What's in a Name?

'Is he OK, Mummy?' asks Tom.
'Yes, Daddy,' I say. I'm looking in the visor mirror at our toddler sitting in the back of the car, strapped to his child seat. His eyes are drooping, his thumb making its way to his mouth. 'He'll probably just drop off,' I say. If I'm honest Freddie is looking a little peaky, but I don't want to put Tom off his driving.
We are on the A421 towards Buckingham, heading for what must be our fifth roundabout. Cars are swishing past on all sides and Tom tenses as the stress of the crossing begins. I look at the sign proudly announcing where we are: Bottledump Roundabout. Who on earth chooses these names? When I was teaching English in France in my twenties, a student once exclaimed on learning the word 'cupboard' that our noble language was so literal, so unromantic. I was taken aback and offended, though on looking at this signpost in front of me, I have to admit that perhaps the Parisian pupil was right.
Now we're heading down the lane marked 'Milton Keynes, 6 miles', and Tom switches on the radio. The news presenter is interviewing a man from the army about something I can't quite focus on. Until the gentleman's identity is revealed: Sir Jock Stirrup. Now there's a name! I bet he was teased remorselessly at school about entering the equestrian world. I am picturing him donning Biggles spectacles and boarding a fighter plane in defiance at their rudeness.
There's a gulping noise from the back of the car.
'Is Freddie all right, Kirsty?' Tom asks.
I'm staring at the scrubby land to my left and becoming horrified at the warning notice that pedestrians might be crossing. What, here? Are they mad?
'Kirsty!' says Tom.
'Who? Oh!' I say. I often forget what my name is owing to my entire identity having been engulfed by motherhood. Kirsty rarely features in my life. It's almost always Mummy, Daddy and Freddie.
I twist round and look at the little man. He is awake and swallowing slowly and deliberately. 'Are you OK, Monkey?' I say. Here we go again. An inability to address people by their actual names. 'Mr Pooping?' I say. 'Are you feeling ill?'
Freddie shakes his head, but I'm not convinced.
Tom winds down the front window, and Sir Stirrup's voice gets muffled by the passing traffic.
Freddie's eyes are now bulging and the gulps are sounding more like hiccups.
'Are you going to throw up?' asks Tom. I'm not sure if Freddie understands this expression.
'Are you going to puke?' I say, 'Chunder? Bring up all your lunch?' I'm getting into the swing of this!
'No,' says Freddie, firmly. Then he proceeds to vomit quantities of red, lumpy liquid all over himself and the car seat.
'Mummy,' he says.
'Yes, Tiger,' I say.
'It's sick, Mummy,' Freddie says.
'Yes, darling, you're right,' I say. 'It's called sick.'

Spider Man

I've just been watching tv and they've been reporting about a guy dressed as Spider Man who keeps scrambling up the sides of tall buildings in Paris illegally. Naughty Spider Man! I rather like him. He used to operate in La Defense when I worked in France myself. His favourite conquest was the block we called The Dark Tower, that loomed over Paris's business district, reflecting back the grey clouds and sheets of rain that often fell upon the office workers scuttling past its base. It was the tower whose lifts whooshed eerily into the ether, transporting immaculately groomed staff to landings filled with turnstiles and No Entry signs. Every week I turned up in my shabby attire, handed over my passport, and muttered my purpose of visit miserably to the receptionists. They would raise their eyebrows as they repeated back 'La professeur Anglaise' and announce my arrival to the waiting Madame Dupont, my pupil.

Madame Dupont herself would appear and lead me to her office, an operation that was no mean feat. Corridor after corridor of be-suited young men greeted us, filled with handshakes, kisses and old-fashioned charm. 'Ah Monsieur Boucher and Monsieur Fournier. Good day to you...' Madame Dupont would say, followed by a most startling display of attentions from the young men. 'Ah, but what a beautiful necklace you are wearing, Madame,' one would say. 'And what elegant trousers,' would add the other.

Inside Madame's office, the lesson would follow its course, filled with teasing exclamations of 'You bring zee bad wezer wiz you!' as we stared out at the persistent rain. Listening to my own dreary voice struggling to keep Madame's attention, I used to long for a Diet Coke break, complete with hunky man flashing cheesy grins at us from outside the window. But it never happened. Instead I would correct repeated utterances of 'What a dommage!' or undo unfortunate confusions about foreigners being 'strange' in place of 'etrange'. But then one day, we had just been doing conditional sentences where my example had been 'What would you do if Spider Man appeared?', when who should swing past the window, clutching a rope, but You Know Who. Madame shot out of her chair and shouted 'Zer iz ze Spider Man!' and we burst into peals of laughter and jollity for a whole thirty minutes, rendering my usually dismally executed English lesson a positive joy. Thank you, Spider Man. Keep on climbing!

