Top Tip for Harvest Festival

Posted by dulwichmum on Thu 30 November 2006

Last year I was almost caught out, I hadn’t organised our family offering for the Harvest Festival Hampers for the local elderly until the eleventh hour, the very last morning. You know how it goes, the school makes hampers for elderly folk, from food donated by children and families from the school.

Apart from the obvious canned tuna and ‘Bob the Builder’ spaghetti hoops in the kitchen cupboards, I was at a loss, Ocado were not scheduled to deliver until later that night. The cupboard was bare. Then suddenly I remembered that earlier in the week James had received a hamper from work, on the event of pulling off a particular deal. The basket in the cellar was promptly raided, and some suitably ‘special’ provisions – a tin of Pate de foie gras and a bag of Carluccio’s dried porcini were commandeered. The day was saved, and the children had appropriate food items to hand over as required,…. we were all happy – apart that is from James. When he returned from work later that evening, he was completely unimpressed at the loss of his prized pate. He rather unkindly commented that he hoped we had given the ‘old goats’ gout! He said that our gifts made us look like a family of ‘flash Hooray Henry’s’.

I felt very exposed……, especially when I subsequently saw our ostentatious ‘gifts’, set amongst the stem ginger cookies, jars of fruit in alcohol, and boxes of Twinings breakfast tea.

This year, in an effort to cultivate the required image I planned well in advance. I bought a wonderful fruit cake from Konditor and Cook at Waterloo (Nigella says that if you can get to a branch of Konditor & Cook, there is no need to ever bake yourself). I removed the packaging, dusted it with icing sugar – (in order to disguise it should anyone guess), wrapped it in foil, and put it in an old Fortnum and Mason tin. I was delighted with cunning plan, I must say. Our cake looked so ‘home spun’ but terribly tasteful.

Marks out of ten for ingenuity? Fifteen. Did they guess I hadn’t baked it myself? Certainly not. I looked so caring, I almost wept at my own thoughtfulness. I’ll repeat the fake home bakes at every opportunity.

Bravo Me!

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 Professional Parents

Posted by dulwichmum on Tue 28 November 2006

For the whole of last week James was not working at his office in London, and so he and his colleague Martin decided to drive instead of catching their usual train from North Dulwich. They never noticed until on their final return journey on Friday evening, that they had been singing along together to a ‘Monkey Music’ tape for five days! They both have children the same age, and so – both daddies know the same songs!…Bless.

I was presenting to some clients on Friday, and thought I looked rather smart with my new Marc Jacobs, black leather Stam ‘it’ bag – you don’t have be the owner of a perfect figure to get away with a status bag! At the outset of the meeting, I was forced to rummage deep into the capacious new accessory for my memory stick. It was not the look at all I was hoping to achieve, removing a sock, a power ranger, a tiny pair of buttercup yellow Petit Bateau knickers and two boxes of raisins, before I finally found the item I was looking for…Credibility Zero!

How come James being a daddy is so cute, and yet me being a mother makes me look so ‘scattey’. I am only recently recovering from the shame of walking the children all the way to school on their very first day with my skirt tucked into my knickers. It is so unfair. I was pleased with the attention I had from passing drivers, but it took the headmistress to actually point out the crowd pulling detail to me for it all to make sense. I had been under the impression that it was my tanned legs under my swishy ‘Pink Soda’ spangley skirt from the Dulwich Trader. My pride has officially left the building.

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