Challenge Number 14: Snog on the back row of the cinema

Thanks to Beth for setting me this challenge, designed - I’m guessing - to release my inner teenager. I’m fairly sure it’s something I’d never done before. Certainly not when I was a teenager - the town I grew up in didn’t get a cinema until after I’d left home, so until I learned to drive I had to go to see films with the unwelcome chaperones of my parents. And the teenage me, in attendance at an all-girls’ school, didn’t get to meet many boys to snog. I’ve probably been guilty of some flirtatious fumbling in a cinema screening at some point in the dim and distant past, but never at the expense of missing a film, and never on the back row. Partly because all my boyfriends have been short-sighted (hm, a coincidence?). But mostly because the back row was always a no-go zone for me. I saw it as somewhere that the bad kids hung out and too far from the screen for my avid film-going eyes. I love going to the cinema, and just want to immerse myself in whatever is happening on the screen. Dave and I used to go up to three times a week in our pre-Charlotte days. When Charlotte was little, it was my weekly treat to take her to the Big Scream at City Screen on Wednesday mornings, and watch a current release in a cinema full of wailing, bawling babies. There I frequently used to sit on the very front row so I could put her down on the floor and let her roll about after bits of fluff, crumbs of rice cake and other babies’ toys. If I was really lucky, she’d drift off to sleep, curled up with Stripey under a blanket.

Nowadays, as we don’t have readily available baby-sitters, Dave and I usually have to do a split shift if there’s a film out we fancy – I go on a weekend afternoon, and he goes on a weekday evening after work, and eventually we get a chance to have a conversation about what we’ve seen. (“What did you think of it?” “It was quite good.”) So this challenge was always going to be one of the more difficult to organise, assuming that it was my husband I was meant to be snogging. It might have been easier to take myself off to the flicks and launch myself at a random stranger, but this may have resulted in me being arrested and Dave being rather cross. It also had to be a film that we didn’t mind missing bits of.

I have a couple of friends that I do baby-sitting exchanges with from time to time, so having baby-sat for my friend Sally and her husband to go out for dinner earlier in the week, we suddenly had the offer of a night out. Cinema screenings are always awkwardly timed for toddler world – 6pm showings are too early, as the toddler is still up and about, needing tea, bath-time and stories. (You see, by “baby-sitting”, we mean going round to sit on someone else’s sofa and watching their telly - especially if they have a better Sky package - while the child in our care is sound asleep upstairs.) But the next round of screenings at 9pm is pushing energy levels and means a very late night if you know you’ll be up before dawn the following day.

But we hit the snog jackpot with James Bond 007: Skyfall. A film that we reckoned would probably have the same plot as every other James Bond (so therefore not requiring much concentration), that would contain Daniel Craig taking his top off, and that was still so new and popular in cinemas that it had extra showings at suitable times, including one on Sunday night at 8pm. Perfect. We had two free tickets left on our City Screen membership to use up and could reserve two seats on the back row online. So off we went.

Sorry, folks, there’s no photographic evidence of this one. And really, I don’t want to go into details for fear of being nominated for the blogger’s equivalent of the Literary Review’s Bad Sex Awards. (There was no sex, I hasten to add.) If I ever write a novel, it won’t be a romance. It’s not in my nature. Having picked up a revolting cough from our resident toddler, Dave and I currently sound like we belong in a consumption clinic, and are now so middle-aged that snogging generally gets interrupted by comments along the lines of, “Why did you put so much garlic in dinner?” “Yuk, that cough sweet tastes disgusting”, “Take your glasses off, they’re digging into my cheek” and “Have you quite finished?” The screening had sold out, so instead of being full of pubescent reprobates, the back row mostly contained responsible looking people that probably hadn’t wanted to be there, or who had picked it because they knew it was the one spot where they wouldn’t have someone kicking the back of their seats. We felt slightly abashed in their presence. To make matters worse, there was a spotlight positioned directly above us.

But unbelievably, a smooching Dave and I weren’t the most annoying couple on the row. The prize for that went to the German girl sitting next to me who (judging by the inane questions she kept asking) had plainly never heard of James Bond and seemed under the illusion that it was a slapstick comedy. She guffawed loudly every time someone fell over: either as part of a death-defying stunt, a passionate clinch, or a non-death-defying death. I’m not going to reveal the plot to anyone who hasn’t seen it, but there’s kind of a sad bit at one point, and she chortled her way through that too. And when she wasn’t chortling she was remaining oblivious to all the cutting one-liners, squealing at scorpions and Tube trains, coughing even more loudly than us, doing her hair, taking her very complicated lace-up stiletto shoes on and off, or wriggling around under her scarf. She was using the scarf as a makeshift blanket, having seen fit to come out in the world’s skimpiest dress, despite the temperature being about minus ten outside. It wasn’t minus ten in the cinema (and surely not with that hot and steamy couple sitting next to her!), but Germans are very good at finding draughts.

