Do you kiss on the lips?

A friend of mine posted a link on the More than just a Mother Facebook page to a really interesting blog post about kissing.  The essence of the piece is simple - should you kiss your children on the mouth?  The answer of course is just as straight forward - you should do whatever feels right for you and your family - but it raised an interesting debate.  My friend Charlotte was quite clear about her views.  "Cheek for family.  Cheeks, forehead, noses, fingers for my son but not the mouth.  Lips are for partners only." 

I’m a lip-kisser.  My children give big slobbery mouth kisses and I wouldn’t have it any other way.  I’m making the most of it before they grow up and barely deign to brush my cheek with theirs, let alone give me a kiss.  Thinking back to my own childhood, I always kissed my father on the lips, and that extended into adulthood.  Kisses between family members – or between good friends – aren’t sexual, they have no hidden agenda.  They’re just kisses. 

This morning my daughter sat on my lap and showered me with kisses.  A thousand butterfly touches across my face, then a stream of lip kisses coming faster and faster till she burst out laughing with the dizziness.  I love it. 

How do you kiss your family? 

  

Ever had a bad hair day?

I'm coming to the end of an extended absence from work, following a big gynae op which a lot of people Don't Like To Talk About.  As a result of my colleagues' sensibilities there are a number of people who have wondered where I've been for the past twelve weeks.  I suspect there has been a degree of speculation about my disappearance.  Was I ill?  In prison?  On a Buddhist retreat?

My time away from work has been blissfully uncomplicated, with plenty of time to fully recuperate from surgery, work on the rewrites for my novel and have milkshakes with the children.  Enjoying the freedom from corporate uniformity, I felt sufficiently brave to have a rather daring haircut.  I did so safe in the knowledge I wouldn't be walking into the office the following morning, enduring the week or so of comments before all is forgotten.

It's a short cut.  A very short cut.  An inch all over, leaving nowhere to hide and requiring absolutely zero maintenance.  I love it.  When I talked it through with my hairdresser I told her I was hoping more for Sassy Elfin Crop than Big Butch Bertha.  She nodded knowingly and delivered exactly what I wanted.

I popped into work last week for a meeting and braced myself for the "gosh you've had your hair chopped off" comments.  The woman in the press office squeezed my hand as she greeted me, a suspicious shine to her eyes.

"How are you recovering?"  She asked.

Clearly my surgery was common knowledge after all.  I gave a reassuring update - all better, no issues - and she nodded sympathetically and sighed a little.  I was struck by her emotional reaction to what is, after all, a very common operation for women.

"And will you need any further treatment?"  She wondered.  Was she referring to HRT?  I found her response rather odd, but the penny didn't entirely drop until she asked me whether I was in remission.

I was aghast.  My being off sick for three months and returning with a close cropped hair cut had meant only one thing to her - I must have a terminal illness.  It was an awkward moment I was tempted to run out on, but I felt duty-bound to set the record straight before they started a collection or sent me to Disney World.  "It's just a hair cut.  I thought it would look nice."  I said lamely.

My confidence in my hair cut has somewhat waned ever since.  Ever had a really bad hair day?  I think I just did.

What's the worst thing you've ever done?

Have you ever done something you're really ashamed of?  I'm not talking heinous crimes here, so if you're reading this from HM Prison Holloway please log off and find something more educational to do.  I mean something which seemed funny at the time, but now you're really quite embarrassed about?

During my degree I worked as a silver service waitress at an exclusive and well known golf club.  During these years I had the dubious pleasure of meeting the rich, the famous and the mildly royal in various states of inebriation.  Like Monica Dickens in One Pair of Hands I eavesdropped and people-watched relentlessly.  From the nouveau-riche couple who half-inched the silver (I offered them the cruet set to complete their haul, at which point they shame-facedly retrieved the cutlery from their pockets) to the arrogant business man who spoke about me in French as I served him (I replied, fluently and with a better accent than him) I saw it all.

At least once a week in the summer the golf club would be taken over for a wedding, each bigger and flashier than the rest.  Ice sculptures, champagne towers and floral extravaganzas would pour into the banqueting hall, swiftly followed by beaming guests in elaborate hats and a bride in Vera Wang.  As was the fashion, in additional to the exorbitant society photographer in attendance, each table would be given a disposable camera, guests encouraged to snap away and leave the camera on the table at the end of the evening.  It was our job as waitresses to gather up the cameras at the end of the night and make sure they were ready for collection by the wedding planner or the bride's family.

And this is where my shameful confession comes in.  You see, frequently guests would tire of taking pictures long before the film ran out.  Each collected camera would have one or two or more shots remaining on the film.  I can hardly bring myself to confess to what we did with them, but here goes...

We would take the cameras into the cloakroom and finish off the films by taking obscure photographs of our body parts.

How we fell about laughing at the thought of the bride and groom collecting their developed films from Boots, perhaps gathering friends and family to look at the pictures together.  Look, here's Aunt Mildred in that terrible fascinator!  Heavens, wasn't the cake just beautiful?  Goodness, whose bottom is this...?   The absolute hilarity as we imagined them wondering which of their guests had been so uncouth as to take pictures of their breasts...

Some fifteen years on I am mortified by our childish antics, and by the thought of the dozen or so brides whose photographs we ruined in our quest for laughs.  If you were one such bride, I apologise profusely.  And if you still have a photograph of my bottom, could I possibly have it back?  It looked so much better then that it does now.

The alcoholic at the checkout

At eight o'clock this morning I resolved to make chicken pot roast in my new slow cooker.  I was missing a single crucial ingredient and rather than compromise on taste, I decided to pop out to the shops right away.  No matter that I wasn't yet dressed - tracksuit bottoms pulled over pyjamas to beat the unseasonal chill - I'd be in and out before anyone noticed.

I drove the short distance to Sainsbury's and ducked inside, heading straight for the alcohol aisle.  I grabbed a can of cider and joined the short queue, where a wholesome looking family was paying for some pre-school shopping.

"We're making pigs in blankets today,"  chirped the eight year old girl.

Her mother gathered the children to her protectively.  I shuffled my slipper-clad feet towards the till and self-consciously placed my solitary can of cider on the conveyor belt.

"I'm making chicken."  I said hopefully, wishing my pyjama bottoms weren't so visible.  I wondered if their Boden provenance would redeem me.

Apparently not - the wholesome mother stared at me with a mixture of suspicion and distaste.  I rubbed fruitlessly at the pillow marks on my cheek and waited as the teenage cashier rang for permission to sell alcohol.  She didn't ask for ID - make-up free and sporting a tousled shock of bed-head hair, it would have been more apt to ask for my senior citizen discount card.

The wholesome mother took an unnecessary length of time to pack away her chipolatas into her reusable shopper, rearranging her features into something approximating sympathy.  I wondered if she was going to give me a lecture on sobriety, drop me a few coins for the night shelter, or perhaps point me in the direction of the nearest church.  But she just smiled sadly at me and bustled her children off to the school gates, where she no doubt regaled her friends with the tragic alcoholic woman she'd met in Sainsbury's.

Frankly, the whole encounter left me needing a drink.



This incident is entirely the fault of Appliances Online, who sent me a slow cooker and some recipe books to try out.  They sell cookers and other white goods, and run a blogger outreach programme involving a mysterious being called the Fairy Hobmother.  If you have a blog, and you comment below, they'll pick someone at random over the next few weeks for a present.