Now showing in glorious Vomi-color!

Our local cinema, on a Sunday morning. They run a special offer every weekend, whereby fairly recent children's films, which are no longer on general release, are shown for £1 a seat - presumably as a way of milking out those last ticket sales before the DVD is released. On the premise that it is (a) raining and (b) cheap, we thought it might be a nice idea to bring our two to see 'How to train your dragon', which the promotional leaflet tells us is showing in 'mind-melting 3D'. Unfortunately, when we arrive we quickly realise that everybody else with a child under seven living in a ten-mile radius has had the same idea. The place is packed, full of willing punters all happy to have their minds melted by however many dimensions it takes, as long as it shuts the children up and gets them 90 minutes of relative peace.The queue is colossal.
"Did you book the tickets?" I ask The Wife.
"No. Why would I book? It's only a pound each. The price would double with credit card fees. And it won't help, the queue for ticket pickup is just as long as the box office."
I look at the ticket pickup queue. She is right, it is enormous. A confused-looking woman at the front seems to be trying an endless succession of different credit cards in and out of the machine, while her children swing off her arms and the people behind her 'tut' with impatience. She look harassed, and the queue looks angry.
"What shall we do?" I ask, fully expecting The Wife to say 'bugger this, let's go somewhere else'.
"I'll queue up for tickets," she says. "You go over there and get sweets or something." She points me to the queue for the popcorn counter. It is longer than all the other queues combined. They should take a photograph of it, and print it in the dictionary next to the entry for 'despair', for illustrative purposes.
"I am not spectacularly happy with that outcome," I announce, though perhaps not in those precise words.
"Get queueing" she says, waving me imperiously away.
Eldest elects to come with me, presumably not so much because she prefers my company over her mother's, but more because of my increased proximity to sweets. She has already put her 3D glasses on, saved from the last time we visited, and is gazing about her in puzzlement.
"What are you doing?" I ask.
"Nothing looks different," she says. "Except that it's all darker."
It take me a second to realise what she means. "No," I say, "You don't need those glasses to see 3D in the real world. It's 3D already."
She moves a hand back and forth in front of her face while pulling the glasses up and down, to see if my theory stands up to scientific scrutiny. A woman ahead of us smiles at her indulgently, as if she can't decide if Eldest is being cute or is just simple.
A man and woman come up to join the queue behind us. He looks at it carefully, and then turns to her and says "I just don't like popcorn enough to go through all that." They walk away.
I have to agree with them. I don't like popcorn that much either: I even think the three minutes it takes to make it from scratch at home in a saucepan is too high a price to pay for the end result. But at this point I notice the Häagen-Dazs concession stand. There is no queue for that - I don't want ice cream at 10:30 in the morning on a Sunday, and it appears that nobody else does either. But it looks like they also sell the same bags of sweets as the main cinema shop. Perfect.