So yes, last Sunday night, I was a very middle-aged teenager. Thank you to Sally for baby-sitting, and thank you to Dave, my long-suffering and lovely husband, and very fine kisser. x x x

Challenge Number 40 – Make a Christmas box for a needy child

 My friend Izzy set me this challenge and it’s been a lovely thing to do. The sort of thing that gives you a little warm glow inside. I am sending a box through the Samaritan Purse charity’s Operation Christmas Child scheme, and will be handing it over next week to Southlands Methodist Church down the road, where we attend a toddler playgroup on Wednesday mornings. It’s not normally in my nature to think about Christmas in October (despite the various efforts of high-street shops and mail order catalogues) but the boxes have an early deadline to allow for shipping.

Putting a box together is simple and fun. You basically decorate and fill a shoebox with a few small presents for a child, specifying age and gender if you wish. The charity’s website or readily available leaflets give gift suggestions for various different categories (e.g. education, play, hygiene), and you are asked to choose gifts from each of the categories. The gifts should be new rather than second-hand. Chocolate is a big no-no, but sweeties are allowed if their best-before date is after March 2013. Liquids, toy weapons and novels in English are also forbidden. You pay a £2.50 donation (online or in an envelope in your box) as a contribution towards shipping costs. If you pay online you can then download a unique barcode to put in your box so that you can subsequently find out where the box ended up. From the UK, it’s likely to be a destination in Eastern Europe.

I say simple, but wrapping up a shoebox isn’t actually that easy, I found. If anyone knows a way to do it neatly, then please share your secret with me. Hopefully the child who receives it won’t mind my battered, twisted Sellotape and torn, bunched up paper. I chose gifts for a girl aged 2-4, since this is the sort of child I know best, having one of my own at home. Inside the box (provided my choice of gifts is deemed suitable by the organisation), the recipient will find a rubber duck, some toothpaste, a toothbrush, a pair of bright pink earmuffs, two pairs of mittens, a hair clip, a wooden bracelet, a packet of Fruit Gums, a plastic shopping basket filled with material vegetables, a bouncy ball, a packet of coloured pencils, a novelty pencil sharpener and eraser, and a colouring book. The items were either toys that Charlotte had received duplicates of for her birthday, or were bought at Poundland, 3 for 2 offers at Boots and Tesco, on sale at the Designer Outlet, or from a friend who runs a toy stall at local Christmas fairs. No item cost me more than £1.35. I am not writing this to show you how ungenerous or impoverished I am myself, but rather to demonstrate that you can send some pretty good stuff without it costing the earth. 

The charity is a Christian one, so we are told that someone is likely to slip a booklet of Bible stories into the box before it is given to its recipient and then invite the child to a church-led follow-on programme. As a staunch atheist, I would rather that they didn’t, but it won’t stop me sending the box. Everyone is entitled to their own beliefs and to make their own decisions regarding religion. I would not deprive a child of some fun or useful gifts just because I don’t happen to share the organisation’s faith, especially if the alternative is that the child receives nothing. The Operation Christmas Child leaflet stresses that boxes are distributed to children “based on need, regardless of their background or religious beliefs” and that they are “an unconditional gift, asking for nothing in return”. And so long as that it is true and that the child is told that the gift has come from someone in the UK who cares about their welfare and well-being rather than directly from God (which would be a lie), then that is good enough for me.

Challenge Number 27: Visit both Clapham Junction stations

The first part of this challenge was completed in April. On Saturday, I got to complete the second. My friend and former subtitling colleague Sarah was over visiting from Auckland, New Zealand so I used the excuse of meeting up with her to complete another challenge. It was also a momentous day as it marked my first whole day away from Charlotte. I’ve managed a few hours on my own here and there (usually for hospital appointments related to all the tedious health complications I’ve suffered since giving birth) but never a whole day. And what a treat to spend it in London.

Up early as always, it was no bother to be on the 8.16am Grand Central non-stop service to Kings Cross, arriving exactly two hours later. A strangely nostalgic journey that I hadn’t undertaken in over three years. I felt slightly glum in its Hertfordshire section as we went through Stevenage (where my mother worked for many years in a primary school base for children with dyslexia) and Welwyn Garden City (where, aged only 58, she died of cancer in 2005 in the loving care of the Isabel Hospice). But then things became more upbeat as we hurtled past Alexandra Palace, which we used to be able to see from our lounge window in our beautiful Crouch End flat (the flat itself just a couple of streets away from the East Coast mainline), and through Harringay, our local station and the start of my commute for nearly four years, and Finsbury Park, home of a notorious imam, the Fleadh and Arsenal’s Emirates Stadium.

Kings Cross was always a bit of a seedy dive when I lived in London. But look what they’ve done to it now:

They've moved Platform 9 and 3/4

And brilliantly, I stepped into this new and airy space and immediately ran into another friend and ex-subtitling colleague Stuart and his family, who were on their way to visit relatives in Hatfield. How reassuring to know that even though I’ve lived away from London for five years, I can see a familiar face as soon as I return. After a quick catch-up chat, I had a look around, bought an extortionate croissant and then set off down to Clapham.

