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Feeling inferior

SarahAlderson

June 15, 2010

I was already feeling like an inferior human being. This mainly thanks to having spent Sunday at Ku De Ta. A place so striving to be cool it can’t even spell itself correctly. A place so filled to the brim with the beautiful people that it hurt to look for too long in one direction. A place so dripping in its own narcissim the floors were slippy. Anyway, a day spent hanging out there next to the sylph-limbed, perfectly-breasted, made me – even as a size 10 – feel like a blubber whale and a slightly inferior human being.

Wanting to remedy the fact that I turned up to the most glam venue on the island wearing a hot pink shorts jumpsuit and fake ray bans (sum total of outfit £2.50 from the local market), I decided to make myself feel better and more sylph-like, by reinventing my wardrobe. I spent Sunday night diligently trawling the internet bookmarking several Marc Jacobs and Missoni dresses. On Monday morning I hunted the streets of Ubud for fabric. I’m like Challenge Anneka when I have a cause and there was none so big as this. Within about half an hour I had about 50 metres of cotton, silk, batik and ikat in my possession and was standing in front of a tailor, laptop open, pointing at the images I’d saved of sylph-like models. ‘Can you make me look like that?’ I asked as the tailor measured me.

She stared at the image, she stared at me, then she unfurled her tape measure and started jotting down measurements.

‘Oooooh. BIG hips,’ she announced patting my rump. ‘Nice. Very nice.’

So that mission worked.

Big Hips. Nice.

Bad day and then a reality check

SarahAlderson

2 comments

June 7, 2010

Ok. Today was a bad day. It went like this. Lula woke at 6.30. We had our first screaming episode of the morning over suncream. I’ve managed to win the insect repellent battle by convincing her that the bugspray is perfume. She submits to lashings of the citronella now because she thinks Egg, her amour, will like it.

Anyway, we fight over the suncream until I have a realisation:

‘Lula, how bout you wear some of mummy’s make up?’

She stops mid-scream and says, ‘Ok.’

I rustle through my make-up bag and pull out a tinted moisturiser with spf in it. She allows me to slather it on. She looks like an oopma loompah but I shrug, at least she won’t be a sunburnt oompa loompah.

I convince John that he should do the school run. Actually I tell him he is doing the school run and he thinks about arguing (I can see it on his face) but he submits quietly and they disappear.

And then return two minutes later. The car is flat because I’ve left the radio on all night. So we need a driver to chauffeur us to school and we need someone who has a car charger to come and help us start the car and we’re moving out of our house and there’s an army of ants trying to hustle some unidentified organic matter the size of a small child across the kitchen floor and I’m too appalled to try to stop it happening – just hoping the ants make it back to their anthill before check out time comes – and I need to pack and I’ve lost my hairbrush and really I am wondering why I didn’t just stay in bed all day and watch Mad Men instead.

The day actually gets worse. The car starts once more. But then it stops again. Just before pick up time. We move into our new place and find the kitchen sink leaks and there is no fridge.

‘You want a fridge?’ the owner asks (that’s not said like it’s an offer more like she can’t actually believe I am asking for a fridge).

I narrow my eyes, trying to figure out whether she’s being sarcastic.

‘Er, Yeah, a fridge would be useful.’ I say, pointing at the milk curdling into cheese on the side.

Also, now we live right next door – as in three yards away – from our friends and the decibel level that three children can reach is record breaking and nerve shattering and my mental state is so very precarious by 3pm that I’m already reaching for the stash of vodka.

So I’m busy wishing the day would end and then I look up and I have to take a moment to slap myself. Hard.

I’m staying in a house amidst the rice paddies, lush green rice paddies beneath a blue expanse of sky. All day women have been walking past me carrying baskets of concrete mix on their heads (I have no idea where the men are). And I have a full time nanny.

I really, really need to get a grip.

Love by a three year old

SarahAlderson

2 comments

June 7, 2010

Alula is in love. She’s in love with a little boy who lives down the road – son of some friends of ours who followed after us from Goa. Lula has her first boy crush and it’s scary. I mean, it’s scary for poor Eggy, possibly the cutest most adorable boy in the world. If I were three I would have the hots for him too. But Lula’s approach is to launch herself at the poor boy and cling onto him like he’s the last bar of dairy milk in the world and she has to stop the hungry hoardes from getting to it first.

