We dreamers have our ways of facing rainy days

‘Ok! Starter for ten. Name six places to take the kids when it’s raining.’
‘Monkey Bizness!’
‘That’s one.’
‘Cinema. As Kevin Marwick of Uckfield Picture House says, “If it rains, they will come.”’
‘We’ve already seen Cars 2 and Horrid Henry. That’s four hours of my life I won’t get back.’
‘Swimming pool. Soft play at the swimming pool. Um.’
‘I’m going to have to hurry you.’
‘Oh god. Brighton Museum. Tescos.’
‘Tescos?!’
‘Sorry, was getting a bit desperate.’
We were all a bit desperate. Halfway through the school holidays, and my Weatherpro app said the percentage likelihood of rain was 110%. Clearly my phone had watched too much Apprentice.
‘Spring Barn Farm’s got some indoor bits.’
‘Baxter’s Field has big sheltery trees.’
‘Let’s face it,’ sighed Honesty Girl, taking a long drag of her hookah, ‘It’s challenge enough to find forty-two days’ worth of things to do in the sunshine. But in the rain, fuggedaboutit.’
‘Last summer we used up three blinking days in Churchill Square,’ said Sweary Mary. ‘I spent £200 in flipping Build-a-Bear.’
‘Cooking is the answer,’ said Nigella, who had recently moved to Lewes. ‘Morning – get them to bake healthy orange muffins for lunch. Afternoon, chocolate muffins for tea.’
‘Are you trying to shift a muffin-case surplus?’
‘Then let them make sandwiches for supper while you relax with a gin sling.’
‘Now you’re talking lady.’
‘Pay them two quid to clear up and that’s another rainy day sorted.’
We looked at our busty new friend with respect.
‘I find technology is terribly useful for these indoor situations,’ said Hoxton Mum. ‘We make little animated movies on Lysander’s iPad.’
Those of us for whom ‘technology’ meant letting our children play Moshi Monsters all day stared at our toes.
‘I need somewhere new,’ said Sweary Mary. ‘I’ve been every-blimming-where. You know those jackass parenting gurus who say it’s healthy for kids to be bored? I need their damn phone numbers.’
I looked round at my friends’ fraught faces, and made a decision.
‘Okay, I’m going to reveal my secret weapon.’
‘I knew there was a secret weapon,’ cried Honesty Girl happily.
‘Trading Boundaries near Sheffield Park.’
‘?’
‘But that’s a furniture shop!’
‘Yes - it can certainly fulfil all your dreams of Mexican-inspired wardrobes. But it’s so much more.’ I ticked off its delights on my fingers. ‘Toy shop. Cool restaurant with Etch-a-Sketches on the tables. Veritable warren of rooms to explore. Tolerant staff. And a playground, in case it ever stops raining.’
‘Are you on commission?’
‘We’ve been there four times already these hols and the children are begging to go again.’
Honesty Girl looked out of the window. ‘Quick! It’s stopped raining.’
We scooped up our television-watching children and yanked them, protesting, to participate in improving outdoor activities. When we needed it, Trading Boundaries would still be there.

Beth Miller, 10th August 2011. Published in VivaLewes.com. Photo by Alex Leith

Climb every mountain

It is a truth universally acknowledged that whenever the Grange Gardens café opens in a blaze of sunshine, the weather will instantly start leaping about across the calendar. So it was this week. Monday: café opens, and it’s April, all sunny and bright. Tuesday: rainy February, cold enough to bung the heating back on. Wednesday: July, people wearing sandals and saying, ‘phew what a scorcher.’ Today it’s September: warm but an autumnal nip in the air. I have missed my calling; I so should have been a weather girl.

Anyway, I was thinking how this was the first Grange Café opening day I have missed in several years, as both children are now at school, and that led to a bittersweet reflection about how life changes, and how we are gradually re-introducing activities that were closed off during the toddler years. Not that sort of activity. I mean things like choosing restaurants for their food, rather than the wipe-downability of their furnishings. Visiting the loo on one’s own. And going for proper walks.

Everyone deals with having kids differently. Some create the metaphorical equivalent of an empty room, stand well back and wait to see what the kid will have them do. Others say, ‘We’re going to carry on exactly as we always have.’ Friends of friends did this: bunged their baby in a sling and legged it up the Hindu Kush. (Have just looked up Hindu Kush to check it is something you leg up. It is.) They were all happy until their child learned to say ‘no’, around the age of ten months. I went to the opposite extreme, creating a lifestyle devoted to minimising the possibility of toddler tantrums, in me or the children. Yes, one’s horizons might thus narrow to Monkey Bizness and the Grange, but on the other hand it means never having to be stuck half-way up the Hindu Kush playing ‘I Spy’ for fourteen hours in order to avoid an epic scream-fest because the yak’s milk tea tastes ‘yucky.’

Then last week we were driving along the A27 when Thing Two stuck his head out the window and said, ‘I want to go up that mountain.’ For sure, Mount Caburn isn’t the H. Kush but it’s big for a small boy who’s been shielded from adult pursuits. We took him at his word and a few days later caught the train to Glynde and walked back to Lewes over the ‘biggest mountain ever’. Predictably, he started to moan immediately we left the train. But by the judicious distribution of chocolate-based snacks every ten yards, and by sherpa-ing him on the back of an obliging sheep, and, yes, by playing ‘I Spy’ even though he would insist that ‘grass’ begins with a ‘j’, we made our first successful return into the world of grown-up walks.