The Victoria Line, the best route to take me south of the river, was of course suspended due to engineering works. Nothing changed there, then. So instead I took the City branch of the Northern Line all the way to Clapham Common. Quickly back into London mode, high on the stench of the Tube that hits you like a heat wall as soon as you enter a station, I tutted at all the tourists standing gormlessly in the ticket hall struggling to work the Oyster card readers, got cross with a further load of them standing on the left-hand side of the escalator, and then barged past several more who’d stopped dead as soon as they’d got on to the platform, blocking the way for everyone else. I walked down to the far end of the platform and then waited with my back to the wall for the much maligned Northern Line minute to elapse (it lasted four) and the next train to Morden to pull in. It was as if I’d never been away.

My reasons for doing this challenge were the year and three quarters I rented a room in a shared house in Clapham Old Town and the contrasts between Clapham life in North Yorkshire and Clapham life in London. I decided to have a trip down memory lane in the area around Clapham Common before heading to Clapham Junction. It’s now eleven and a half years since I moved on so it was interesting to see what had changed. Lots of new apartment blocks, a Boris Bike or two, a smattering of different restaurants and shops, and the pedestrianisation of Venn Street outside the Picture House which had allowed room for an exquisite food market to set up its stalls. But otherwise there were plenty of familiar places with happy memories (The Pepper Tree, Gastro, Carmen tapas bar, the Frog), and a surprisingly stubborn clinging on of a lot of the grot.

I wasn’t ever really qualified to live in Clapham as I was neither city slicker, famous (the actor Neil Pearson lived round the corner from me) or yummy mummy, instead being just an impoverished media employee in her first London home, but it was a great place to be based. It only took ten minutes or so on the Tube into town and I could even walk to work if I wanted (it did take an hour, through the back streets of Stockwell, round the Oval cricket ground, and then up through Kennington, but I liked the empowerment of walking in London – nothing could make it take longer than that hour, unlike the unpredictability of rush-hour public transport).

Clapham High Street

Clapham Common tube station

Market on Venn Street

The church and paddling pool on Clapham Common

Clapham Common, scene of  the occasional "moment of madness"

I wandered round through the Old Town and on to inspect my old pad on Broadhinton Road. It looked exactly the same. Still right under the Heathrow flightpath. Still just down the road from a fire station and backing on to a recording studio. Still the most expensive space per square foot I’ve ever lived. Still the only place where I’ve found home colonic irrigation equipment on the bathroom shelf and where I’ve been burgled whilst fast asleep in my bed. But it was a beautiful house. A house where I wanted to feel more at home than I ever could, sharing with people who didn’t want me there and where I knew I would get evicted as soon as the landlady’s boyfriend moved in. I don’t know who lives there now, but as they bought the house for around 750K a few years ago, they probably are stinking rich and not very nice.

Clapham Old Town

Where I lived

Right under the Heathrow flightpath

Time was ticking along so I carried on past the Artesian Well down to Wandsworth Road and hopped on a number 87 bus to my challenge destination, Clapham Junction station. Britain’s busiest rail station. A total shithole. The only nice thing we ever did there was buy our double bed from the Warren Evans shop in its arches. It was pretty much unchanged from my last visit. From Wandsworth Road, you still go in via an unprepossessing shopping mall and after the ticket barriers through a dingy tunnel to get to the platforms.

The entrance to Clapham Junction from Wandsworth Road

The dingy tunnel

I instinctively walked up on to platform 11 where, a couple of years after I had left Clapham, I used to catch trains back to my flat in Earlsfield. On platform 11, I took the necessary photographs, had a good look at the Shard (a new building for me hovering on the distant city skyline), found some trainspotters (a permanent fixture at Clapham Junction, and my camera probably made me look like one), then hopped on a train to Victoria, to go on to South Kensington to meet Sarah and later on a couple of other former subtitling colleagues as well. 

Train to Earlsfield from Platform 11

My first view of the Shard

Trainspotters

Looking towards the site of the Clapham rail crash of 1988

Battersea Power Station and the London Eye

It was a happy day, full of good food, cheese and cheer, the odd glass of wine, and the strange conflict of sensing a marvellous liberation whilst feeling like a part of me was missing. As I haven’t returned to work after having Charlotte (my research post at the university in York ended while I was pregnant), most people I know here don’t think of me as someone other than a full-time mum. It meant a lot to be with people that remembered me from the days when I was in gainful employment and with some level of professional skill.

And London – can’t live in it, can’t live without it. I wouldn’t want to raise a child there, but I hope that we can take Charlotte there more in the years to come, to see its brilliance, its buzz, its bullshit, its bloody-mindedness, its beauty. My journey to Clapham Junction was utterly therapeutic.

