The Pink Frog

'It's called the Pink Frog,' says Esme's mother.

We are in our daughters' dorm, trying to locate lost hockey socks and school fleeces in other girls' drawers, under the bed, etc, while simultaneously exchanging the usual stories of frustration at our ailing memories and faculties.

Slow, heavy footsteps on the stairs. Mattie's mother staggers into the dorm and, breathing heavily, flops on the nearest bed. 'Urhhh,' she groans. 'That was embarrassing. I just asked Saskia's mother if she'd tended any casualties lately. She looked at me as if I was a mad woman. I thought she was the new nurse. They both look like lambs with their crimpy hair.'

'The Pink Frog strikes again,' I say knowingly.

'Pink Fog!' laughs Esme's mother.

I thought it was an incongruous name. I'm in a Pink Fog league of my own.

Poor old Digger

Dan's dog Digger has come to stay. He's rather a charming old boy, with white chops and white rings around his eyes. If Digger were a man, he'd be about 6 ft 5, slightly stooped, a bit arthriticky around the knees, with a shaggy-eyebrowed Patrick Moore quality about him. As it is, he's a dog. He goes straight over to the carpet, buries his nose deep into the shagpile to get a good whiff of what must be the beguiling equivalent of Chanel No 5 (eau de Cinder, Hugo and Jemima's sleek young labrador), squats unmanfully over it and wees.

'Oh God!' says Dan. 'Digger! OUT! Sorry, Lize,' he shrugs helplessly. 'I can safely say he's never done that before.' They always say that, of course, like the owners of all those Staffies that used to attack Dusty in London. 'Never done that before!' they'd say.

Dan clearly doesn't trust me. He's bagged up the food in four individual daily pouches. Poor Digger is absolutely starving. His ribs protrude from his worn old coat. He only gets fed once a day, hence the instruction to give him his breakfast in two halves, lest he scoff it so quickly that he's sick. I dutifully follow orders. Digger inhales the first half in about 3 seconds flat, gagging as he goes. I wait a few minutes for him to compose himself, then give him his seconds, which he hoovers up in one. I send him out and, as predicted by Dan, a poo immediately pops out. Then he paces up and down groaning, throws up half his food, studies it for a moment and then eats it up.

Digger comes with an instruction manual and glossary. Dan was clearly traumatised as a young boy when we let him believe that the bath plug was called a 'plugout'. I think he was about 12 before he realised the truth. Now he's meting out his revenge on his poor dog.

Bastard! - basket!
Paid for! - you may now eat
Piddle! - self-evident
Dump! - self-evident
Bark! - self-evident
Safe! - stop barking
Goodnight - to be said several times in different intonations when retiring for the night
See you later - to be said cheerily when you go out and leave him

'What about when you want to stop him eating poo?' I ask, since poo-eating (not his own, but cow's, horse's, fox's, that kind of thing) is apparently one of his foibles.

'Kick him,' says Dan.

'Can I give him any treats?'

Dan frowns. 'He's doesn't have human food, if that's what you mean.'

'Dog biscuits?'

'He can have one at bedtime.'

'Can he have a chew?'

Dan inspects my bag of panatella-sized hide chews and hesitates for a moment before conceding. 'He can have a chew.'

Poor Digger. This will be a loving respite home for him.

Half-term industry

'Mum,' says Lily. 'I woke up at 6.30 today.'

'Really?' Since we were up till past midnight playing Scrabble, this is incredible news. 'Did you get up then?'

'No. I just stayed in bed till 7.30.'

'Reading?'

'Thinking and reading and doing nothing - multitasking, basically.'

Strict Connecticut

I've been getting comments from members of Lily's contacts list about her emails, which go something like this:

Hi, how r u? 
Love Lily x


To add insult to injury, these communiques are not even personalised; they are sent out to one and all, with the addresses on display in the 'To' line. Uncle Dan, Club Penguin, Godmother Franny, Godmother Rose and random friends. (Her mother is never included.)

In the car, going home for half-term, after hearing about the pop lacrosse near-triumph (they lost 9-15, but Lily always sees the positive side) and a few funny dorm stories (their matron says there's an invisible Wall of Smell between one half of the dorm and the other - I'm pleased to discover Lily is on the Side of Sweet Perfume and not Stench), I broach the email question.

'Now, darling, have you heard of netiquette?'

She looks blank.

'Have you heard of etiquette?'

'Nope. But I've heard of Connecticut. It's in Madagascar.'

'What?'

'In the film, it's where Marty wants to get back to.'

'Ah.'

There's a silence while I consider whether it's worth tackling the importance of the bcc at this juncture. I decide that, as ever, I would only be wasting my breath.

'Do you remember I told you Mattie has a pet scorpion called Fluffy?' asks Lily. 'It just died and they had it...'

'...cremated,' I offer.

'Nowuh!  What do you call it when you keep it and have it...'

'...stuffed.'

'Nowuh! when you put stuff on it and it keeps it for ever.'

'Pickled.'

'Nooooo! It begins with muh... muh....'

'Mummified.'

'Nowuh! Varnished. That's what they did. They varnished it and put it in a translucent box with foam on the bottom and foam on the top, to cover Fluffy.'

Daisy and Confucius

Lily and I are driving on a dual carriageway. A big overhead sign looms. DON'T PANIC WHILE DRIVING. Oh God! Should I be panicking? Is there something up ahead to panic about? Then I think of Franny - she often panics while driving and has to stop. What a nice, supportive, public service message, I think. Then we get closer and I see the message afresh. DON'T PHONE WHILE DRIVING.

