spilling secrets like dropped Smarties.
And no, until you have done it you don't know how it feels. Fuck knows, you can't even start to imagine what it is like. I've had mates attempt a comparison with such gems as, "Oooh, I know how you feel. I was out clubbing until 5am last week!" or, "Oh I know, the blood dustman wakes me up at 7am every Thursday morning".
Excuse me? Are you out of your tiny frigging minds? Do you honestly think that choosing to snog and booze your way though a weekend with your mates is in any way comparable to being woken every hour by a raging offspring? Or averaging three hours a night for a month? No, no, no, no, no. And again, hell no. 
I'm afraid parental sleep deprivation is the equivalent of conquering Everest or having a car fall on you. Until it happens you haven't got a fucking clue what it feels like. Imagine having your senses ripped out through a hole in the top of your head and then run over by a shit-covered dumpster truck driven by Jonathan Aitken. Then scrap that analogy because it doesn't even come near it.
So while the 'club' is one that I'll never join, I'll give it the nod over this 'un. Or perhaps I'm just too fucking tired to get my arse in my hand for once.

If I've Said it Once...

You reckon?

You know what's really fucking hard about parenting? The repetition. Endless, bottomless, infinite repetition. Not so much in actions but in speech. If I say one thing to Kraken Junior every day I probably say it a thousand sodding times, usually twice before she responds and three times before she acts. By which time I'm physically smashing my head against the nearest hard surface at the scorching frustration of it all.
Do you know what phrases I use the most in any given 24 hour period? Do you care? Too bad, because, in a stunning fit of irony, I intend to repeat them here:

• Teeth! Teeth!
• Can you actually hear me?
• Just because, that's why.
• Shoes!
• Just sit still to eat your tea.
• Hands!
• You want what?
• Come. Back. Here. NOW!
• No, just two stories.
• For. Fuck's. Sake.
• Do you need a wee?
• You tit
• I said slow down!
• Just give me one bloody minute, OK?
• Do you need a poo?
• Can't I have a shit in peace?
• I love you.
• I need a drink.

This is it. This is frigging it, the soundtrack to my life. It used to be the latest from the Ministry of Sound or Pete Tong but now it's the endless fucking barking of instructions at a four year old who swears blind that she knows better than her 40 year old mater.
In fact, said repetition has even turned me hoarse. There have been nights when Kraken Junior got just one short story because my voice wouldn't have survived even more infuriating repetition by way of We're Going on a Bear Hunt or the bloody Gruffalo.
Jesus, and they say having kids broadens your outlook.Well, it does exactly the frigging opposite to your skills of erudition. Conversationally I've regressed about thirty years since KJ slopped into the delivery room. Oddly enough, the first words she heard were "For! Fuck's! Sake!" and "I need a drink". Yup, I should have known even then.

Only the Lonely

A better kraken than me

Whoa there, Great Britain, hold your frigging horses. What the frig is with the demonisation of single mothers, then, eh? Have all 62,218,761 of you lost your Daily Mail-poisoned minds? Because if you ask me single mothers should be kissed on the collective arse, what with them inhabiting the seventh circle of hell otherwise known as being the permanent and sole target for feeding duties/ tower building/ bum wiping.
What I mean is, I'm struggling to raise a kid with the help of Conjugal Kraken and assorted family members. How the fuck women do it when they are completely alone is beyond me. When do they ever get to drink a hot cup of tea? Or get dressed? Or take a shit?
Christ, I haven't taken a shit on my own for four years. How I'd manage if I was the only parent available to said offspring fills me with the sort of terror that turns my bladder icy. Seriously, it'd be me wearing the nappies just so I could get through the day.
And how the frig do single mums manage when they've come down with the lurgi? Just the thought of it makes me weep. Imagine crapping and puking your way through days of gastroenteritis all while building marble runs and grilling chicken nuggets? At what point, pray, would you get the chance to lay face down on the floor of the bathroom and weep yourself to death?
Really, it's a mystery to me how single mothers aren't single-handedly keeping therapists and counsellors in gold bullion. I sprinted over the edge even with a phalanx of willing assistants. Without them I'd have barely left the delivery room. In fact I'd probably have been transported straight from there to the psych unit just to save on the middlemen.
Which is why ripping apart these women is so pitifully short sighted. Forgetting the political and moral blatherings, they're working about as hard as it's possible to work without visiting a Gulag camp. And, OK, if they have fucked up on the procreation front, it's safe to say that they're frigging well paying for it when they've had four hours sleep for ten days in a row.
In fact, they don't need the pitchfork waving masses to point out pitfalls of single motherhood. I dare say the downside crosses their mind 40 times a day, like when one hand is filled with shitty wet wipes, the other hand is holding a wrigging baby and they need another hand to...oh.
So let's just give the babymama bashing a rest eh? Think about your own parental chaos and wonder how the fuck you'd have managed on your own. I dare your bladder to survive the sudden onset of an ice age. Brrrr.