Progress Report: Halfway through

Whenever I tell anyone about my 40 challenges, they immediately ask how many I’ve actually completed. I find this difficult to answer since some challenges are still at the planning phase, others are partially underway but nowhere near finished, and others I haven’t even dared contemplate yet. Counting up through the original list, I reckon that 21 are completely finished with, so I guess that’s about where we should be halfway through. I’m pleased with all that I’ve managed to do so far, and have some wonderful memories already. But I am also acutely aware that time is slipping by and that I’m occasionally feeling swamped by all I still have left to do. I seem to have less time to myself than ever now, as Charlotte’s daytime nap has to be very limited in length, otherwise she won’t go to bed at night. And by the time she is settled in the evening I am too comatose to do anything other than stare at The Great British Bake-Off or DVDs of Frasier. It’s only going to get harder as winter approaches, when darkness will set in by half-past three and Charlotte may well ditch her daytime nap for good. It’s the challenges that involve writing, learning, thinking and – heaven forbid – piano practice that are proving the hardest to settle down to. Yet ironically they are the ones I want to do most.

And it doesn’t help that every single evening class I might want to take in York to help my challenges along (British Sign Language, pottery, oil painting, knitting) all seem to be on Thursdays at 6pm, which is when my pilates class is. Though making Dave leave work early more than one night a week to be here for Charlotte while I pursue my leisure interests doesn’t seem fair. Of course if someone were forward-thinking enough to run an evening class that didn’t start until 8pm, there wouldn’t be a problem. Apart from the fact that a lot of art classes are very expensive owing to the cost of materials.

And on a financial note, I have no idea how we’re going to be able to afford to go somewhere German-speaking before March, especially now we have to pay full fare for Charlotte on flights. I may have to cheat and just take myself to the cinema to see a German film (I think the wording of the challenge would permit this), if any happen to be in York over the next few months. A further cheat might be to extend my 40 challenges into my 40^th year – beyond the celebratory lunch in a 2-Michelin starred restaurant.

But enough of the negative of what I might not manage, and back to the positive of what achievements I have actually made. Here is my first (and so far only) tomato:

It was very nice. I don’t hold up much hope for many more – there are a smattering of green ones on the plants, but as temperatures have dipped again, the sun has left our back yard for good until spring and the nights are threatening frost, I can’t see them managing to ripen before the plants wither completely. Green tomato chutney is probably called for.

And here is some more bread, which even I am starting to lost track of now... I haven't baked any for ages, so need to get myself back on the rails fairly sharpish to keep to schedule. These are loaves 17 to 21. So 21 loaves, 21 challenges. There's a nice harmony in that.

Challenge Number 31 – Make and ice Charlotte a birthday cake

Challenge Number 31 was originally to take Charlotte on the North York Moors railway, but after the Snowdonia meltdown debacle, I decided that making such a trip could turn out to be an expensive and stressful waste of money. Besides, there were too many challenges on the list involving trains. The idea was to do something nice for Charlotte in Yorkshire, and so what could be nicer than baking her a cake at home for her 2^nd birthday?

I’m a complete birthday cake novice, and I’ve never iced anything other than occasionally pouring a citrus glaze over muffins. So this challenge was also about acquiring an entirely new skill, one which will hopefully serve me for several children’s parties to come. I found some cake decorating books in a charity shop for 50 pence apiece to get some recipes, tips and ideas. I had in my head a park theme, since we spend half our lives in Rowntree Park, whose duckponds, woods, willow trees and swings serve as our garden.

The whole process was a steep learning curve, from understanding the difference between vanilla essence and vanilla flavouring, to how long our oven takes to bake enormous cakes without burning them on top and leaving them raw in the middle, to how to make buttercream icing, to how to sieve apricot jam, to the different tastes of different coloured shop-bought ready-to-roll fondant, to how long defrosting and icing a cake actually takes when you’re trying to fit it in around a hectic toddler schedule and only have your exhausted evenings free.

This point about defrosting was because I had baked the sponge cakes a couple of weeks in advance and stored them in the freezer. This was to avoid a last-minute rush and (potential) last-minute disaster and subsequent trip to Waitrose to buy a replacement. I used a Victoria sponge recipe my aunt had told me about, which featured in Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall/ Fearlesslyeatsitall’s Guardian column a while back. The recipe’s quantities are based on the weight of the eggs used in the bake. However many eggs you use, you weigh them in their shells at the start, then use exactly that quantity of flour, sugar and butter. The theory being this gives you precise and perfect proportions. In this case, for each layer of cake, I used 8 eggs (beaten into the creamed butter and sugar individually), and 483g of the other ingredients, with a teaspoon or two of vanilla. It was scary putting the cooked sponges into the freezer without being able to taste them (I wasn’t ready to cut them up at that point because I hadn’t quite finalised in my head what I was going to do), and it was only once they had defrosted and I’d carved the top layer into the shape I’d decided on that I could have a mouthful and breathe a sigh of relief. The cake was, in a word, yum.

