My toes are individual points of cold pain at the end of my legs. I’ve even tried sitting on them, but my chair is fairly small and it all involves negotiating the winter belly (grown with simultaneous pride and disgust). Add the straining trouser buttons and jersey riding up the back and its all just too much effort. Which reminds me of living in Austria, where I would drink my coffee black and eat dry cereal rather than put on all those layers just to walk 2 blocks through the snow to buy a box of milk.

Winter is here.

Today started cold and overcast and windy but now the sun is back out, not a cloud in the sky and my autumn coat hangs uselessly on the back of my chair (having been pulled stubbornly from the cupboard for the first time in 3 years). Again, I am reminded of Europe, more specifically the UK, where people can have long conversations revolving entirely around the weather. But seeing as this particular blog is about winter, I don’t see what choice I have.

In summary then, my feet are cold. I don’t miss living in Europe (but would like to be able to afford a visit), the sun is out, and I really should be working.

This afternoon I am invited, without my pimple, to attend a parent-teacher meeting at my daughter’s school. I am already preparing myself (little under-the-breath pep talks) to control the natural aggression that comes seething up my chest and threatens to burst from behind my teeth at any criticism of my child.  It’s not that I think she’s perfect (I do), and it’s not that I expect her to excel in every aspect of life (I don’t) but I expect her to get credit for effort and improvement. If we don’t applaud our children for trying, why should they? Often I think the teacher’s shortcomings are projected onto the child. The teaching profession is no longer a vocation or a passion for the majority of teachers, but a paycheck and discounted school fees for their own brats. My advice to teachers?  If you are telling more than one parent their child is ADHD – it may well be that the content of your lesson, or its delivery, is BORING.

I also think that our schools have forgotten the fundamental importance of play and rest. 5 year olds are not designed to sit still for 2 hours at a time, and boys and girls ARE very different. Children are robbed of their freedom, their natural exuberance, their curiosity, and their right to question everything (including the teacher’s right to lead them). I am dreading the day my son starts school; then the feathers are really going to fly! I received his acceptance letter yesterday, and attached were the rules and various avenues of discipline at the school’s disposal. Can you believe he would be punished if I forgot to sign and return his communications folder? If I decided to put a Coke in his lunch box, he would be penalized, possibly with detention. How does a 5 year old control these things? Oh, and if he INADVERTENTLY breaks something, he will be punished, and I suppose expelled if he did it on purpose?

Clearly that is why I am in such a strop today. And I’m getting angrier as I write. It’s nothing to do with my daughter’s teacher, but rather, with the school.  Anyway, I’ll let you know how it goes. Whether everyone leaves the room alive, whether I am transformed into a red-faced harridan with spittle flying from my screaming mouth, whether my husband is spared the embarrassment of me losing my temper … so much responsibility to behave myself.

But someone once gave me fantastic advice – stick up for your child! If you don’t, who will?

I’ve had a hard time the last few weeks, what with one thing and another.

At my age you’d think pimples were a dim adolescent memory or at least something that I couldn’t care less about. But the wisdom that comes with wrinkles is shot down by the volcano on my chin.  And I’m young enough to see it in the rear view mirror!  So with wrinkles, fatigue and everything else mapping my path through life on my face, I took this solitary, defiant blemish as a grievous insult, added to already extensive injury.

I have done my best to keep to the office, the car and home, avoiding as much contact with strangers as possible.  As fate would have it, many of our computers had to go in for cleaning, thrusting me unwittingly and repeatedly into an almost exclusively male environment. It was a conspiracy I tell you!  I found everyone talking to my chin, never mind the boobs. I swear I could’ve been stark naked and it wouldn’t have made the slightest difference! Not that the boobs are anything to write home about – but I think we’ve discussed my surgical, or financial, limitations already.

Self-conscious disguise was inevitable really.

The disguises over the last few days have included an impossibly raised collar (John Travolta style – with my fleece jacket, sexy!). A finger raised to my chin (in contemplative manner albeit sometimes in the most unlikely circumstances – who walks through a shopping mall with their finger on their chin and their elbow hovering in mid-air? Once a till slip clenched between my teeth (as if my hands were full) and sometimes walking as though I had developed a serious neck injury – with my chin stubbornly stuck to my shoulder.  My children had to fend for themselves crossing the street. What with me glaring at the ground, finger affixed to my chin, gagging on till slips, it was each man for himself!

Before they come to take the kids away, let me just point out the slight exaggeration; I left them in the car, they were embarrassed to be seen with me!

I am pleased to report that The Pimple has since died of natural causes (murder having been narrowly averted by Rescue Remedy) and subsided to more humble proportions, hence the courage to write this. As soon as my colleagues and friends read this I imagine them streaming into the corridors to see my chin for themselves, and I will mumble something about stones and glasshouses and a hex on you all, as I push my way through the crowd ….