Head's Up

Noggin lovin', brain toastin'

Well, bugger me backwards and spit out the bits. What's this madness I've witnessed in the last two days where tiny babies have been outside without hats on? It's been - pardon the jargon - fucking freezing but these teeny tiny creatures, with the same capacity to regulate their temperatures as a bag of sand, are out in the equivalent of the Everest death zone as bald as Britney.
Please tell me what the frig is going on. Why, in the depths of winter, would anyone take a baby out without a hat on? Are they trying to create genetic popsicles? Jesus, you'd have to bath the kids in anti-freeze just to thaw them out.
And, as sure as shit, it gets worse because the people who were carrying these nippers were wearing bobble hats. I know, I know, I wish I were making that up too but alas, no, such spam-faced idiots really do exist.
I mean, if it's cold enough for an adult to dig out a woolly hat surely it's cold enough to stick a titfer on a baby. What the frig makes parents think that their offspring is somehow immune to the blasting, sub-zero wind from the Urals? Or that they have a blossoming Torvill and Dean-like obsession with ice? 
Christ, the moment KJ splattered forth from my screeching, prostrate form the midwife stuck a hat on her to keep her snug. She hasn't been titfer-free since then either - it's woolly in the winter and wide-brimmed in the summer. For fuck's sake, I couldn't even tell you what colour her hair really is. It's like living with a three foot high Dolly Parton.
Perhaps I should start staging infant interventions, lobbing baby beenies at gimply parents until they defrost their brains enough to form a sensible thought. God alone knows how many beenies it would take though. Fuck knows if there's even that much wool in the world. For some bleak reason, I doubt it.

Candy Floss

Almost but not quite

Pink, pink, pink and more fucking pink. This, I'm afraid to say, is life with a four year old female of the species. Pink everywhere. No, really, every-frigging-where. Until she was born our laundry piles were divided into whites and darks. Now it's whites, darks and fucking pinks. 
It would be easier to avoid the grim reaper that it would be to avoid your daughter becoming mesmerised by the colour pink. I reckon Kraken Junior is less child and more black hole, slowly sucking into her all that's pink in the world. Seriously, she's got an event horizon that would put cosmological phenomena to shame. I'm even avoiding redecorating her -currently lime green - bedroom because there's a vile inevitability in her wanting to turn it pink. Jesus, it'd be like creating a giant, walk-in cervix. Stick her in the right clothes and she'd so match her environment that we'd need heat-seeking equipment to find her.
That's why I've started buying her boys' clothes, because unless she starts wearing blues, yellows, greens and reds she'll turn some strange strain of colour blind. You know how pit ponies stop being used to the light? Kraken Junior will stop being used to anything that doesn't resemble a crushed fucking raspberry.
I blame social stereotypes. If you should want to dress, feed or entertain your child first you have to chose between pinks and blues. Seriously, you want to buy a set of pyjamas, prepare to be funnelled into one or t'other. Or perhaps you want to buy a bike? Then make your choice. Jesus Christ, Kraken Junior even has a trampoline that's pink.
And yeah, this pinky overkill is partly down to myself and Conjugal Kraken buying the stuff but, for fuck's sake, sometimes you get sick of fighting your way upstream and just give in. Ok, Ok, it's weak willed but you try tussling with ethical dilemmas when you've had five hours sleep and are arguing the toss with a toddler in the middle of a heaving Asda. You'll give into fucking anything, just to get out alive. She could ask me for a chainsaw and I'd shove one in the trolley just to snag four (that many?) seconds of peace.
So pink has one frig of a lot to answer for. It's turning my kid into a walking strawberry sundae. Stick a Flake in her gob and Mr Whippy could flog her from a van. Well, at least the music would be Greensleeves.