The icing process demonstrated my general scatterbrained cack-handedness, but next year I will be so much more confident and won’t forget crucial things like covering the sides in your carefully sieved jam before you have actually plonked the rolled-out icing on top of the cake. I covered as much of the cake with buttercream as possible, to stick the sponge segments together and create a topping, but didn’t make enough buttercream to do the sides as well, and had run out of icing sugar by this point to make any more.

I used ready-coloured fondant icing, but the ducks, pond and paving around the pond were all constructed by me. I managed to write Charlotte’s name in black icing. The flowers were shop-bought and attached with gin (a tip from a friend) to create a seal. The swing and slide are obviously inedible and a part of a Happy Land play park set from the Early Learning Centre, but the cake would have looked pretty feeble without them. So not too many fancy frills, and no proper piping – like the trip on the North York Moors Railway, these will have to wait for another year.

I used the cake trimmings to make a trifle, plus an extra cake with buttercream icing. (I’d bought some more icing sugar by this point.) The icing was coloured purple by me and covered with Charlotte’s favourite word of the moment, “sprinkles”. This was just to prove I could actually make coloured icing of some description by myself.

All that was left to do was light the candle and sing Happy Birthday, a song which invariably makes Charlotte wail in dismay. Daddy had to help her blow out the candle, but the swing and slide eventually distracted her from the accompanying music. At last it was time for the tasting. The guests at the party on Sunday (family from both sides) appeared to be truly impressed. It’s about the only food I’ve ever cooked for Charlotte that she has wolfed down and asked for seconds of. I am very proud of myself. And now I more or less know what I’m doing, hopefully next year’s cake will be even better.

Challenge Number 18 – Have a crazy hair-cut/colour

Now, don’t hold your breath on this one.

My friend Sarah set me this challenge. I think it comes under the guise of “You’re getting old, so go wild and show abandon.” A couple of other challenges on the list fit into this category. Sarah added, “It’ll always grow out.”

Lottie's ringlets

I come from a family of curly hair. Friends just laughed when they spotted a row of my cousins at my wedding. Charlotte thankfully has inherited the curly gene, as I wouldn’t have a clue what to do with straight hair. I say “thankfully”, but truth be told, I grew up hating the fact that I had curly hair. And I hated hairdressers. Partly because my parents would only pay for me and my brother to go to the cheapest place in town (an old lady perming salon), partly because my mum thought it would be a good idea for me to have my long ringletty locks all lopped off into a crop at the age of ten (though to be fair she did splash out for me to have it done at a “trendier” hairdresser’s called, hmm, Scarecrows) and partly because once I hit puberty, my curls just turned into a dried-out frizz ball. Any hairdresser that I saw had no idea what to do with me. Apart from one, when I was eleven, where my aunt took me as a special treat before I was bridesmaid at her wedding. The hairdresser told me over and over again what wonderful hair I had, and made it look – well, a very 1980s Lady Di kind of nice. I was still so much in shock at this that I passed out during the marriage service and had to be revived by my mum flapping her order of service in my face and stuffing my mouth full of orange Chewits. As a result, in the official photos, I am ashen pale, and look like I’m wearing orange lipstick. Which kind of detracts from the hair-do.

But as for the rest of my childhood hairdressers, they always prodded at my dandruff and scab strewn scalp and held up my curls at arm’s length, before cutting them all off and blasting me with a hairdryer, therewith trebling the size of the frizzball. I got so sick of this that I refused to get my hair cut for two years in my teens, before my mum eventually relented to let me go to the poshest place in town, Crouch and Haskins. (Though it was known locally as Crotch and Foreskin.) They had to hack off half a foot of split ends. Thereafter, things improved. I learned that curls don’t need a hairdryer ever. Or even a hair brush. Which actually makes life pretty easy. By 1989, a decade of bad perms had meant that some decent frizz-taming products had come onto the market at last. Like, er, mousse. But every little helps.

A brief moment of straightness in 2000

Nowadays I generally manage the curls pretty well, and I wouldn’t be without them. They are very much me. I did have my hair straightened once in London and it made me look so different that my father walked straight past me at Waterloo station, but within hours, the curls had fought back, so I never bothered again. Other than that, I’ve kept more or less the same style for years, with variations in length depending on forthcoming weddings, being pregnant (which made my hair wonderful) and my thyroid disease (which can make it fall out in handfuls).

I found some excellent hairdressers during my years in London, but seldom found them again whenever I tried to return. They were always part of London’s transient society, people from Canada, New Zealand, South Africa, Finland, who had found a job that gave them a passport to travel, and hardly ever stuck around for more than a few months.