I try to talk to her about her proclivity for stalkerish behaviour. ‘Lula it’s just not cool to throw yourself at boys.’

‘Why?’ she asks confused.

‘Er –because…’

‘Treat them mean, keep them keen,’ Egg’s dad says over my shoulder.

‘Yeah, exactly,’ I say, ‘Treat them mean, keep them keen.’

No hang on, I think, we’re already having problems about Lula being mean to people (everyone infact other than Egg), this is giving her mixed messages.

‘It’s just that if you act aloof boys prefer that.’

‘What’s aloof?’

‘Well if you act disinterested, like you don’t care, boys are automatically programmed to then become interested in you.’ I think about her father.

Lula stares at me with big eyes. Maybe, I think, this talk is ten years too soon. ‘You know what, forget I said anything, you do whatever you want, just don’t put Eggy in so many headlocks.’

‘But why?’ Lula asks.

I sigh. If only there was some way of her ingesting my thirty two years of wisdom about the male of the species (and believe me there’s a lot) – her life would be instantly easier. But I suppose that’s part of growing up and I suppose I should be glad that since Eggy came on the scene there’s been no more talk of her marrying her cousin. Which is good because I didn’t want to have to explain what inbred means.

Toddler love

Driving in Bali

SarahAlderson

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June 4, 2010

Driving in Bali is like playing space invaders. Cars, dogs, scooters, chickens, trucks and bikes are all sharing the one lane road with you and they’re coming at you from every direction trying to kill you. If you get distracted by the 7 year old driving past you on his scooter with his three year old brother perched behind, more fool you, because you’re going to plough into the family of 5 – sharing one helmet – that are weaving dangerously in front of you.

So I’m not sure putting me behind the wheel of a huge 4×4 is a good idea. But I’d rather be there than be the chicken on the road. That’s a literal chicken I’m talking about – not a wussy kind of driver. The chickens seem to get a bad deal in Bali. Roadkill or just plain kill, grill and on a plate next to a pile of rice. They don’t stand a chance.

Anyway, driving here – it’s kind of invigorating. It’s better than driving in South East London because here no one gets out their car with a baseball bat and smashes your car up if you cut them up (that did actually happen to me in Brixton). In Bali they expect to be cut up and just smile about it. Also here if the police see you do something bad you can pay them off with the 50,000 rupiah you stash in your glove compartment ($5), whereas if you tried to pay cigarette money to a policeman in the UK you’d be arrested.

I can hear my dad and my brother reading this and going ‘She’s driving? She’s driving in Bali? JESUS.’ Well HUH. Yes I’m driving and so far no deaths, of the human kind, though I make no claims about the poultry kind. And the thing is getting in a car I felt like I was 17 again – the same crazy, stomach wobbling feeling of liberty and lip-biting excitement at having the means to explore the world and to be able to ditch out of school whenever I felt like it. Having a car is like being given keys to the kingdom. And in this case, the kingdom is Bali. It’s heaven and I’ve got a hall pass.

I drop Lula off at school in the morning then head on into town for breakfast/shopping oh who the hell cares. I don’t . I just like the drive and knowing I can go wherever I want whenever I want. Then I mooch on back to pick her up and then we’re like Geena Davis and Susan Sarandon – Lula and I – we head on out on the open road keeping one eye open for Brad Pitt. Let’s just hope it doesn’t come to a nose dive off a canyon.

Thelma & Louise

Why do we keep doing trains?

SarahAlderson

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June 1, 2010

I’m on a train right now. The light is dying outside – and the clouds are glowing rosy pink over the limestone hills.

Enough with the pretty. Inside the train it’s prison strip lighting, tacky floors and toilets that make me yearn for a penis (as in, that I had one for peeing with, I don’t get turned on by prison strip lighting). Hell these toilets – they even make me yearn for India.

