Apparently Size Does Matter!

Mr B has been doing his Dr Dolittle act again. On Sunday evening he had a word with me on behalf of the guinea pig. According to Robbie she is not as satisfied with the new carrots I bought because they are the wrong shape! I told him that she is a guinea pig and as long as she has enough to eat she is not bothered about size, to her three small carrots are just as good as one large one. I could tell by his expression that he wasn't convinced, he told me that he was sure that she found the larger ones more satisfying. 


Usually I buy 'saver' carrots for her, but last week they had some small 'finest' organic carrots on offer. They were cheaper than the saver carrots so I chose those for the guinea pig along with her curly kale and other vegetables. I am fairly sure that she didn't even notice the difference, I think it is Robbie who has the problem not the guinea pig! Why do men have to obsess about size all the time?

“You’d better tell His Majesty that many people nowadays like marmalade instead.” A A Milne

Sunday mornings are special, but this week I was not best pleased with Robbie when I woke up on Sunday morning because he had woken me up at 3am when he came to bed. Does he seriously think that I want to chat at that time in the morning? He always knows how to get around me, very sensibly he didn't try to make excuses he just apologised and then plodded off to make me a cup of tea. 

When he came back to bed he cuddled up next to me, looked me in the eyes and said that he had something to tell me. I wondered what he could possibly want to say, he looked very serious, then he announced that he had run out of marmalade! I told him that this wasn't the moment to be talking about marmalade, but he just gave me that lost little boy look that he does so well. Then he snuggled up closer and told me to make sure that I choose thick cut Golden Shred when I buy his next pot of marmalade. Sometimes words fail me!


The title for this post comes from the poem The King's  Breakfast by A A Milne.

Don't judge each day by the harvest you reap, but by the seeds you plant - Robert Louis Stevenson

I love Saturdays, there is nothing better than the luxury of time. Going to bed on a Friday evening knowing that you don't have to set the alarm clock. Then waking up on a Saturday morning knowing that you can lay there and listen to the radio if you want to, or you can take a long lazy bath without anyone telling you to hurry up. Perhaps most important of all from my point of view is having time to enjoy a cup of tea without the need to rush, in fact I can enjoy two cups of tea if the mood takes me!


It was such a relief to have a more or less dry day on Saturday, it gave us a chance to consider the garden. I use the word consider rather than a more active word because I rendered myself incapable of anything more active. Robbie whispered the magic words into my ear and I gave in to temptation. The words in question were 'full English' - Robbie's speciality. I couldn't resist, it was more brunch than breakfast by the time we got around to eating and by then I was hungry. I ate too much because it was too nice to leave and after that I felt so full that I thought I would never be able to move again. So we spent time planning our next moves in the rather than actually doing the deed.  

We decided that the back fence needed urgent attention. I wanted something to grow up the fence that would look more attractive than the fence and would deter anyone who may be tempted to climb the fence. So we went out to choose some plants to grow along the fence. Robbie spotted a very pretty fuchsia, which while beautiful was not what I had in mind at all. We settled on Pyracantha it has several things to recommend it, it will add some colour to the garden in winter and if anyone tries to climb over that they will probably end up on hospital, it has thorns as long as spears! We bought some more potting compost too. We need to replace the soil in the tubs in the front garden, they have been washed out and waterlogged for so long that we need a fresh start. I think I will leave that job for a little while until I am certain that it has stopped raining.

In the book of life, the answers aren’t in the back - Charlie Brown

Robbie is a fan of Charlie Brown, he particularly likes Linus. Linus always reminds me of my son, not just because of his attachment to his security blanket, because he is clever, spiritual and a deep thinker. He has his own view of the world and it doesn’t seem to bother him that other people see things differently. I guess there is a bit of Linus in Robbie too, but instead of a security blanket he has a rucksack!

The one thing that both Robbie and my son have in common is that they don’t always understand me. This week has been a bit of an uphill struggle for me, my asthma has been playing me up which makes everything so much more of an effort. It makes me feel scared, struggling to breathe is horrible. It felt as if I was plodding through the week with diving boots on! My son, who probably hasn’t noticed that I have been feeling off colour this week, added to my burden by breaking the habit of a lifetime and delivering all his washing to the washing machine without being asked  - how many clothes does that boy have!! Later on he saw me trying to compare an old photo with the present day image on Street View. He asked what I was doing and I explained that I was trying to work out exactly where the photo had been taken. He was quiet for a minute or two, then he posed a deceptively simple question, “why does history matter?” I think the answer to that could be a blog post all on it’s own, but it gave me plenty to think about.

Robbie did his best to cheer me up, he made me a lovely meal on Wednesday evening. Unfortunately his efforts to cheer me up tonight fell on stony ground. He sat at the side of me with his ipad, he wanted to show me train pictures. I thought it was quite sweet until I realised the grim story behind what he was showing me. He made a hasty retreat to the other side of the room with my words still ringing in his ears!