Baby Talk

Oh, the glamour!

Wonders never bloody cease, do they? I’ve just been privy to an absurd debate on how the MTV shows 16 and Pregnant and Teen Mom glamorise teenage pregnancy. Shit on a stick, it was like listening to common sense and intelligence spiral down the plughole.

Have these people ever seen the shows? If they have while simultaneously witnessing anything that encouraged teenagers to get knocked up then I’ll willingly let them take their pick of any of my vital organs. I’ve watched the shows since they first clogged up MTV and I’ll be fucked if I can remember a single moment of glamour. In fact all I can remember is broken hearted parents, abandoned 15-year old girls, feckless boyfriends, screeching infants, resentful 3am feeds and fuck all chance of a decent education this side of Russell Grant being straight.

So tell me, which part of this is glamorous?  At what point would any half-sentient teenager watch these shows and think, “what a fucking great idea! If I’m pregnant by November I can be dumped, broke, uneducated and friendless by Christmas. Whoo-oo!”

I’ve even heard the argument that these shows encourage teenage pregnancy. Are you for fucking real? Encourage pregnancy? What, by wooing viewers with graphic scenes of teenagers tearing their vaginas during childbirth? Or by wowing them with the blazing rows they could have with boyfriends who swear the kids aren’t theirs? Look, if this stuff encourages some girls to get pregnant then may I put forward the idea that said girls are unlikely to be chucking away great careers as physicists or diplomats as a result. Instead they’re probably so bat shit crazy that they’re an insult to bat shit.

Problem is, this argument is reeled out whenever any TV show or film addresses the shittier side of life. Chuck a scene about drugs, booze or sex into a show and suddenly we’re glamorising anything from overdoses to abortions. Oh spare me. No fucker ever complains that Eastenders glamorises the soul-sucking boredom of running a market stall on the square you are born and will die on, do they? And frankly, I find the encouragement of the latter way more worrying than the encouragement of the former.

So turn your ire on something a little more deserving, you soothsaying nutbags. When you see a show that rewards pregnant 12 year olds with duffel bags of cash and a shag with Justin Bieber feel free to holler. Until then, try rescuing your common sense from that plughole, if it’s not too late.