I march Eldest over to to the stand. "Hello," I begin. "Do you sell sweets?"
"Yeah, we do" says the deeply interested man behind the counter.
At this point, I hear hurried footsteps heading in my direction. I turn round to see Youngest, hurtling towards me, her face grey and with panic in her eyes.
"Daddy! she cries, "Daddy! Quick! I think I'm going to be...Bleeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeerugh..."
And then she throws up, all over the front of the Häagen-Dazs stand.
The people standing in the queue for the main shop, watching this little drama unfold, all make a disgusted 'urgh' noise, and the whole line seems to shimmy as it takes a collective step back from us.
"Ah..." I say, for wont of anything else.
"More coming!" shrieks Youngest, bracing herself against the side of the concession stand."Daddy, more sick is coming! Dadddeeee....Bleeeeeeuugh"
A second, larger dollop of foul-smelling white poultice is deposited on the floor.
"Wow. Cool." say Eldest, who is studying the scene with interest from behind her glasses, and is presumably thinking that the whole incident been arranged for her benefit, in order to demonstrate the immersive power that 3D imagery can bring to the vomiting experience.
"It smells of lemons," she observes, with detached scientific precision. "And you can see where she was eating pickled onion Space Raiders...." A woman in the queue gags audibly at this.
"Did you want some sweets?" asks the man behind the counter, with some impatience. I realise that the entire incident has taken place at knee-height, out of his field of vision, and he has thus seen nothing. I turn back to him and smile brightly.
"Could I have some of these paper napkins?" I ask, helping myself to a large stack before he can answer.
"Yes..." he says. Then, slightly aggrieved: "I thought you wanted sweets?"
"Personally, not quite so much now, no..." I say, judging the puddle on the floor below and helping myself to more napkins
"I want sweets" says Eldest, automatically.
"Me too..." says Youngest, who has straightened up and seems almost cheerful now her stomach is empty.
"Fine," I say, deciding that the path of least resistance is probably easiest here. "A family bag of Malteasers, please. And more napkins. And could you point me at your nearest rubbish bin?"
Later, with the floor mopped up and the dirty napkins disposed of, I discuss the incident with my wife.
"It smelled of lemons..." I say, wrinkling my nose.
"Well, yes," she says. "It would. I gave her a lemon to eat in the car."
I find this statement so outlandish that I feel I have to challenge each element of it individually: "You gave her a lemon? To eat? In the car?" I say, each question increasing in pitch to denote my rising tide of incredulity.
"Yes," she says, clearly annoyed, and then mimics my voice in her reply: "Yes, I did. Because she asked for a lemon. To eat. For breakfast. In the ca-aar..."
"A lemon?" I repeat.
"Oh, don't keep saying it. She likes lemon."
"Yeah, but didn't you think it would make her sick?"
"That wasn't the lemon. That was because of your driving. You were swinging the car about too much..."
"We were late..." I interject.
"...so when she told me she was going to be sick, I said, 'Go and tell Daddy'..."
"Wait a minute, she told you she felt ill? And so you sent her over to me to throw up on?"
She looks defensive. "Well, I wasn't giving up my place in the queue..." she says.