I never thought I would say I missed Indian trains but actually here I am saying it. I miss Indian trains – same strip lighting, probably more filth and more cockroaches but there’s something so epic about an Indian train ride. I think it’s the chai wallahs. And the men who bring you your pile of laundered sheets to spread over your ripped lino plank. And the samosa sellers. Yeah, maybe what I miss most is the never ending stream of food and tea straight to your bunk.

I’ve just trekked through ten carriages to the buffet car on our express to KL and ordered nasi goreng and fried mee – hold the spice. I trudge back leaping heroically between the gaps in the cars and find Lula having a fit and John threatening to take her to the naughty step in the prison carriage of the train. As Lula sits down and starts eating I wonder whether I should tell John that possibly the reason for her dynamic shift in mood is that ten minutes ago she helped herself to the Sprite into which I had decanted the remains of our duty free whisky.

I am interrupted by a scream – ‘It’s spicy!’

‘It can’t be. I expressly asked for no spice. Like three times. I said NO SPICE.’

John tastes both plastic containers. They are spiced to the eyeballs.

‘But I’m SO HUNGRY,’ Lula starts to scream, jump up and down and cry hysterically.

I look at John – ‘They have western food too – ‘

He gets up and trudges the ten carriages, returning with a burger. This is the man who rolled his eyes at me this morning for ordering Lula a banana pancake because she wasn’t getting enough fruit and veg. Banana? Hello? Burger? Hello?

But options are limited and something needs to soak up the sprite.

She takes a bite into the flaccid chicken patty and I watch in disgust, images of Gillian McKeith and abattoir floors dancing in my head.

‘Ahhhhhhh,’ Lula screams, ‘IT’s spicy! My mouth is all fizzy.’

I take the burger and dissect it and then lick it tentatively. It is indeed slathered in a chilli sauce.

I wonder, not for the first time, why we ever think that trains are a good idea. They are only a good idea retrospectively. Even Indian ones. Then I remember the weeing episode on the coach we took from KL. There are some benefits to trains I guess.

I resort to wiping the sauce off her reconstituted burger with a piece of toilet paper. Lula eats it. I cringe. Then she passes out.

Malaysia – can we live here?

SarahAlderson

3 comments

May 30, 2010

We have twenty four hours left Malaysia before we get back to Bali. Home. As I’m tentatively starting to think of it. We’re going back for 6 weeks to make sure the honeymoon isn’t over. I haven’t loved Malaysia. Just in case you missed that. But maybe, after Bali, nowhere was going to impress. I’ve been trying to rationalise it, though rationalisation isn’t one of my strong points.

So herewith my for and against list for Malaysia – can we live here?

For

Handrolls. It sounds like I’m bigging up something off a brothel’s menu when in fact it’s just something off a Chinatown menu. Like springrolls except nicer.

Er – let me keep thinking.

Against

The beaches are pretty dirty.

When buying alcohol in a supermarket you are made to feel like you are buying hard core porn.

The Fashion. I just can’t. Go. There.

This list lacks lustre. I turn to John, ‘I’m writing a list of reasons for and against living in Malaysia. What are your thoughts?’

He pulls a face. ‘There’s only one reason we can’t live here as far as I’m concerned. It’s not Bali.’

it’s just not Bali

What do I do all day?

SarahAlderson

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May 29, 2010

‘So what do you fill your days with?’ a friend asks in an email.

I stare at the screen frozen. What exactly do I do every day?

I have no idea.

My fingers hover over the keyboard as I try to think. I have become one of those women I used to read about with a mixture of scorn and pity and maybe a fraction of envy in Hello! – the ones who spend their days lunching and sunbathing and shopping. Except it’s like some sick alter-universe. I’m lunching in the kinds of places that have photographs of the food displayed on the walls and shopping in the kinds of places that have bins of fake crocs. I’m not even managing the sunbathing because it’s too hot to sunbathe – even for me. It’s too hot to do anything other than stand naked under the air conditioning unit.

So what then am I doing with my days? Other than standing naked under the air conditioning unit?

Well let’s start with yesterday.

Woke up. Went for breakfast. Came back. Grabbed rubber ducky. Went to beach (sat in shade). Parasailed. Came home. Went for Chinese. Came home. Played snakes and ladders. Went to beach (sat in shade). Ate dinner. Came home. Watched sisterhood of the travelling pants II. Slept.