I’ll just about be ready for another one next year. In the meantime, it’s back to the Grange Café. Once the weather’s settled down a bit, anyway.

Beth Miller, 7th April 2011. Published in VivaLewes.com. Photo by Chris Winterflood.

Baby, it's cold outside

Whenever I hear someone’s thinking of getting a puppy, I always ask if they’ve considered a toddler instead. There are similarities – boundless enthusiasm, weeing on the floor – but toddlers have the edge because they’re reluctant to go out in bad weather. They won’t stand by the door holding their reins and looking hopeful. They will resist vigorously, clinging grimly to inadequately earthed items such as crystal vases.

But though they object, pre-schoolers, like puppies, need to go out every day and romp off some energy. Where to, when it’s cold and wet?

Expensive:

Monkey Bizness. Massive cushioned aircraft hangar. Not dear in money terms, if you take just one toddler and stay all day. Costly, however, in terms of the toll on your sanity.

Lewes Castle. Marvellous dressing-up room in which to enact fantasies of being a thirteenth century toddler. Town model will hold pre-schoolers’ attention for just seventeen seconds.

Paradise Park. Unbeatable for indoor activities. Most toddlers are terrified of the implausible looking dinosaurs but the kind staff will let you bypass them.

Budget:

Library. The children’s section is very good. Not free, as your child will force you to rent a Pingu DVD which you will fail to return, incurring enough fines to have bought the damn thing outright.

White Hart. I’ve never tried this but am told that toast costs about 50p and you can watch swimmers in the pool below. The White Hart does not market itself as a ‘toddler hang-out’, so use sparingly.

Ocean Adventure at the Leisure Centre. Tiny, low-rent Monkey Bizness. Has a crèche most mornings so you can have a grown-up swim/quick nap. Hot chocolate from the machine is better than the tea.

Toy Library at the All Saints. Toys, biccies, tea, company. Only open on Wednesday mornings, no point banging weepily on the door at other times.

Toddler groups. There are enough of these in drafty church halls that you could spend your whole week lurching from one to the other. Terrific if you find like-minded parents. Beyond depressing otherwise. (LDC keeps a list.)

Free:

Wyevales Garden Centre. Much missed is the unfenced koi carp pond, but there are lovely wooden playhouses (boring people call them ‘sheds’). There’s a café so you might have to spend money at some point.

Inside Outside. New ‘creative playgroup’. Their website hints they’ll be outside whatever the weather, before admitting they have a nice big warm tent. Untried but it looks good.

Toys R Us. Before your child realises this a shop, tell them it’s a toy museum. Don’t buy anything or the gig is up.

Booth Museum. Only if you can face explaining the principle of taxidermy. Thing Two set off an alarm last time.

Grange Gardens. Technically outdoors, but on cold sunny days before the café opens the benches near the hatch are bathed in warmth. Toddlers, sprinkled with Grange magic, will play happily for ages. Thing Two and I are often the only people there, so keep it to yourself.

Beth Miller. Published in VivaLewes.com

But my words like silent raindrops fell

We took advantage of the open day thingy to nose round the Friends Meeting House. It was a lofty chamber of tranquillity, in which even the children spoke in hushed whispers. We imagined the building in use, echoing with silence. But a nice lady who gave us tea and some rather good Victoria Sponge said, ‘Ooh no, we have tons of kids in the side-room on Sundays and it’s really noisy’.

Just an hour after visiting the Friends, we encountered two women in the Grange Gardens, Not Friends, who brusquely told Things One and Two to be seen and not heard. They said they had come to the Grange for peace and quiet.

‘Well why sit right next to the café at lunch-time on a Saturday then?’ is what I should have said, but instead suggested they might prefer the Knot Garden, a space specifically set aside for meditation and repose. ‘No, we want to sit here’, they replied, giving me no other option than to attack them with Thing Two’s Power Ranger.

Clearly, if I want somewhere relaxing for the Things to play I should take them to hang out with the Quakers.

So where in a small town can you go for a bit of p and q?

When I were a lass, it was libraries that were silent chapels of contemplation. No sitcom was complete without a secret being loudly blurted out amongst the bookstacks. Then a bunch of elderly extras in mackintoshes, one of whom was contractually obliged to have a fussy little moustache, would chorus ‘Shush!’

In fact I believe it was this tiresome cultural stereotype which caused libraries to re-think their noise policy. Now you go into, say, Lewes library, and the place is awash with people talking at a normal pitch. Parents read out loud in the children’s area, and often there are music groups, with toddlers bellowing, ‘The Children on the Bus Make Too Much Noise’. People do their shopping on the library computers and yell, ‘HOW MUCH?’ just as if they were at home. Say ‘shush’ in a library nowadays and everyone will look at you like you’re an out-of-touch weirdo, which you are, and may suggest you move along to the Grange Gardens.

Oddly, the quietest place I have encountered lately is Monkey Bizness. Their spelling. For those of you who’ve never been (oh lucky people), it’s a windowless warehouse filled with slides, massive cushions and screaming children. Usually, the decibel level is what Phil Spector was aiming for with his wall of sound, except much, much louder.

But the other morning, after being bullied into taking him there by my child’s freakish mastery of maternal guilt, we found we were the only visitors. Thing Two swiftly scaled a twenty-foot climbing frame and disappeared, as though into a black hole, and I sank into a leather sofa. It was exactly like being in a huge, silent padded cell. I must tell the Grange Garden ladies. I think they’d like it.

Beth Miller. Published in VivaLewes.com and in Viva Lewes magazine, October 2009. Photo by Alex Leith