Mothering Heights

My kind of girl

Have you any idea, kraken-fumblers, how much I loath and detest the term 'yummy mummy'? Well, if you didn't before you will now, bless your poor, poor souls.
What a vile fucking concept this yummy mummydom is. It's no longer enough to be a mother, you now have to be a mother who is fragrant, delightful, erudite and, all in all, some mythical creature who has never been near a nipple pad in her life. It's utter bollocks, of course, and just another way of women bashing the fuck out of each other rather than just getting with the endless to-do list that they're already embroiled with every day of their lives.
Why the fuck does anyone want to add the burden of being yummy to the already crippling responsibility of being a mummy? Look at it this way: we, mothers, have already grown another human being, developed size 24 arses, had our vaginas poked/ stretched/ torn, shat on the delivery table with the effort of it all, leaked milk from our tits, fed another human from our tits, gone bananas to the tune of PND, survived on two hours sleep a night, wept with exhaustion over tasks as basic as getting dressed, swapped sex for Benjamin fucking Bunny and blown cosmic sized holes in our careers. And now you want us to look pretty too? Go, as they say, fuck yourself.
This yummy mummy malarchy is yet another unachievable myth, of course. Worse, it makes women feel like dribbling failures if their school run shoes have anything less than three inch heels. Excuse me?
I see women who have achieved this myth as the biggest victims of all. For fuck's sake, how much effort must it take? And why don't they have anything better to do with their time? The likes of Victoria Beckham are praised for their perfect mummydom but all I see is a woman so cowed by this image that she's not allowed to leave the house unless she's catwalk ready. Who, I ask you, wants a life like that? It's amazing VB has time to take a shit. Most mothers don't and that's when they haven't seen the business end of a mascara wand for three months. How the fuck you do it while matching you spring wardrobe with your new Laboutins is beyond me.
Funny thing is, I have a picture of myself and Kraken Junior by my bed and the frame has the words Yummy Mummy written on it. It was given to me when my fanny stitches still meant that I had to pee with my head lower than my pelvis just to stop the stinging (you work it out). I now revel in how the frame and picture are poles apart. It's my daily act of seething rebellion. My smiling face is hiding the rapid onset of severe PND and what would become visiting rights to the local psychiatric unit. That's about as yummy as I managed to get. And that's about as yummy as I'd like to stay, if it's all the same to you.

Timber!

We're going for
something small this year

Tomorrow we're decorating the kraken cave with a Christmas tree. I tell you this because it might be useful information when the police ask for witnesses. Personally I'd put the tree up at 9pm on Crimbo Eve and then saw up the fucker at 9am on Boxing Day but with Kraken Junior in her fully festive mode that's out of the question. 
Ironically, I used to love shoving an expensive spruce into the corner of the living room and festooning it with flammable tat. Now, while I long to love the day of erection (as it were) I know that doing it with a three year old who's stamping on baubles/ chewing tinsel/ crying because the fairy is the wrong shade of pink is a complete and utter fucker. Yes, it should be a day of great joy where we share the hanging of lights, conjure up fabulous displays of glitter and then gaze adoringly at our creation as it twinkles but c'mon will you? It's more likely to end as it did last year with me sobbing on the doorstep while stabbing myself in the foot with the sharpest plastic star I could find.
And that's the thing about Crimbo with kids isn't it? Yeah, it's a joy to see how excited they get at seeing Santa and to watch their faces on Crimbo morn. Yet it's also a complete bastard when they refuse to eat their turkey dinner because the stuffing isn't the right colour and throw an almighty wobbly at 3pm because exhaustion has stolen their brains.
It's the same business with the tree. In my imagination it's a scene from a Bing Crosby festive bonanza. In reality it's just a scene from, well, Bonanza. Except where the Injuns win. 
Now go dial 999 and forewarn the police. And tell them to bring a chainsaw.