When we moved to York, I just picked the one salon that used the Aveda products that I now swear by and thus adopted a perfectly nice but not especially good hairdresser. I’ve never loved anything she has done to my hair, but I haven’t hated it either. But she was always so sweet and friendly that I felt I couldn’t go to anyone else in the salon. This whole tale is a story of my Britishness. I can’t be assertive about what I want or what I think about the end result, yet it’s my head that a haircut has to sit on until my next trim. A hairdresser holds up a mirror to the back of my head and I always say, “Mm, yes, that looks a lot better,” just as I always tell a waiter serving me a meal that I’m loathing that it’s “very nice, thank you” when he asks me if everything is OK.

And this carries on into my “crazy hair-cut/colour”. At my last haircut, I explained to my hairdresser about my 40 challenges and what I wanted to do, and booked an appointment for a couple of months’ time so we could complete the challenge. The week before the appointment, she rang me to say that she had opened her own salon, so could I go there instead. As she was no longer going to be using nice organic Aveda but rather very 80s-sounding Wella, I should at that point have run a mile, but instead just meekly agreed to switch venue as requested.

My main aim was the crazy colour. I’m nearly 40, but am lucky enough to not actually have to dye my hair, so never really have. I had a misdemeanour with lemon juice when I was 22 which left me very blonde for a few months, and also had a brief spell of purple a couple of years later after getting drunk with my university housemates. Otherwise I’ve just been brown. So I decided to go for a new experience and have some highlights. Crazy highlights. As Sarah said, they’d grow out.

Technically, this could be described as a crazy hair-do

The day of the appointment arrived. My hairdresser showed me her palette of colours and I pointed to the more exciting ones on display. But then she said “Leave it with me” and went off to mix up some bowls and cut up some foil. It was only when she’d painted half my head of curls that she told me the colours she was using. Red, orange and...brown. "Brown?" "Brown?!" My hair is sodding "brown" already. What is “crazy” about "brown"? When did anyone ever get excited by or stop traffic with "brown"? What’s the point of paying someone 70 quid to dye brown hair "brown"?

The salon was very nice, and had special massage chairs at the sinks. She also had some 43-year-old Woman’s Weekly magazines to read, which were highly entertaining with their doll’s clothes knitting patterns and plentiful adverts for cheese. But I won’t be going back. I asked my hairdresser to make the angle of my current bob a bit more exciting. She just cut it all the same length. The red and orange she’d chosen just turned out the colour of old man’s boot polish and - I realised to my horror - a very close match to our front door. Plus it very quickly washed out, which I don’t think it was meant to do. Apart from the brown, that is. Oh, right. That’s because it was BROWN...IN...THE...FIRST...PLACE! And the dye has made my hair so dry that the frizz has returned, and this has remained, even though the colour has largely gone. I can’t moisturise it out enough.

In perfect harmony with our front door

Sigh. All in all, an expensive waste of time, and I don’t have the budget to give it another go. But I tried. Charlotte, rightfully, seems to have inherited my mistrust (in her case manifesting itself as abject terror) of hairdressers. (Though history is also repeating itself: I take her to an old lady perming salon.) May she always scream “No, no, no!” and never mutter “Yes, that looks very nice thank you” if she doesn’t like the end result. 

Challenge Number 39 - Learn to count to 100 in Welsh (and three swear words)

My dad set me this challenge, to tie in with "conquering" Snowdon. My friend Sarah also set me the challenge to learn some swearwords in a foreign language, so I combined the two.

When I was a teenager, it slowly dawned on me that I was quite good at learning languages.  I never had a problem memorising vocab or verb endings, could mimic accents, and always seemed to do well in exams without even trying. I did a school exchange to Germany and realised how quickly I was absorbing the new words and phrases around me, and that I wanted more, more, more. I'm not quite sure who I inherited the skill from - it must have skipped a generation somewhere. My parents only took me on holidays abroad once I hit adolescence so I could do all the talking for them. Not that Little Miss Stroppy Teen was willing to oblige, of course. I also benefited from having a couple of particularly good teachers at school. My A Level French Literature teacher was somewhat eccentric, immensely talented and intolerant of fools, which made her both terrifying and awe-inspiring. She owned a battered old farmhouse in Provence long before Peter Mayle made it fashionable, and spent every summer there, studying Impressionist art and pottering about with the locals. She was as passionate about Star Trek as she was Maupassant and her classes on Racine's Phedre made me go home and try to write French poetry in rhyming couplets. How on earth did she do that? It's true what the adverts say - no one ever forgets a good teacher. (You don't forget a bad one either.)

