If I had a photograph of you

Grange Girl and I were sitting on the grass atop the Priory ruins, trying to imagine the park covered  by an enormous festival. At present it was just us and a seagull.
“Do you know what I’m most looking forward to about the Mumfords thingy?” Grangey asked, taking out a sandwich wrapped in grease-proof paper. The seagull cocked his head expectantly.
“Um, going to sleep early as usual, despite the revelry yards from your window? Wait, don’t unwrap the sandwich yet, let me take a picture so I can show the kids what 1950 looked like.”
She raised a cynical eyebrow while I lined up my phone. “What devilment is this? A hand-held device that steals your soul…”
“Please don’t do the ‘new-fangled technology’ riff again, you’ve already hurt my pedometer’s feelings.”
“Well, honestly! A gizmo that counts your steps? This is how to tell if you’ve walked enough: when you’re ready for a nice early bed.”
I took a picture of her so I could show the children what 1850 looked like.
“So, what are you looking forward to re Mumfords?” I asked, unpacking my hoisin duck and endemame bean wrap.
“Tourists,” she murmured indistinctly through a cheese and pickle barrier.
“Tories? You’re saying the Mumfords will attract unprecedented numbers of Tories and you’re looking forward to that because… no, I’m going to need some help here.”
“Tourists, you cloth-eared clod. Probably some will be Tories, but that’s statistics for you.”
A middle-aged (eg slightly older than us) woman approached. She was definitely a tourist, but kept her politics to herself. After a few kind comments about our lovely town, she asked how to get to the castle. I let Grangey tell her. Directions aren’t my strong suit. I regularly turn the wrong way after leaving my own house. Nonetheless, people always ask me the way, perhaps working on the same principle as that which compels cats to seek the laps of the allergic. I have often inadvertently sent tourists into a perpetual loop round the one-way system. Some may still be there.
After receiving the Grangey instructions, complete with map coordinates, and recommendations for other sites of interest, the woman toddled off happily.
“See?” said Grangey, offering her crust to the seagull, who ignored it and looked at me. They have a taste for hoisin sauce, do Lewes seagulls.  “This festival is a brilliant opportunity to show off our town’s many wonders. I love sharing them with new people.” She leaned against her rucksack and pulled up her thick hiking socks.
I said, “They ought to employ you to promote Lewes. You look like you’ve stepped out from one of those Golden Age posters.”
“Like this, you mean?” Grangey whipped out an iPad mini and Googled a ‘Travel by Train Today!’ image. To my incredulous look she said, “I believe I have previously mentioned that I am large and contain multitudes.” She opened a Tupperware and offered me and the seagull a hard-boiled egg. We both declined.

 Beth Miller. Published in VivaLewes.com. Photo taken from Wiki Commons.

You're the dirty rascal

Standing on tiptoe to peer over the ancient battlements, Thing One gazed at the stunning vista before her. Mount Caburn, the Ouse, the Downs... ‘Ooh look’, she cried excitedly, tugging my sleeve, ‘You can see Prezzo.’ So you could. We were right above the restaurant’s blue and white umbrellas. Pretty damn handy for Simon de Montfort; he could shimmy over the wall whenever he fancied a pepperoni calzone.

The castle’s crumbly stone steps were replaced in the recent refurb, and now they’re as uniform as an Ikea staircase. This has removed most of the risk in climbing up, which used to be rather thrilling if you were with anyone young or infirm. Still, some of the new steps have writing on, which means an enthusiastic reader like Thing One will stop dead at random intervals, causing all behind her to bump together with small, painful thuds, while she carefully spells out, ‘Fiends of Lewes Rottery Club.’

Other alterations are great. The wooden lever thing, with which you hoik foam bricks to make a wall, keeps grown-ups amused, and is handily placed next to a bench. Small children can hide behind the foam wall, then pop out with a ‘Boo!’ which echoes powerfully round the circular stone room, scaring the bejesus out of parents who have briefly drifted off. Health ‘n’ Safety, that well-known double act, have cordoned off the top of the tower where once you could lean precariously over the town. Having spent much windswept time there, clinging onto a small child’s leg, sometimes even my own child’s leg, I’m glad this has changed. The dressing up room is wonderful as ever, providing doublets and headdresses of all sizes, so everyone in the family can see what medieval clothes look like with trainers.

