ENGLISH MUM IN IRELAND HAS MOVED! FIND ME AT ENGLISHMUM.COM

So here’s the thing, it’s the end of the road, the final page of the story, the last rolo, the…er…last kiss before bedtime for my blog. We’ve had a long and somewhat tempestuous journey together. We’ve had some good times; some laughs and some serious hissy fits along the way, but we part company older, wiser and nominated for four awards! Not bad eh?

Still, it’s not all bad. We’re moving into dot com territory and that’s gotta be a step up. From now on, my new humble abode will be:

ENGLISHMUM.COM

Last one there’s a sissy!!

xx

PS: Early teething probs mean that comments are showing as zero even though they’re in there somewhere. Don’t be afraid to comment!!

PPS: Please remember to change your links and bookmarks to the new site.

So I finally managed to slot in a visit to Gorgeous G, my yummy hairdresser. Someone fabulous and glamorous once told me that a girl should never allow anyone except a man to cut her hair, and even though I can’t remember who it was (I do remember that they were fantastically well groomed), I’ve stuck by that rule ever since. Gorgeous G is a find. Not only is he friendly, chatty and heterosexual (okay, I suppose that doesn’t really matter, but the whole point is to find someone who will make you look attractive, and if their idea of attractive is Brad Pitt, well, frankly you’re in trouble), he’s also pleasingly easy on the eye. Digressing. So I plonked myself down in the chair, G gave me a quick once over, and the trouble began.

G (shakes head and does the sucking air through teeth thing that plumbers do when your boiler’s going to cost a fortune): ‘Ohhh dear. You’re looking a bit…’
Me: ‘A bit….what?’
G: ‘Well, a bit dull and washed out, and your hair is frazzled’
Me: ‘Frazzled. Okay, that’s not a technical term for fantastic, then?’
G: ‘Er, no. It’s a technical term for: step away from the straighteners, girl’*

Ah. So, basically his solution was a radical one: brown. Now I’ve no objection, in principal, to brown hair. There are plenty of beautiful brunettes in the world, but I came into the world blonde, and even though I’ve darkened over the years, my comfort zone is distinctly blonde-flavoured. Reader, I panicked. I took some persuading, but G explained, in his best ‘I’m the expert and therefore I know best’ voice, that it was either brown or a radical few inches off the length and I look like a boy with short hair. I took some persuading, but after promising faithfully that it would restore some much-needed shine to my over processed locks, I gave in. Two hours later and several Euro lighter, I emerged, like an..erm..hairy butterfly, a glossy brunette. ‘There’, said G, somewhat unconvincingly, ‘it’s lovely’, before quickly adding ‘look, try and live with it and if you really hate it I’ll fix it on Monday’.

So I went home, looking in the rear-view mirror all the way at the shadowy, serious stranger driving my car. When I got in, I did the washing up, staring again at the dark and sombre stranger standing at my sink. I picked the children up from school (wary glances were shot in my direction, but nothing was actually said out loud – I think it was my trembling bottom lip that did it). And finally I phoned Hubby: ‘I hate myself’, I said, ‘I’m dowdy and boring and, well, brown. I haven’t laughed once since I was brown. I can’t even think of anything funny to write on the blog. It’s not me. I’m happy and fun and, well, blonde’. But men don’t GET stuff about hair. They don’t see how important it is. And his reassurances that ‘I bet it’s lovely, and you’ll get used to it’ somehow didn’t hit the spot. This called for the BF. I reached for the pink batphone:

Me: ‘I’ve gone brown’
J: ‘No!’
Me: ‘Yeah’
J: ‘You hate it don’t you’
Me: ‘Yup’
J: ‘Get thee back to the hairdressers. There’s only room for one brunette in this friendship, and that slot’s taken. Get blonde and buy a good treatment. End of.’

So that’s it then. I’ll be loitering outside the hairdresser’s at 9am tomorrow morning, and will pester G like a deranged thing until he promises to restore my sunshiny, happy blondeness and banish this brown forever. Then I’ll make you laugh again. Promise.

*Okay, so that’s not exactly how the conversation went, but you get the picture.