Scintillating non?

Ok that’s not all I do. I also spend several hours of each day pleading with Lula to put on suncream, brush her teeth, wear her hat, eat her squid, wipe her bum, wash her hands, not answer back, put some knickers on. That takes a few hours for sure.

I think back to when I lived in the UK. My days were filled with work, commuting, bill paying, emailing, talking to friends, cooking, cleaning, parenting, laundry-doing – usually three of the above at once – being a female of the species.

Here, I don’t do any of that. My commute is to the beach, I haven’t picked up a saucepan in five months, I did clean once – in India – I squirted some detol over the floor where we’d seen a cockroach, I don’t do laundry – I did once in Singapore and realised how much I didn’t miss it, I don’t talk to friends because I haven’t yet signed up for skype out, I don’t pay bills because I don’t have any, so the only thing I do do is parent. And that would be what fills my days. 24/7 because most of the time we’re sharing a bed with Lula and I’m the one waking fifty times a night when she cries out for ‘more ice-cream’ or wakes up needing a poo.

Parenting. For the woman who begged her boss to give her some work, 6 days after giving birth, it’s a turnaround. Ironically – we wrote ‘more time for Alula’ on our post-its when discussing our reasons for leaving. I only wrote that though because I wanted to appear self-less and like travelling around the world was a great big act of parental self-sacrifice and nothing whatsoever to do with the fact I wanted a year-round suntan.

And now I find myself parenting full time, well apart from when we were in Bali and she was at school and then we had Ketut (the nanny that Lula turned into a gimp) and when we were in India and she was at school in the mornings. Other than that – full time. And it’s great – other than the battles over suncream and teethbrushing and wearing pants. Today Alula told me she loves me billions and a hundred and all the way back to London.

But still. I can’t wait for Monday. Bali. And school.

parenting beach style

God give me Topshop

SarahAlderson

5 comments

May 27, 2010

There are days when I wake up and open my bag and collapse sobbing over its contents.

Yesterday I caught the end of Clueless and it made me cry. I love that movie – Alicia Silverstone in awful knee high socks, Poor Brittany Murphy, the guy who marries Phoebe, the revolving wardrobe. That’s what made me cry. Not Brittany – the revolving colour co-ordinated wardrobe.

I have NOTHING left to wear. My Reiss shorts jumpsuit, the one I love passionately even though it’s almost impossible to pee when wearing it, just got eaten. That was my last connection to fashion. Now it’s severed. All I have left are some hotpant shorts I bought when under the influence which I know I’m too old for but like to wear just because giving them up would feel like surrender. I have had to throw away three topshop vests and two pairs of trousers as well as my havanaias which finally bit the dust. The lovely Ketut in Bali sewed up my strapless sundress that kept falling to my navel so I still have a nice line in strapless sundresses, just no boobs to hold them up anymore. My bikinis are so saggy that they make my butt look like it’s scraping the floor.

This morning I surveyed the remnants of my bag with a sigh.

‘I’m going to go shopping,’ I tell John. I open the door on forty degree heat and head forth but with no joy in my step. Because although this is paradise, Topshop hasn’t penetrated it. And neither has diet cherry coke.

I stumbled down the street and into the first shop I saw.

The bikinis hung in rows – polyester animal print shininess blinding me. I gave up after thirty desolate seconds. I tried for flip flops next but it seems in SE Asia the current trend is for two kinds of shoe only – the wedge flip flop and the fake croc. Seeing how I’d rather go barefoot for all eternity than wear either I muttered under my breath and backed away from the rainbow plastic array.

On the verge of giving up I headed to the duty free store down the road. They had rows and rows of diamante jeans. Just what I need, I thought, before heading to the alcohol section, past the blueberry and nut Pringles (the bad taste stretches across clothing and into groceries).

At least, at least there is this, I thought, clutching a £6 bottle of Gordon’s to my chest.

The mountain fall and I

SarahAlderson

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May 27, 2010

‘It’s 100 metres.’

‘So how long will that take?’

‘The man says it takes twenty minutes.’