Crackers and Cobblers

Can't afford clothes, though

Whoa! Listen to this for a big bowl of wrong. Abbey Clancy, model and footy wife (God, what a dispiriting description) is bemoaning the fact that her nine month old daughter - yes, nine months - has already opened all of her Crimbo presents in a fit of festive excitement. Poor Clancy now has to buy her more presents so that the kid has something to open on Christmas day.
What a pile of complete and utter fucking bollocks. What a load of absolute cock. What a bulging sackful of self-indulgent, spoiled, overpaid, deluded stool water. There are so many things wrong with Clancy's 'predicament' that I barely know where to start ripping it apart. Every lobe of my brain is misfiring and sparks are squirting from my nostrils. 
Clancy, love, you need to learn a few things and fast. Your kid is nine months old. She still doesn't know what to do with her various sphincters let alone root around at the bottom of your many wardrobes, find her presents, unwrap them and fret about how she's fucked up her first Christmas. If she's opened her gifts in a festive frenzy it's your fault not hers, you pan-faced footy shag. Get a grip woman. Kraken Junior turns four next month and she's still happy with a cardboard box, a roll of sticky tape and a fistful of Cheerios. 
Anyway, spare a thought for the rest of country before you start cracking on about what a fucker it is to have to spoil your daughter twice in quick succession will you? These are straitened times for Christ's sake. Most people reading your ridiculous spoutings will be struggling to make ends meet enough to produce a turkey for the table. Gifts for their kids will drag them screaming into the red and January will be decorated with unpaid bills. And yeah, while that in itself is a blog post (working title: the many daft fuckers who go into debt for Christmas) for most families that's the only option open to them these days. 
So, Clancy, if you're expecting sympathy from this particular kraken you're barking up the wrong Norway spruce. Go ahead and buy your nine month old a diamond encrusted motorised scooter or treat her to her first catamaran. Whatever. Just don't expect us to give a flying fuck about what a terrible burden this is upon you this festive season. Now go back to your baubles and shut the bugger up.

God Tink Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen

Move over Charlt, there's
a new Tink in town.

Aye, the consumerist juggernaut carries on driving then reversing then driving then reversing over Christmas in this particular kraken's cave. Hauling Kraken Junior to school this morning she was warbling some God-based tune or other that she'd learned there. Course, the conversation turned to praying (I was praying for peace and frigging quiet which shows exactly the power of prayer). Here's how it went:
Me: "People pray to lots of different gods you know, not just the guy with the beard."
Kraken Junior: "Like Jesus?"
Me: "Kind of. And like Buddha or Shiva. Depends on what you believe in."
Kraken Junior: "And Tinkerbell?"
Me: "Eh?"
Kraken Junior: "And Hello Kitty?"
Me (under my breath): "Oh for fuck's sake..."
Kraken Junior: "Whoooaaa, you said a naughty word!"
Too fucking right I did, my lovely back-seat beast. Problem is that as far as little krakens are concerned the slinky Tinkerbell and the soulless Hello Kitty are gods aren't they? They may not wage wars against infidels or plunge pitchforks into gays and lesbians but they wreak frigging havoc amongst the toddler masses. It's like an infant form of Catholicism, where God is everywhere even when you're beating one off. That's because the likes of Tink and Kitty are similarly omnipresent. Yeah, they're on toys but they're also plastered all over magazines, tins of food, yoghurts, shoes, clothes...I've even seen Tink and her fairy dust mantra on cars, for fuck's sake. No wonder Kraken Junior reckons Hello Kitty wants her for a sunbeam.
It's not that I want her to believe in God, mind you. Every time she bounds out of school with some new prayer under her belt I pep talk her about how she doesn't need to ask God for strength or power or whatever because she embodies all of those things herself. Sod getting on your knees and asking for a better life. Get on your feet and make it for yourself instead, that's the gospel in our cave.
But the idea of putting Tink and Kitty up there with other spouting deities withers what's left of my belief in mankind. By the time she's 16 she'll be praying to the Benson and Hedges bible and crossing herself at the altar of Diamond White. I think another one of my pep talks is in order. She'd better start rubbing her Tink beads and muttering her Hail Kitties, by Christ on a bike (and even he's pedalling as far from here as he can get).

Yo, Silence!

You said it, mate

There are many ways in which child rearing is abso-frigging-lutely crucifying. You know, the mess, the chaos, the heavy bolt that keeps them locked in the attic. But what's killing this particular kraken at the moment is the endless fucking conversation broken only by Kraken Junior's sleep. 