I would’ve left the beauty salon laden with anti-wrinkle skin care products had I had the money. It was the exchanged glances between the staff, beauticians I mean. The secretive “wonder when she had her last facial” looks that convinced me I should have them all – the super-duper sub dermal-plumping, collagen-injecting, youth prolonging miracle creams. Beauty in a bottle, a bit like the adverts on TV – if you use this cream you too can look like Sarah-something-Parker AND own her fabulous shoe collection – never mind that you are swarthy and bearded and vertically challenged. We pooh pooh mere genetics. It is everything to do with the skincare range and directly proportionate to the amount of follow-up sessions you book at the salon. Mendel theory, pffft! I added an extra “f” to that – for emphasis you understand, and in case you may have missed it, had the word been any shorter … but I digress.

As it was, I spent an hour and a half being massaged and exfoliated and tweezed. I left looking plumped, not a wrinkle in sight – but I may have been distracted by the blotchy redness of most of my face – and soft and feeling nothing but 2 wings of tautly stretched, agonized skin where the rest of my eyebrows used to be. Comes from reading outdated lifestyle magazines – bushy is back I screamed as they pinned me down!

I’ve been thinking about us (women) and our body image and how we are all unconsciously programmed. As God didn’t see fit to grant me big boobs (I would’ve settled for medium, anything bigger than a button really – everything you see is courtesy of the genius of Wonderbra), I’ve been considering having breast enlargements. Think about it, if your boobs are bigger, no one notices the bulging belly. You’re just generously proportioned. But if you’re flat chested and have a big tummy … well, it’s not great is it?

I have a friend, well not really a friend, more a relative of a relative – ok, I don’t know her at all – but she had a boob job and swears by it, as does her husband (rather clichéd that, but I don’t think he cares). Anyway, I shall continue to think about it. As it requires saving quite a bit of money I don’t think we are in any imminent danger.

The Kentucky Derby (pronounced “Darby”) arrived in Harare! We raided my daughter’s dressing up box for hats for everyone, and the kids managed to keep them on for most of the day! I had a huge purple striped hippy hat, which kept flopping into my face at the front, forcing me to peer at people out the side, with one eye. The only thing stopping the crowds of single men (already an exaggeration) must’ve been my progeny, clamouring for “uppy”, imprinting my legs and dress with sticky fingers and offering half mouthfuls from the buffet. I get to finish off everything tasted but not enjoyed, with a dash of slobber, sometimes a generous sprinkling of grass where it has been dropped and hastily recovered – if you’re not paying attention, you don’t even have time to clean these bits off as it gets shoved into your mouth mid-conversation. I blame it on the kids, but, well, it could’ve been the hat. And I’m not entirely sure there were many singles there – I was focused on my hat (naturally, being foremost in my vision) and the horses, and keeping the kids out of the flowerbed. But only when you are at a diplomat’s house! Did I mention the time they took wax crayons to a newly painted house? Austrian diplomats. Graham spent much of lunch that day with a scrubber and Handy Andy discreetly purloined from the staff in the kitchen while I distracted everyone with tales of poisonous spiders and prolific snakes – the dangers of living in the “bush”.

After several mint juleps (a Southern cocktail with spearmint, bourbon, sugar and water), I removed my high heels, flinging all decorum to the wind, or the flowerbed if we’re going to be accurate. The heels had bothered me much of the afternoon, sinking into the luscious lawn several times, culminating with me almost smacking myself in the face with my knee. My daughter wore them thereafter, although I still say the exchange was hardly fair – I couldn’t get my big toe into her sandals!

Anyway I left, far too late and many multiple juleps later, clutching my winnings, forgetting my hat on the table and my red high heels jutting out of the flowerbed (where my son had been using them in construction), but very jolly after an afternoon in the sun, at the races, pampered by Southern hospitality.

A friend of mine dropped off a bunch of magazines that she had finished reading. We recycle magazines – eventually they will end up at YOUR GP – but only when all the fashion advice is really redundant, the gardening tips are for the wrong season, the hairstyles are disgusting and the sexperts are old news. The usual suspects were present: “Cleo”, “Cosmopolitan”, “Elle” et al.  Every time I had a break this weekend (to be assured of 5 minutes uninterrupted reading time is quite a feat) I dived, nose first, into the nearest copy to read about how everyone else is doing it better.

People out there are having unbelievable sex (several times a week, if not several times a day – my bum is a biscuit!), they are great parents, successful entrepreneurs, accomplished sports people, over-achievers and ball-breakers.  You put down one of those magazines thinking you have to start that diet, and get that exercise and teach the kids from home and run a successful business and still find the time to make your husband feel like a god.  AND prepare home-made chilli jam and plant an organic vegetable garden and make homeopathic remedies from scratch from the garden.  If I had a super power, that would be it; all things to all people.

Needless to say yesterday morning I did the 5 recommended stretches for want of something better to do. Stretches mind you, nothing as ambitious as the Comrades to start off with, it’s not like I was pushing my luck. I could hardly brush my teeth today. I feel like a dressed chicken, about to go into the roasting tray – you know how you sometimes hold them up by their wings (or is that just me?) and the skin looks all stretched and tight and white (brownish if they are Argentinean) – that’s what I feel like.

Anyway, needless to say, when the alarm clock went off at 5 this morning to remind me to do my stretches – I gave it the finger, from the warmth and comfort of my winter feather duvet.