We persuaded the children to watch the educational film about Lewes because it was on a ‘big telly’. For young people reared on the colourful action of Chop Socky Chooks, it was a little slow, consisting of blurred photographs accompanied by a dull commentary. But they waited patiently for the bit I’d told them about, which I remembered from some years back, when the little train comes to life and starts chugging round the model of Lewes. I was looking forward to this as much as the kids, but when the narration reached the part about the railway, the train didn’t budge. Thing Two gazed at me, eyes full of betrayal. I quizzed the man behind the desk why the train didn’t go, and he told me it never had.

Something the castle doesn’t shout about, but which is very much worth knowing, is that if you fill in a gift aid form when you buy your tickets, you get a year’s free pass. So now we can visit every weekend if we want. And we will. I want to keep an eye on that little train. I’m sure it will go round, if I can catch it in the right mood.

Beth Miller, 31st March 2010. Published in VivaLewes.com and in Viva Lewes magazine, May 2010. Photo by Alex Leith

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

Save it til' the morning after

We don’t need alarm clocks. Thing One, not Greenwich, decides when it’s morning, always erring on the side of barbarically early. She creeps into our bed and immediately embarks on a stream of consciousness, the length and breadth of which make ‘Ulysses’ seem a model of brevity.

It’s apparently a sign of insanity to keep trying the same thing, hoping for a different outcome. Well, section me now, because I play dead every single morning in the pathetic hope she’ll go and dismember some other prey. That never gets me more than three seconds before the start of that day’s edition of Question Time. No expenses-blagging, moaty-bloaty MP ever stuttered under Dimbleby fire as I tremble under Thing One’s fiendish interrogation.

‘Mummy, what bird is that?’ was yesterday’s opening gambit, referring to the demented old-style tweets seeping through the open window.

Even fully alert, I wouldn’t choose the natural world for my specialist subject on Mastermind (thanks for asking: the best biscuits for dunking). At this hour my brain was far away in a happy land where people kept turning into green blancmanges. However, a tap-tap-tap inspired me, and I croaked, ‘wood-pecker’, before registering that the tapping was Thing One hitting my head with a plastic dinosaur.

I’ve tried to outsource the nature study element of parenting to Grange Girl. She occasionally takes Thing One round her beloved Railway Land and tells her the Latin names for weeds. She knows her greater-spotted from her lesser-spotted thrush. But when I gave her the sixteen-page job description, detailing hours and basic pay, Grangey laughed in my face.

Last week, Thing One suddenly got interested in history, another subject I always avoided during that weird era when we all played Trivial Pursuit.

‘Who lived there?’ she said, pointing to the scaffolding around Lewes Castle.

‘Oh, hang on, I know this, it’s on the tip of my tongue’, I stalled, then as we went into Nero’s I spotted Born and Bred Boy. He was quietly ordering a skinny soy latte, changed abruptly to an espresso when he saw us. I asked about the castle, and he said, ‘Oh, everyone knows that! It was Simon le Bon.’

I passed this on to Thing One and she accepted it provisionally, till she could check with her teacher. Amazing how the guys wrote ‘Hungry like the Wolf’ without the benefit of modern toilet facilities.

So it continues. ‘Why are there cliffs if there’s no sea?’ (Answer: ‘Er, because they like it here.’)

‘How many people live in Lewes?’ (‘Ooh, loads’.)

‘Why are there so many shops selling houses?’ (‘I have absolutely no idea.’)

But at last, this morning, a question I could answer. Five-thirty, and her warm little elbows battered against my lifeless form. ‘Mummy?’

‘Ugh?’

‘Can sick be multi-coloured, or is it always orange?’

I sat up, fully alert. ‘You’ve come to the right place darling’, I beamed, and the dawn chorus had long finished before my detailed explanation drew to a close.

Beth Miller, 9th June 2009. Published in VivaLewes.com and in Viva Lewes magazine, July 2009. Photo by Alex Leith