We were trudging around the big field this morning, then; Bert with his fur-lined waterproof coat on (it’s manly, honest), and me with seventeen layers, including thermals, t-shirts, fleeces and two jackets. The snow was coming straight at us as we walked down the slope and the wind was freezing my eyelashes to my very pink cheeks.

Bert started to pull. Usually this is because he’s stopped to have a poo and I haven’t noticed, but this time he was looking up towards Lily The Lovely Lamb Lady’s farm. We were introduced to Lily last week when the little blue greyhound went missing. It was on her land where Hubby hurled himself out of the car at our little escapee, sliding neatly off her rump and landing in a big huffy heap. Lily took pity on us and showed us round all the new lambs that they were feeding by hand, and the ready-to-pop lambs in the field closest to the farmhouse. It was that particular field that was drawing Bert’s attention. Lily The Lovely Lamb Lady’s very fat, pregnant lambs were being chased about their field by a very pingy black dot, moving a whole lot faster than you would expect a heavily pregnant mother to move. I know my eyes are bad but it didn’t look good. Especially when, on closer inspection, the dot was definitely dog shaped. I phoned Hubby on the pink batphone:

Me (slurring through frozen blue mouth): ‘I’m in the field behind the house! I just looked up and there’s a black dog chasing the ewes in Lily the Lovely Lamb Lady’s field!’

Hubby: ‘What?’

Me: ‘There’s a f*cking dog chasing Lily’s sheep!!’

Hubby: ‘Oh shit. Is it ours?’

Me: ‘No, it looks furry’

Hubby: ‘Thank Christ. Do you know her number?’

Me: ‘No, but D next door’s brother in law knows her’

Hubby: ‘I’ll get on the case’

So, while Hubby tried to warn Lily, like the Michelin man in a bad slow-mo movie clip, I ran, dragging a very miffed Bertie, back to the house, hurled myself into the jeep and took off as fast as I could (it’s difficult to drive in wellies, especially with seventeen layers of clothing and frozen extremities) off to Lily’s farm. As I drove up the farm track, the dog, a bedraggled black collie-looking thing, came running towards me. Oh. I hadn’t expected that. I stopped, jumped out, and tried to entice it towards me. It eyed me warily but didn’t come any closer. Instead I opened the back of the jeep and whistled. Amazingly, it hopped in. Slamming the door, I screeched up to the farmhouse to meet a worried-looking Lily at the gate.

Luckily, the sheep weren’t as heavily pregnant as I thought, in fact, that was the ‘kind of possibly maybe could be pregnant’ field, which was good. Having checked her beasties were all well, we retired into the farmhouse for a cup of tea and a mull over what to do with our hairy hostage, now sitting guiltily in the back of the jeep (it’s the Cavan way – a cuppa and a chat can solve any crisis – maybe we should suggest it to NATO as a new strategy).

So the upshot of this very exciting episode was that we drove around a few of the farms, showing off our little furry prisoner, and when nobody recognised him, we drove him to The Dog Lady, who everyone knows takes in dogs, and if someone’s missing a dog, they’re bound to visit. While we were there, we oohed and ahhed at her clutch of rescue puppies (7!, all needing a new home), and were happily chatting when Lily the Lovely Lamb Lady suddenly remembered that she’d got a ham joint boiling on the stove. Back we went to the farm to drop Lily off to her lambs and her ham joint, and I drove back, mulling over the fact that I had single handedly managed to catch a stray dog in about five seconds, but that my own runaway still evades capture over two weeks later.

Well I never. I was perusing the links that lead people to my blog this morning, and apart from several hundred wierdos, perverts and dog-botherers who googled ’saugages’, ‘lips’, ‘arseholes’ or a combination of the three (note to self: pick better titles to your posts so as not to attract abovementioned weirdos), I noticed this link which happens to mention that I got a nomination in the Blog Awards 2007 for Most Humorous Post for ‘Ooh I Say!‘ too. Happy day! I would jump around the lawn in my pants only it’s snowing and my extremeties are delicate. Woohoo, though, and thanks for whoever nominated me (Ma?).