I set myself the typically rational teenage ambition of learning every single language in the world and decided that one day I would be in interpreter at the United Nations. It's quite depressing to see how far off the mark I've ended up. It doesn't help that I didn't end up completing a degree in modern languages - I started one at the University of Sheffield in 1992 but left after six months because it was - not to put too fine a point on it - crap. I chose Sheffield because the course would enable me to study four languages at once and because my boyfriend at the time told me not to go there. But the course ended up being rather different to the one described in the prospectus - all the literature and history classes were taught in English and when we did get to speak some French and German (about once a week), most of my fellow students could barely string a sentence together. I suddenly realised how good the language teaching at my school must have been. I ended up taking myself off to Germany to go to university in Heidelberg for a year in a bid to get the German fluency I craved. I then came home to do a degree in Linguistics at the University of York. I loved Linguistics, but it didn't set me up for a job at the United Nations, alas. My degree did involve a year and a half of Mandarin Chinese, which is as exotically near to my teenage ambition as I've got so far. Otherwise, I've only managed reasonable French and German, GCSE level Italian, a few words of Polish picked up when I taught English at a summer school on the Baltic coast and a bit of Danish from a couple of extended holidays there and watching too many episodes of The Killing. Regretfully, all my languages are horribly rusty now, as I never get a chance to use them. I also tried to learn Spanish when we moved to York through the university's Languages For All scheme, but I just got it muddled up with Italian. I also didn't get on with the class at all, as the teacher was desperately trying to make it "fun" for a bunch of disinterested 18 year olds. I was the annoying one in the corner tutting "Stop making me sing pop songs and tell me how to form the pluperfect tense instead." Get rid of the games and bring back grammar, I tell you! (That is the short version of my treatise on foreign language teaching in this country.)

So Welsh, eh? Well, I'd never had a go at any of the Celtic language either, only laughed at them on signposts. Here we go. I promise you I am writing all of this out from memory and haven't just copied and pasted it in from the Internet:

1 = un (pronounced een)

2 = dau (pron. die)

3 = tri (pron. tree)

4 = pedwar

5 = pump (pron. pimp)

6 = chwech (pron. [x]wear[x] where [x] is a voiceless velar fricative like in Scottish loch)

7 = saith (pron. sigh-th)

8 = wyth (pron. oith)

9 = naw (pron. now)

10 = deg (pron. day-g, though the vowel is more like Cardinal 2 [e] for you phoneticians out there...)

11 = un deg un

12 = un deg dau

13 = un deg tri

14 = un deg pedwar

15 = un deg pump

16 = un deg chwech

17 = un deg saith

18 = un deg wyth

19 = un deg naw

20 = dau ddeg (the dd is a voiced alveolar fricative, like at the beginning of that)

21 = dau ddeg un

22 = dau ddeg dau

23 = dau ddeg tri

24 = dau ddeg pedwar

25 = dau ddeg pump

26 = dau ddeg chwech

27 = dau ddeg saith

28 = dau ddeg wyth

29 = dau ddeg naw

30 = tri deg

31 = tri deg un

32 = tri deg dau

33 = tri deg tri

34 = tri deg pedwar

35 = tri deg pump

36 = tri deg chwech

37 = tri deg saith

38 = tri deg wyth

39 = tri deg naw

40 = pedwar deg

41 = pedwar deg un

42 = pedwar deg dau

43 = pedwar deg tri

44 = pedwar deg pedwar

45 = pedwar deg pump

46 = pedwar deg chwech

47 = pedwar deg saith

48 = pedwar deg wyth

49 = pedwar deg naw

50 = pum deg

51 = pum deg un

52 = pum deg dau

53 = pum deg tri

54 = pum deg pedwar

55 = pum deg pump

56 = pum deg chwech

57 = pum deg saith

58 = pum deg wyth

59 = pum deg naw

60 = chwe deg

61 = chwe deg un

62 = chwe deg dau

63 = chwe deg tri

64 = chwe deg pedwar

65 = chwe deg pump

66 = chwe deg chwech

67 = chwe deg saith

68 = chwe deg wyth

69 = chwe deg naw

70 = saith deg

71 = saith deg un

72 = saith deg dau

73 = saith deg tri

74 = saith deg pedwar

75 = saith deg pump

76 = saith deg chwech

77 = saith deg saith

78 = saith deg wyth

79 = saith deg naw

80 = wyth deg

81 = wyth deg un

82 = wyth deg dau

83 = wyth deg tri

84 = wyth deg pedwar

85 = wyth deg pump

86 = wyth deg chwech

87 = wyth deg saith

88 = wyth deg wyth

89 = wyth deg naw

90 = naw deg

91 = naw deg un

92 = naw deg dau

93 = naw deg tri

94 = naw deg pedwar

95 = naw deg pump

96 = naw deg chwech

97= naw deg saith

98 = naw deg wyth

99 = naw deg naw

100 = cant

Phew! Now, even though I can't pick up languages as easily as I used to, this all struck me as surprisingly logical. Which isn't what you'd expect from a language that has mutating nouns, starts every sentence with a verb and thinks Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch is a sensible village name. Unfortunately, it turns out this logic is deliberate. These are the new decimal Welsh numbers, devised after Welsh language schools became widespread and they needed an easy way to do maths. The original Welsh numbers were on a vigesimal system, which is apparently still used in telling the time and in counting money, and by older speakers of the language. A vigesimal system has a base of 20 rather than of 10. You see remnants of one in French, where 99 is quatre-vingt-dix-neuf, literally "four twenty nineteen", or in traditional English phrases such as "four score years and three", meaning 83. (Incidentally, the French-speaking Swiss have wiped out the vigesimal in their numbers too - 70, 80 and 90 are septante, octante (or huitante in some cantons) and nonante.)