Chicken Run

So I'm cycling along Windsor Road, and I see three people ahead of me: a lady waving her arms in my direction, a man standing awkwardly outside a house, and a policewoman standing beside him holding a chicken under each arm. Here's how the scene goes:
Waving Lady (beckoning me over): 'Do you know anyone around here who keeps hens?'
Me (feeling strangely proud at this): 'Actually yes, there's a woman who sells eggs on a street round the corner...'
Policewoman (looking red-faced and flustered and in faltering English): 'Chickens, chickens, what do I do?'
Man Beside Policewoman: Silence.
Me: 'Would you like me to go to the egg lady and ask if her birds have escaped?'
Policewoman: 'Yes, you go, now.'
Waving Lady and Man Beside Policewoman: Silence.
I make moves to set off.
Man Beside Policewoman: 'Actually, the chickens belong to the house we're standing outside.'
I stop the bike. 'Oh.'
The policewoman marches round the back of the house to investigate. The man picks up his briefcase and rushes round the back too.
Waving Lady: 'Well, the officer really shouldn't have to spend her time chasing naughty hens, and why doesn't she speak English, and what a strange man...'
I smile and go on my way, feeling like I'm an extra on 'The Archers'. Then I enter the Post Office, where I see the woman from the day before with the dog, whom my darling toddler had been compelled to say 'Dirty dog' to for no reason. The woman doesn't have her hound with her today and gives me a beaming smile. I figure she wasn't too offended by Freddie's comment. Phew. Now I'm on the set of, perhaps, Neighbours?

The telephone rang the other day and a distant voice said, 'Hello, Mrs Raj?'. I said, 'Er, Mrs Ridge?'. The caller said, 'Yes, Mrs Ridge. How are you today?'. I said (and this was true that day), 'Well, actually, I've got breast cancer and am having a bad week.'. There was a pause. Then the caller said, 'Oh well, these things happen. Can I interest you in some accident insurance?...'.

I wrote an email to my oncologist recently with a list of questions which he diligently replied to, point by point. In answer to my query about what kind of injection my hormone jab would be (I asked: 'Will it be in my tummy?'), my oncologist wrote back, 'Yes, although we prefer to call it the abdomen.'. Perhaps next I can ask him about Freddie's dinky, my husband's bot bot and my tootsies and see what he says...

I'd better go to beddy bye-byes. Though I'm not feeling very sleepy, and sheep aren't doing it for me at the moment. Perhaps I should count those chickens...

Pigs in Space

A little-known fact about me amongst my more recent friends is that I have a nickname at home. It's Piglet, or simply, Pig. If you switch on our Wii Sports player, and play a game of, say, baseball, a team will come rushing out onto the pitch with spookily familiar faces. There's Tom, the comic version, with a heavy beard and thick glasses, our friend Abigail with big blue eyes and yellow hair, my mum in a bat-wielding pose never before seen, and then there's me. My name flashes up as Pig, and I sport glasses just as thick as Tom's and a haircut chosen pre-chemo. The 'Pig' title always gives me a little start, seeming somehow rude, but I've never changed it. And now that a short, rather squat 'Fred' has joined the team, I'm realising that minimalist nomenclature is the order of the day.

So Pig I am, and rather spacey today with it. In fact, not to put too fine a point on it, I'm suffering from Pig Flu right now. Or swine flu, if you will. Freddie had it last week and is right as rain now, whereas I'm not faring quite so well. Which is down to my immune system not quite recovered from that dratted chemo last year, according to the doctor. And I honestly thought I was fit as a fiddle and robust as the next person. Never mind. You might well ask how ill I can be if I'm sitting writing at my computer, but I say to you: if you've spent several days in bed with a nasty temperature, sweating like a, well, pig, running to the loo, and nursing aching bones in lukewarm water in the bath, you feel like doing something different to see if it will help. So here I am, 64 Zoo Lane on in the background (though Freddie's not actually watching it. He's in the garden playing football with a valiant Tom. More on Tom later), writing.

Well, here you have it. To all those who say the swine flu thing is a storm about nothing, and that it's no more than a nasty cold and that people should stop being melodramatic about it: Stuff off! Perhaps because of my fragile immunity, I've been dealt a big dose of the flu, and dealt it good. If you count making an imprint in sweat of your body on the sofa after frantic attempts with paracetamol, head coolers etc to get your temperature down from 38.6, doing a fart and then realising it was actually diahorrhea in your pants (sorry, but perhaps the nitty gritty will get the point across!), being so blocked up by night there is no way you're going to sleep unless sitting bolt upright (if you could just knock that temperature on the head), a hacking chesty cough that hurts every time, achey limbs and a mysterious tingling sensation in your fingers and toes as 'just a cold', then please don't come into work with a 'cold' anywhere near any establishment I'm ever associated with! It is utterly miserable, make no mistake. Not to mention sitting slumped on the pavement outside the out-of-hours doctors, head resting against the wall, waiting till I could be directed to a special room with a masked, gloved-up doctor in it so I can be checked out and given Tamiflu. All in all, a simply swell experience, I'm sure. And nothing to make a fuss about. Oh no!

Now Tom, as of this morning, has also come down with it. Would you believe it?! I suppose not that unlikely, considering. Just very unfortunate. The football game just now (ended just now due to rain) was a first attempt at entertaining Freddie with something other than the tv. Because, believe me, you don't feel like doing anything else when you've got this horrible lurgy. But Tom's done SO well. I couldn't even handle lying across the sofa with Freddie and had to go to bed today. So, thank you, Tom. You're a star!

I need to see to Tom's Tamiflu. Slight hitch on our 'flu friends' front, so an email needs to be sent to fix up someone else!

Good bye for now, from the Hogs of Sherlock Road.
xxxxx