I'm writing a book...

 ....for twenty years, I've been prevaricating. I'm 40 next year, and as my wife and any of my friends can tell you, I've pretty much wasted the last twenty years of evenings watching TV and playing Nintendo. Basically, it's time to put up or shut up.
So, spurred on by NaNaWriMo, I'm giving it a go. (Though I don't have a hope in hell of matching that pace, so I'm going for 1000 words a night over a hundred days, and thus far, on day 14, I'm bang on target). I'm cheating a little, though, because some of the most popular stuff on this blog is getting reworked into the text...
I don't care (well, not too much) if the end result is shockingly bad, at least I can say I've done it.

Please forgive the self-indulgence in bringing it up, but saying I'm doing it here is part of it, because if I fail, anyone who's ever read anything I've written will know. And that might feel a little awkward....by announcing it here, I'm just giving myself extra incentive to stick with it.

Words of encouragement are very welcome. Words of discouragement I can live without, though - I've got a little voice in my head that does that for you already, thanks...

Normal Lemon Drizzle posts will continue, and in fact will resume very shortly: Youngest humiliated me in the cinema the other week by being spectacularly sick all down the front of the Haagen-Dazs concession stand. I know you'll want to hear all about that...

The tale of the sea anenome

It is about one o'clock in the morning, and all four of us are awake - and although all in bed, only my wife is where she should be. This is because Youngest is ill with a nasty chest infection and keeps coughing herself awake, which means that I have been turfed out of my bed to allow her to sleep in the same bed as her mother, because she somehow finds her presence soothing. I find this frankly unfathomable, because 'soothing' is about the last thing I would describe sharing a bed with my wife as, but there you go. This means that I have been banished to the spare bed, in the loft (which is not as Dickensian as it sounds: there are proper walls, windows and carpeting up there, even if you do have to climb a ladder to get into it). Fidgeting away beside me is Eldest, who started crying and had a major tantrum when her sister swapped beds because it left her all alone in their room, and so after much fuss it was decided she would share with me in the spare bed so she wouldn't be lonely. This may sound sweet, but is actually quite annoying, as I am exhausted, whereas she is feeling chatty and wants a story.
"I will tell you about the last time I had to share a bed with you, if you like?" I offer, sensing an opportunity to  impart a valuable life lesson about not making a needless fuss.
She nods without any enthusiasm, perhaps (rightly) realising that this is about the best she can expect, and that I'm really not going to climb back down the ladder and return with a selection of picture books for her to choose from, no matter how many time she says 'please' and makes puppy-dog eyes.
"It was about four years ago - you were still very little. Mummy was still pregnant with your sister..."
"What does pregnant mean?"
"That's definitely a story for another time. For this story it just means your sister wasn't born yet and Mummy needed to sleep in a proper bed, OK?"
"OK"
"Well, we were staying at Nanny's house. Mummy and Daddy were sleeping in the spare room, and you had your little blow-up bed in the other room. But you were scared, and kept waking up, so wanted one of us to sleep in the same room as you..."
"So you did?"
"Yes. It was a long night."
"Why?"
"Well, first of all I had to make up the sofa bed up, then find a blanket. And then, once I'd done that, you decided you wanted to sleep on the bed next to me, but still stay in your blow-up bed. So I had to lift your whole bed up and lie it next to me on the sofa bed."
"That doesn't sound bad. That sounds funny..."
"Oh, you had only just got started with your demands. Then you decided you wanted to share my blanket, so I had to drape it over you which meant it wasn't quite wide enough to cover me, so I got a cold draught up my back. I had to go and find my sweatshirt to sleep in, but you didn't want to me leave you alone and so I had to carry around Nanny's house in the dark, bumping into things while I looked for my sweatshirt..."
"Nanny has a special cupboard where she hangs all the coats and jumpers up."
"Yes. I know that now. Anyway, when I found my sweatshirt, and put you back in your bed on my bed, you decided it was too dark..."
"So you put the light on?"
"So I put the light on. But then you said it was too bright..."
"Hmmm..." she says sagely, in sympathy with her younger self - as if unpleasant ambient light levels have been a lifelong burden that she has just somehow had to learn to deal with.
"So I turned the light back off. But then it was too dark again. So I had to pick you up, again, because you didn't want to be left on your own, and blunder into the front room, where Nanny had this battery operated table-light made of fibre optic threads..."
"I don't know what that is..."
"The sea anemone light. The one you use to play with all the time."
"Oh, that one. I liked that one."
"Yes. You used to pick it up all the time..."
"It used to change colour. It was pretty. But I don't think she has it any more."
"No. No, she doesn't."
"What happened to it?"
"I believe you broke it, shortly after this story takes place..."
She ponders this.
"She should definitely buy another one. What happened next?"
"Well, I went and got the sea anemone light, and put in our room, and put you in your bed, but on my bed, though under my blanket, with the main light off...and then you said the sea anemone light was too far away for you to see it properly. In the end I spent half the night lying on my back gazing at the ceiling with the sea anemone light held on my chest, just so you would go sleep..."
"Ha!" she says, amused.
"It is not funny," I say. "Now, think; why do you think I am telling you this? You were very little, but you are much bigger now. So what does that story tell you?" I ask.
She goes quiet while she thinks about it. I wonder how she must feel, hearing about the demands her younger self used to make. It is a silly sweet story, I think, but there is a point to it, and she is old enough to realise that sometimes you just need to get on with things for the sake of others...
"I think," she announces, brow furrowed in concentration, "it says that you used to be a much nicer Daddy than you are now?"
I am at a loss for words. I literally have no idea what to say.
She senses opportunity and presses on: "Can you buy us a new sea anemone light?"