Peckham and Pompey

I had an enjoyable day yesterday in one of the dodgier parts of London, let's say not so far from Peckham and leave it at that shall we.
Alex and I did food shopping, food eating and post food relaxing. Perfick. I have a picture from Alex's room, but now that I am back to not being able to connect with my laptop, I can't load it.

I needed to get back so that I could look after Holly and Teddy this morning while Sue went out. I was greatly looking forward to this and equally greatly enjoyed it. They were both well-behaved and delightful but oh Lordy had I forgotten how utterly physically exhausting it is looking after a toddler and a baby.

You have to keep your eyes on both of them all the time. If one wants to go to the toilet you have to take them both, which will by necessity involve carrying one, but may involve carrying both. While you wipe one bottom, someone else's foot goes in the cats water bowl.

You cannot get out of your seat in a leisurely fashion, you have to leap like a panther everytime, as there is inevitably something about to occur that involves imminent death or disfigurement.

Don't be led astray by one of them claiming to know where something is, it may be an excuse to go into their parents' bedroom and apply Bonjela (mouth gel) to their eye.

No book can be read out loud just once, but rather three or four times, often with appropriate voices for the characters. Avoid Thomas the Tank Engine, because you have to do Ringo Star's voice doing someone else's, you're never drunk enough for that while kids are awake.

When I'm in Canada I feel free to whinge and moan about things that annoy me, but when I'm here, I feel obliged to talk it up. This was mostly fine at my sister's, since my nephew is determined to spend some, oh alright, quite a lot, of his mother's money doing a ski-instructor course at Whistler. But I came unstuck once.

When we were having lunch with my sister's friend, the one whose own sister had just returned from Vancouver, I made the mistake of asking how the children were settling into school here.
'Well, U. was surprised at the number of special needs pupils in M's class,' she said.
'Oh, that surprises me too, mostly over here we have actual school and separate classes for those kids, whereas in BC they're all in together, although I know that U's kids were in a private school, so maybe it just seems a lot because she wouldn't be used to having any in the class,'
'That's what U thought. Then she discovered that the reason there were so many special needs pupils in M's class was that M was actually in the special needs class here.'
'Ah.'

Oops.