In the beginning.....

First of all, a word of explanation.

At school, when I was little, we had music lessons. At any given point, to mounting excitement, we were allowed to "choose" an instrument to torture. That's to torture and not of - it wasn't that sort of school. All the bigger, pushier kids (those with the richest parents - was a private primary school and fiercely competitive but more of that another time) always ended up with the really cool instruments - the kettle drum, the really fucking huge (and slightly sinister but again, more of that later) recorder, or the absolute apogee of late-seventies british music lesson cool - the glockenspiel. Whereas me - a bit fat, lavishly Mum-styled hair (remind me to expand on that another time) and more than lacking in self-confidence, invariably ended up with the D-flat chime bar. Basically a flat bit of metal screwed to a cylinder thing, with a hitting stick. When struck, the thing emitted a sort of mournful off-key boink noise.

Story of my life.

So, off we go. No idea where I'm going with this, or even why. I have so much weird, utterly random stuff floating around in my head at any given time that I thought maybe putting it down might at least allow me enough free headspace to a) do the job I'm paid not a great deal for (altho to be fair at present my working day consists of seeing whether I can break my own personal surf-the-internet/see-how-many-folders-on-the-network-I-can-access/do-a-search-with-keyword-"salary"-and-figure-out-how-much-the-people-i-hate-here-are-earning-so-that-I-can-hate-them-more record) and b) enjoy my life/relationship while sparing the long suffering Other Half from the hours and hours and hours of endless navel-gazing and guilt that he currently wards off. That said, I'm determined not to bore the arse off myself and anyone stumbling across this by wittering on endlessly about you know, like, stuff. Lord knows there's enough wanking going on out there without my bad self-psychology adding to it.

Today has been fairly momentous. Small Person enjoyed her first full day at school. This was more a test of my dammit-i-refuse-to-cry-and-look-like-a-lunatic-in-public powers than her resilience - she's been in daycare since before she was two and currently regards the world as a series of 9-5 working days during which any change of routine is a respite. So jaded for one so young......so I've spent the day imagining all sorts of graphically hideous scenarios (I personally wet myself on my first day at school owing to lack of cutlery so was dreading a call from the school insisting that I either supply them with incontinence pants or feed her at home) ranging from fights over pencils to the whole of Year 1 chanting obscenities at her in the playground. Fortunately it appears that once more my Worst Case Scenariometer has been in overdrive, and she merely favoured me with a withering look when I picked her up. My question "what did you do today" was greeted with a sigh and "I can't remember", delivered in a tone that suggested that in her head the response was "For fuck's sake, mother, I've had a tough day. Do you really think I can be arsed recounting the entire thing to you so that I can assuage your working-mother guilt by letting on that actually I had sort of a good time? Hardly...."

She's not even five.