The only person who knew instantly without being told that I wasn’t feeling very well was my best friend – and we were only speaking on the phone. It made me realise how lucky I am to have her. It is the strangest thing, it was a very odd situation that brought us together and no one would have expected us to become friends because we are very different. I think it surprised us both, but there was an instant connection between us from the very first time we met. It feels as if we have been friends forever.

A friend is someone who knows the song in your heart & can sing it back to you when you've forgotten the words

Surely not!!

I have to acknowledge that I have a weakness, if Robbie wants something I find it very hard to tell him that he can't have it. I have always tried to do my very best for all my family, seeing them happy makes me happy. The difference is that Robbie wants some very odd things at times. I know that I am old and boring - my 'nearest and dearest' remind me of that often enough, but I think most people would admit that Robbie has a rather unique fashion sense, and I really don't have the words to describe his approach to colour, the only word that springs to mind is 'loud'.

Yesterday he announced that his Berghaus jacket has seen better days and it is time to get a new one. He told me he had seen a nice green one and he sent me a link so that I could look at it online. I was pleasantly surprised, it was a deep olive green, it would have looked appropriate with smart clothes but it would have looked good with casual clothes too. I told him that I liked the colour and he looked surprised. He mentioned that I don't like green, but I said that I didn't mind olive green. He looked even more surprised, then he announced that I was looking at the wrong colour. My heart sank when he directed me to his chosen colour - it was pea green! I begged him to reconsider but he said it was beautiful. I only recall one instance of pea green being described as beautiful. In Edward Lear's poem the Owl and the Pussycat went to sea in a beautiful pea-green boat - but they were a very odd pair! As far as I am concerned pea-green looks good on peas, but on anything or anyone else it is a mistake.


I spent the rest of the evening trying to change his mind but I was wasting my breath. Can you imagine what it would look like if he wore that on one of 'rancid green machines' He would clash with the train and scare the passengers! So this is a plea to the select few who have more influence with Robbie than I do (you know who you are). Please take pity on me and persuade him to choose a different colour.

"The world was my oyster but I used the wrong fork" - Oscar Wilde

Robbie had undercarriage problems at the end of last week. On Thursday I bought him a Lego City police van set with the police dog and the police man minifigure. He sat down at the table to build it with a big smile on his face, but after a few minutes he announced that his undercarriage was missing. We checked but there was no sign of it in the box, all the other bits were there, but they were useless with the vital part missing. So Friday saw back at the shop in search of the missing part, the things I do to put a smile on his face! He was delighted when he got home and the part was waiting for him on the table. He built the police van, equipped the minifigure with an impossibly large pair of handcuffs and then called me over to admire his work - he even set the scene by creating a range of police dog noises! Okay, I  know he is a bit weird, but it is a harmless pass time, there are plenty of worse things that he could be doing. Anyway seeing him smile makes me happy too.


This morning he cuddled up to me in bed and somehow got on to the subject of one of his odd little obsessions. We have two different sets of cutlery, but Robbie will only use a three pronged fork while my son insists on only using a four pronged fork. They are as bad as each other, but both try to convince me that the other is much worse when it comes to weird obsessions! Robbie warmed to his theme and went on to tell me about the perfect dimensions of a tea spoon. Apparently there has been a serious upset at work, his personal tea spoon which was perfect in every way has been stolen! According to Robbie it is irreplaceable - but that will not stop him trying, he intends to scour ebay in search of a replacement! I scored a minor triumph, I managed to distract him before he got on to the subject of knives! I'm sure I haven't heard the last of his very specific cutlery requirements, but there is only so much that I can cope with in one day.  

Autism is like an iceberg some signs are visible but more are hidden below the surface

A telephone call on Friday afternoon left me in tears, but that is the end of the story, I need to start from the beginning. At 6am on Friday morning Robbie had left for work and I was standing in the kitchen ironing shirts and feeling very apprehensive. Two members of my family had important meetings that day and there was not a thing I could do to help either of them except to iron shirts for my son in the hope that looking neat and tidy would help him to make a good impression.

I have spent my life worrying about him, trying to keep him safe and generally trying to do my best for him, he may be 17 and almost grown up but I still worry and I still do my best to support him. Life is often challenging for people with Asperger's Syndrome or Autism but it can also be mentally exhausting for those who love them. I don't usually write about my son's Asperger's Syndrome because he tries so hard to be just like everyone else. He doesn't want to be labelled, he just wants to be accepted as himself, but in order to achieve that he has had to work hard to understand other people and to understand himself. It has been an up hill struggle, but I am so proud of him because he never gives up, even when things go wrong he keeps on trying.