So this meant that I had to learn a whole other way to count to 100 too. I'd like to think my dad knew this and was deliberately setting me a really hard challenge, but no. He just got lucky.

1-10 are the same as above.

11 = un ar ddeg (so we're more old-fashioned here, literally "one and ten")
12 = deuddeg
13 = tri ar ddeg
14 = pedwar ar ddeg
15 = pymtheg
16 = un ar bymtheg (one and fifteen and look, that noun just mutated at the beginning)
17 = dau ar bymtheg
18 = deunaw (two nines)
19 = pedwar ar bymtheg
20 = ugain
21 = un ar hugain
22 = dau ar hugain
23 = tri ar hugain
24 = pedwar ar hugain
25 = pump ar hugain
26 = chwech ar hugain
27 = saith ar hugain
28 = wyth ar hugain
29 = naw ar hugain
30 = deg ar hugain (ten and twenty)
31 = un ar ddeg ar hugain (eleven and twenty)
32 = deuddeg ar hugain
33 = tri ar ddeg ar hugain
34 = pedwar ar ddeg ar hugain
35 = pymtheg ar hugain
36 = un ar bymtheg ar hugain
37 = dau ar bymtheg ar hugain
38 = deunaw ar hugain (eighteen and twenty)
39 = pedwar ar bymtheg ar hugain
40 = deugain (two twenties)
41 = un ar deugain
42 = dau ar deugain
43 = tri ar deugain
44 = pedwar ar deugain
45 = pump ar deugain
46 = chwech ar deugain
47 = saith ar deugain
48 = wyth ar deugain
49 = naw ar deugain
50 = hanner cant (half a hundred) when on its own, otherwise deg ar deugain
51 = un ar ddeg ar deugain
52 = deuddeg ar deugain
53 = tri ar ddeg ar deugain
54 = pedwar ar ddeg ar deugain
55 = pymtheg ar deugain
56 = un ar bymtheg ar deugain
57 = dau ar bymtheg ar deugain
58 = deunaw ar deugain
59 = pedwar ar bymtheg ar deugain
60 = trigain (three twenties)
61 = un ar trigain
62 = dau ar trigain
63 = tri ar trigain
64 = pedwar ar trigain
65 = pump ar trigain
66 = chwech ar trigain
67 = saith ar trigain
68 = wyth ar trigain
69 = naw ar trigain
70 = deg ar trigain
71 = un ar ddeg ar trigain
72 = deuddeg ar trigain
73 = tri ar ddeg ar trigain
74 = pedwar ar ddeg ar trigain
75 = pymtheg ar trigain
76 = un ar bymtheg ar trigain
77 = dau ar bymtheg ar trigain
78 = deunaw ar trigain
79 = pedwar ar bymtheg ar trigain
80 = pedwar ugain (four twenties)
81 = un ar pedwar ugain
82 = dau ar pedwar ugain
83 = tri ar pedwar ugain
84 = pedwar ar pedwar ugain
85 = pump ar pedwar ugain
86 = chwech ar pedwar ugain
87 = saith ar pedwar ugain
88 = wyth ar pedwar ugain
89 = naw ar pedwar ugain
90 = deg ar pedwar ugain
91 = un ar ddeg ar pedwar ugain
92 = deuddeg ar pedwar ugain
93 = tri ar ddeg ar pedwar ugain
94 = pedwar ar ddeg ar pedwar ugain
95 = pymtheg ar pedwar ugain
96 = un ar bymtheg ar pedwar ugain
97 = dau ar bymtheg ar pedwar ugain
98 = deunaw ar pedwar ugain
99 = pedwar ar bymtheg ar pedwar ugain
100 = cant (same as above)

And now the swear words. My pronunciation guide on the numbers was a six year old girl, so obviously I couldn't ask her about the rude stuff. And somewhat disappointingly, despite being called Street Welsh, my phrase book didn't contain any swearwords. But unsurprisingly, there's plenty of websites devoted to the subject. Scouring through them, I picked three insults that were spelled consistently across pages and which would keep their English translations free of f-words. This also probably makes them more authentically Welsh:

1. Cer i grafu (pron. kerry-graffy) = go and scratch

2. T'in coc oen = (tin cock-oin) you are a lamb's male appendage

3. Dos i chwarae efo dy nain (dossy [x]wa-ray efo dee nine) = go and play with your grandmother

I'm still a long way from the United Nations, though if a Plaid Cymru member who can only speak like a Numtum with Tourette's ever ends up on the Security Council, I'm sure I'll be the first person they call.