‘Twenty minutes? Even I,’ I scoff, ‘can manage to walk 100 metres in twenty minutes.’ And with that I fling open the car door.

Immediately I am knocked backwards by the wave of humidity. I groan and pull myself up. I am not dressed for sweating. I am wearing the last item of clothing left in my bag that isn’t dirty, sweat soaked or caked in sand. It is a pretty, strapless silk dress I bought for £2 in India. It’s elasticated around the bust and the sweat has already started to gather in the folds (of the dress – I’m not that fat) and I haven’t even started moving yet. I groan some more as we set off on the walk to the waterfall – or the mountainfall as Lula calls them.

We approach what looks to be a concrete wall. No, I blink, it’s just the road. It veers upwards like a granite cliff. Ok, so now I get the twenty minutes. My own child outwalks me. She is 3. I growl and curse and sweat my way along the path, muttering between clenched teeth that it had better be bloody Vic Falls after this.

The view that greets us is astonishing. Litter cakes the ground in all directions, frothy, stagnant water gathers in pools at our feet and a little bit of a water falls over a rock a few feet above us.

‘I can’t believe I climbed that bloody hill, in this dress – for that.’ I wave my hand at the dribble above us. ‘I cannot believe it.’ I stamp off back the way we came, whilst John and Alula start leaping over rocks determined to find some grace in the situation.

I don’t get very far before I have to stop. My sunglasses are fogging up – – and there is now more water pouring down my cleavage than over the waterfall.

Sometimes, sometimes, I think I would sell my body parts for air con.

Even as I think it I hear Al Gore yelling at me about climate change but seriously, obviously he’s never climbed a waterfall in a silk dress in Malaysia.

Lula invents a new game

SarahAlderson

2 comments

May 20, 2010

We have gone up in the world. We are staying in a dead posh hotel. We know it is posh because Alula’s first words upon tearing through the room and discovering the bathroom were, ‘YAY! There’s Loo paper!’ (Mine were, ‘YAY! There’s a minibar!’, John’s were: ‘Yay! There’s wifi’)

That says it all really doesn’t it?

In the last few days Alula has invented a new game. It goes like this, as soon as we arrive in a place she gathers any and every bag she can get her hands on – mainly of the plastic gin bottle carrying variety – and places all the things she possesses and then some things she doesn’t into these plastic bags. She then deposits the bags around the room in strategic places that we must step over, leap over but never, under any circumstance move, look in or god forbid EMPTY out. Not even if our toothbrush is in one buried under dirty socks and her wet boardshorts.

Our morning routine goes something like this.

‘Alula have you seen the hair brush?’

‘Super trouper lights are going to find
me shining like the sun…’

‘Alula focus, where is the hairbrush? Have you moved it?’

‘Smiling having fun…’

‘Alula darling where is the hairbrush?’

‘Feeling like I’m number one.’

I will turn my back on my Abba tribute in frustration and start checking under desks and beds. And there invariably I will find her shrine.

Alula’s shrines are created by placing her Barbie on the mountain of her tutu and placing all around the plastic D-cupped deity, the coins pilfered from my purse, an entire pack of playing cards laid out face up, my little pony, my hairbrush, whatever shoes happen to be handy, a handful of hair clips and some sweet wrappers. Basically anything that won’t fit into the bags. I’ve not yet found any human or insect sacrifices.

I’ve started calling her magpie. These little shrines are more like nests where she collects her stray belongings (and our not so stray belongings) and hides them from our prying eyes. And the bags containing her possessions she calls her shopping bags– so either she is learning some really bad habits from me or she’s actually manifesting some anxiety behaviour due to all the changes being foisted on her.

For the first time in four months I’m starting to worry about the lack of stability in her life and the constant change. Up until now the pros have outweighed the cons but then up until now we’ve been slow travelling, spending a month in one place and allowing her time to make friends and go to school. When we’re on the road she struggles.

We had better settle somewhere before I find her trying to hitch a lift back to London with a plastic bag containing her Barbie, her float suit, a pack of cards and my hairbrush.

I jest but actually for once I’m not laughing. It really is time to move to Bali.

Super Trouper China Town style.