He had applied for an important role within his school and on Friday he had to attend interviews as pat of the the selection process. We all feel anxious about interviews, but for my son facing people he didn't know, managing to maintain eye contact, to answer questions and (most important of all) to know when to stop talking was a really big challenge for him. I felt apprehensive all morning, and it was a relief to get a text from him saying that the interviews had gone well. He told me that he would know the outcome by the end of the school day, so he still had an anxious wait. I wished him luck and reminded him that whatever the outcome, it is all good experience.


I can't believe the change in him since he moved to that school. They have helped him to believe in himself, to believe that he can do things and to dare to aim high. His old school had high academic standards and he did well there, but I never felt that they cared about him as an individual. His new school had a different outlook and he has thrived.


I watched the clock, 3.15pm came and went and I convinced myself that it must be bad news. Then at almost 4pm my son rang to say that he had been selected as a vice president of his school for the next academic year (boys are not allowed to stand for president because it is a girls school). I was just on my way out to the supermarket when I took the call, I was so please for him and so proud of him, that I sat in the car with tears running down my cheeks. It has done him the world of good going to that school.

Simplicity is making the journey of this life with just baggage enough.

For the last few days I have been creating extra pages that in due course will be linked to the blog. I have been looking back at old posts in order to select some favourites. It was a surprisingly emotional experience looking back through time to the start of the blog, I wrote the first post on this blog in November 2006. A lot of water has flowed under a lot of bridges since then. 

Reading those old posts has made me realise a few important things. Perhaps the clearest theme running through the posts is that Robbie gets away with murder at times, especially when it comes to abandoning me in favour of his beloved trains. That is mostly my fault for being too accepting of his odd little ways for too long. Reading those old posts has prompted me to make a big decision about my life and Robbie is not going to like it. It is time to take control, we have to de-clutter!! We have too much junk and it is taking up so much room that it will soon be standing room only! I can live with his obsession with the railway, but 'standing room only' is taking things too far.


We are both 'blessed' with the hoarding gene, but in my case it tends to relate mostly to books and to things that hold special memories for me such a as letters, old birthday cards and things that the children made as they grew up. Robbie just hoards, shoes, ties, books, magazines, pens, notebooks, model trains, vinyl records, cds, Lego minifigures .......... The list is endless, but you get the idea. It is time for both of us to bite the bullet and get rid of a lot of the clutter in our lives. It will take time, but it will make things so much easier and it will give us much more space when it is done. So this weekend we will take the first step, two black sacks each sounds like a reasonable start.

Time is a dressmaker specializing in alterations - Faith Baldwin

It has been necessary to make changes to the blog, partly because Blogger (the platform I use) has changed, but also because the blog has grown and I felt that having everything on one page made it look too 'busy'. Robbie didn't like the first change that I made, he said it didn't feel like his blog any more, so we have settled on this fairly simple layout. Just below the header you will see the links to the photo page and the information page, everything is still there but I hope the home page looks cleaner now. Hopefully there will be no more big changes, there are one or two cosmetic changes to make and I need to make it easier for people to find older posts, but that will take a few days. Thank you for being patient over the last week or two while I have experimented with different layouts, and thank you for your continued interest in the blog.

Raindrops keep falling on my head ......

I am so fed up with all this rain, I am thinking of changing my name to Noah! Even when it is not raining heavily it seems to be constantly damp and miserable. We have floods in various places, two caravan parks at Billing and Cogenhoe and some other properties have been evacuated. Sheep and cattle have had to be evacuated from flooded fields and in the park the lake has flooded and paths and benches are hidden under water.The ducks and water birds seem to be enjoying their newly enlarged lake, but for the rest of us the conditions are depressing. So why when we have more water than we no what to do with, do we still have someone from the government saying that we will be getting our water from standpipes in the street if we have another dry winter? It is all very well for the water companies to say it is the wrong kind of rain and telling us that it just runs away. Rain is rain, too much of it causes floods and creates havoc. Of course water soaks away gradually, but it us up to the water companies to collect it and store it, heaven knows we pay them enough!

This photo was taken yesterday looking towards Weston Mill from near Bedford Rd in Northampton. On the left is the River Nene, on the right is the flood storage area (usually you can walk on this land). That is a lot of water! 

It is exactly 14 years since we had another very wet April, apparently we had 3.5 x the average rainfall for that month and according to news reports a whole months worth of rain fell in one day in April. On the night of 9th April there were terrible floods in the town and there was no advance warning. 2500 homes were flooded and 2 lives were lost. There had been no serious flooding in the town since 1939. The reasons for the 1998 flood were complex, but building on the flood plain certainly played a part. Since then a lot of work has been done to protect the vulnerable areas of the town. Without that additional protection Billing and possibly other parts of our town would have suffered serious flooding again this year. It does seem that 'the powers that be' have got their act together in respect of flood protection. Now we need the water companies to do the same in terms of water storage. It is a nonsense that we are up to are eyes in water yet we still have a hosepipe ban!