To think, we spent the first two years of her life encouraging her to talk and now all we want her to do is shut the fuck up. You want to know the topics of conversation that she and I covered in the ten minute car ride home from school today? No, quite, but too bad 'cos here they are:

Pooey knickers
Crimbo concert practice

Lunchtime fruit

Crimbo trees

Driving up hills

Tooting car horns

Library books

Chicken nuggets vs fish fingers
The shape of the moon

Oranges with toothpicks sticking out of them

Alien shaped sweets

Yellow cars

The dark

Eating crayons

Tunnels

Microwave popcorn

Chatting to a nearly-four year old is like being violently assaulted with the Oxford English Dictionary and left for dead amongst the shattered remains of the English language. Apart from being exhausting it's about as bewildering as you can get without your brain spilling out of your nasal cavities. 

Half the time I haven't got a fucking clue what's going on. By the time 7pm bedtime comes I'm all but weeping from the endless verbal carnage. Seriously, the goings on in Abu-Ghraib were a piece of piss compared to this. Waterboarding? Ha. Listen to the endless non-sequiturs from a child and you'd admit to wanting to shag your own grandmother if only that would make it stop.

Hopefully all of her imaginative chat will turn Kraken Junior into an erudite and garrulous adult. Problem is I'll be dead by then because I'd have stabbed myself in the ears with a sharpened toffee hammer and fed myself to a hearing dog for the deaf. So good luck to the rest of you when you meet her. You'll fucking well need it.

Talking Balls

Victoria 'Bollocks' Beckham

Whoaaa! I've just read this quote from the oboe-faced Victoria Beckham and have therefore exploded my eyes into my own palms. Read, if you will, this load of cock:

"There are quite a few video conferences at 5 a.m. with me in my dressing gown, holding baby. For me it's no different than it is for a lot of women out there. It's like juggling glass balls. I love it." 
Indeed, that last line is where said cock lurks. Who in the fuck enjoys, nay, loves video conferencing at 5am while a newborn shits into their lap? Who, pray? I fucking well didn't enjoy it when I did it and I'm as sure as fuck that no other mother enjoys it either. In fact I didn't enjoy it to the extent that I now feed from a nosebag of anti-psychotics. 

I've written columns twenty minutes from deadline with one finger while a three month old KJ screeched in my left arm. I've done interviews while wiping up the sick that's just puddled over the carpet. I've called editors while shoving a bottle into KJ's gob to keep her quiet for five minutes. And no, I didn't love any of it. In fact, I fucking hated every second of it. I hated the chaos, the noise, the panic and the persistent feeling that I was failing every poor fucker who dared to come into contact with me.

The thing is with Beckham is that she is, well, Beckham. She doesn't get arsy clients shouting at her, doesn't get threatened with her job when she misses work for another jabs visit, doesn't have to troop on until bedtime 14 hours later because there's probably a queue of nanny's desperate to pick up her fucking slack.

I love it. Bollocks, Beckham, bollocks.

Yoof

Then stamp on it

Christ on a bike if my heavily medicated spirit has just taken another small, yet everlasting, kicking. Why? Read the conversation I've just had with Kraken Junior. And weep:
Me: "Look! Your Tinkerbell comic has a fairy mobile that we can make!"
KJ: "A mobile? Can we play with it?"
Me: "Course. Want me to put it together for you?"
KJ: "Yeah. Can we call someone after that?"
Me: "Eh?"
KJ: "Call someone. On the mobile phone you're making."
As sure as shit slides off a shovel, this has to be the most disheartening fucking conversation I've had in something like 30 years. KJ is three years of age and she thought I was talking about a mobile phone. How the fuck did that happen? We read her books about bears and pirates! We spend hour after fucking hour spilling glitter across the floor! She thinks thunder and lightening is caused by Santa taking a dump! 
When the fuck did technology overtake all that's good and innocent about dangling fairies off her ceiling by making KJ think I was fashioning a mobile communication device from the pages of a bloody magazine? 
Start praying for the safety of the next gimp who tries to flog me a mobile phone, will you? Or it'll be them that KJ finds dandling from the frigging ceiling.