We are listening to Classic FM. The bloke is going on about Delius and if there were one piece he would play that captures the wonderment of Delius, it would be On Hearing the First Cuckoo in Spring.

'That's good to remember,' I say to Lily. 'On Hearing the First Cuckoo in Spring. And who was it by...?'

'Delia Smith.'

Leonardo, polymath and quintessential Renaissance Man, diagnosed with ADHD

Just doing a little research when make fascinating discovery.


Email Dan:


Hey guess what! Leonardo had ADHD!!!!

1. How often do you have trouble wrapping up the final details of a project, once the challenging parts have been done?

2. How often do you have difficulty getting things in order when you have to do a task that requires organization?

3. How often do you have problems remembering appointments or obligations?

4.When you have a task that requires a lot of thought, how often do you avoid or delay getting started?

5. How often do you fidget or squirm with your hands or feet when you have to sit down for a long time?

6. How often do you feel overly active and compelled to do things, like you were driven by a motor?

Dan emails back. 

It certainly seemed like it when he was in steerage....

By jove, she's got it!

Quintessential!

The Leonardo exhibition

'I went to see the Leonardo exhibition,' I tell Dan, who's driving home after buying a digital box. 'It's the hottest ticket in town.'

'I assume we're talking about di Caprio,' he says, deadpan.

I burst out laughing. 'I wonder what an exhibition on di Caprio would actually consist of?'

'A lock of hair, a pair of boots...' suggests Dan.

'The broken handcuffs from Titanic...'

'That bit would be interactive - you'd have to test your skill at bringing down the axe in just the right place so as not to chop off the out-of-work actor's hands.'

I'm warming to the idea. 'Maybe they could do a simulated flight over Beverly Hills where he crashed into all those houses when he was playing William Randolph Hearst or Hugh Heffner or Howard Hodgkin or whoever he was.'

'Speaking of which,' Dan says, 'I don't actually have Hodgkin's lymphoma, you'll be pleased to hear. But I can't remember the specific symptoms that after a lot of testing I didn't actually have.'

'That's nice,' I say. 'Anyway,'

'I think it was just a pain in the armpit.'

'...who was that bloke who was flying the plane?' I splutter.

'Douglas Bader?'

'No! In The Aviator.'

'Do you mean Howard Hughes?'

'Yes! Who exactly was Howard Hughes again?'

'The bloke di Caprio was playing when he crashed through the ceiling of that old bint's house.'

'Anyway, there'd have to be movie clips capturing those key moments...'

'Oh yes,' says Dan, 'they'd be the glue that held the exhibits together.'

You see, Dan and I could go into business together creating marvellous interactive exhibitions, as part of my portfolio of successful and fulfilling careers. Oh, except, Howard Hughes, who I'm just checking out online, said, 'Never have a partner.' And he was a billionaire. Mad reclusive, though.

'Anyway, the good news about the Leonardo was,' I say, trying to remember what it was about da Vinci that I thought was a good message to take home...

'They had his missing ear!'

I'm gasping for breath. 'No! The good news was, he was highly distractible, and hardly ever finished anything, so despite only...'

'So really that painting of him without an ear was just an unfinished painting?'

Oh God! My ribs hurt. 'So despite only completing a handful of works, he still went down in history as one of the most...'

'...prolific?'

I battle on. '...brilliant, seminal... influential... amazingly clever... I'm struggling here... peers of the realm... no, you know, Best Painters Of All Time. And the blueprint ... what is the word I want? Embryonic.... No...'

'Foundation?'

'Spearheading.... No. Archetypal! No. I nearly had it then. Forerunner. Oh God, what is it? The... the...  I'm trying to describe that he was the-one-that-began-it-all-and-encapsulates-it-all Renaissance Man.'

'Trouble is, by throwing all those words at me you've done my head in too. Didn't it say in the exhibition?'

'Probably.'

'Didn't he design the aeroplane that Howard Hughes crashed?' asks Dan before I can look up the exhibition booklet. 'As well as designing the theme tune for... it wasn't Civilization? Men at War. World at War. World at One. What was that programme?'

'Give me the tune.'

'It wasn't a tune! It was a man on a circle doing star jumps...'

'Hang on, hang on... yes, you're right, he did design that ... that...'

'...app?'

'No the... credits for...'

'...the credit crunch...'

'Oh God!' I'm weeping and I can't breathe. 'Please let my brain catch up!'

'Didn't he design a helicopter? I'm sure he designed a helicopter and then he went on to design an aeroplane that Howard Hughes crashed but he didn't quite finish it, that was the problem. He left out the landing gear...'

'World in Action!' I say, triumphant. 'It says here, the centrepiece of the World in Action theme tune...'

'It wasn't a tune!'

'...titles was Leonardo...'

'...di Caprio doing star jumps.'

Thank God. Dan's gone out of range. Deep breaths, deep breaths. Haaa. Deep sigh. Composure. Now, let's look at my Leonardo exhibition booklet. Oh. It doesn't say he was a Renaissance Man at all. It says he was a polymath.

Brazilian blowdry

'I just went past the hairdresser's,' says Cass. 'They're offering a Brazilian blowdry. Surely there's nothing left to dry if you have a Brazilian.'

'I wonder what a Brazilian blowdry is, then?' I ask. 'I'll look it up online.'

'No, don't do that!' urges Cass. 'You'll be bombarded with emails trying to sell you Brazilian blowdries. I'm for ever being offered downstairs cloakroom double sinks with an overflow and a swivel tap.'

'Is that a euphemism for someone in need of a Brazilian?' I ask.

Miss Dorothy Gray