Only four days until Intarwebnet service resumes at home and counting... Normal posting soon! So, over the weekend I had Angel and Murray once more.
When I went to pick them up, Siren requested some money to fix a problem she has.
The problem is that she used to take my stuff (way back when we were living together) and put it in the loft of our home whenever she felt like it. If she couldn't see it, it couldn't offend her, and my stuff seemed generally offended her. The end result was that when we split up, an
awful*1 lot of my stuff ended up being left in the loft.
Over the years, when I have dropped by to pick up the kids, she has mentioned that she will be "clearing out the loft", and I have told her that when she does, I'll happily come and collect my stuff. Obviously, this was wishful thinking on her part, as it never came to pass.
We now come to an interesting impasse. She has swapped residence with someone, and that someone wants the stuff taken out of the house. Not an unreasonable request. Siren wants me to foot half the bill for getting the stuff out . An unreasonable request.
The way I see it (and feel free to correct me if I'm wrong here), is that she put this stuff up there, so she can bloody well take it down. I have offered on several occasions to dispose of this miscellany, and I have not been taken up on the offer. And frankly, to be brutally honest, I've managed to live without this stuff for nearly three years now, so I can safely say that it is all stuff I can live without. I'm sure there are some gems in there, but the way she used to fling things in there would mean that it would actually dangerous to get the stuff out again.
Obviously Siren (unused to being told no by me), got pissed off and told the kids to get a move on and to step out quickly, as she wanted to lock the door behind me!
Fast forward 48 hours, and I drop the kids off, due to the presence of a visitor at the Siren's place, a thin veneer of conviviality covers the clear resentment of the 'no' delivered two days previously. In fact the Siren is so quick to close the door in my face, the Angel has to open the door once more to kiss me good bye.
Yes, it's true, the Siren is still pissed at being told no, but it doesn't end there, oh no, that would be too easy...
Not more that 15 minutes later I get a phone call from the Siren. It seems that Murray was uncomfortable sleeping in the fold-out guest bed, but rather than tell me directly, has told his mother and then claimed he had informed me of his discomfort... Not so.
A couple of minutes of conversation later, I have explained the situation, all the while being told to not be so aggressive, whilst my parenting skills are called into question, by possibly one of the worst parents on Earth.
*2 And all the while the mentalist is telling me she doesn't get involved in my parenting of the kids... Do you see the contradiction? I do. Does the concept of '
in loco parentis' mean bugger all to the woman? I'm not Murray's parent, but in her absence I take on that mantle!
The real problem of course is that Murray didn't want to eat dinner with the rest of the family, he had been snacking (a thing he has been repeatedly told not to do) and so was not hungry when meal time arrived. However, my rule is law in our home, and he ate anyway with the rest of us. Meal times are social times in my home, and I won't have everyone raiding the fridge whenever they are hungry, we sit down to eat as a family, and we sit at the table to do it.
So what does Murray do? Does he complain to me about it? No, because he is in the wrong and he knows it. So, he complains to his mother about something else, knowing that she is pissed off at me already (he knew something was wrong after our quick eviction from the Siren's house Friday evening), and she gets on my case about something utterly unrelated, completely new to me, and of course indefensible because I'm being hijacked without warning, and of course because he knows his mother is a ranting loon once she gets going.
Is the story over? Hell no! Not by a long shot...
When Sandy and I get home a little later, Angel's hat and school book bag (containing her homework) are on prominent display, so I have to jump in the car and drop them off in time for school this morning.
So an hour after I have dropped the kids off, I am once more at the Siren's front door. Angel comes to the door to collect her stuff, and Murray makes an appearance saying that the Siren has commanded an audience. To which my reply is to tell her that I'm at the door. (I reason that an argument is most likely coming, and I want to be on as neutral a territory as possible, and be able to make a quick getaway.)
The Siren makes her entrance. The guest is no longer present, so now the veneer is gone, the gloves are off and she is ready to rumble!
Now I must do some scene setting, a little background for you all:
Angel is dangerously allergic to a number of things (her little mastocytes are ready to go at a moment's notice), she suffers with eczema and with asthma. Angel is not unusual, this is after all London, with its many crappy forms of pollution.
Over the years her skin condition and her breathing have deteriorated, and I am medicating the child four times a day and rehydrating her skin with aqueous cream two to three times a day. Even through all of this though, the child is still a gloriously happy bunny.
I am reasonably certain that this degradation in my child's health, is result of the Siren using too many cleaning products too efficiently, and as a result my daughter's immune system is systematically attacking her own body, for want of anything better to attack. When I was a kid, and I suppose this holds true for my whole generation, all these modern anti-bacterial cleaning products were not available, we used soap not anti-bacterial hand wash and our parents used bleach/washing up liquid to clean, not anti-bacterial washing up liquid, and ultrafuckoffbleach, etc., etc...
Siren is trying to clean away the problem, but she is making it worse. I firmly believe that Angel's immune system needs to be exposed to dirt with its many microbes, bacteria and virii. Only though this exposure will her immune system learn what to attack, other than its host body. I have tried to explain this to the Siren several times over the years, but horses and water and all that...
Before the Siren an I split up, tests were performed on Angel to determine what she was allergic to. Blood was taken and antigens were found which indicated what foods she was at risk of having a fatal reaction to. So both the Siren and I could safely make sure that she is not fed anything containing potentially dangerous foodstuffs. In Angel's case: fish, nuts or sesame.
Further, as a precaution, when Angel is with me, I carry her inhalers (for asthmatic episodes), Piriton (for minor allergic episodes), and a paediatric Epipen (a device for delivering adrenaline into the blood stream intramuscularly during a serious allergic reaction, thankfully not used to date).
Now that the background material is over with, I'll tell you that Siren decided to take Angel to see a Chinese Herbalist (yes the same sort of person that sells extract of pearl in order to balance your Chi!) and they sent some of Angel's hair away for analysis to see what she was 'intolerant'
*3 to.
As you may have guessed, I'm more of a Western Medicine kind of guy. I don't see it as a panacea for all things. But
peer review,
blind testing,
controlled studies, and the
Hippocratic Oath, which underpin the science and practice of Western Medicine hold a lot more weight for me than paying for:
- a shaman to cast some bones,
- a voodoo priestess to invoke Papa Legba,
- a wizened old Chinese guy and some dried herbs. (delete as appropriate)
to
- chase away my demons,
- curse my enemies or remove their curses,
- balance my Chi. (delete as appropriate)
Anyhoo, it seems that Angel is 'intolerant' to all dairy products, wheat based products and bananas (as well as allergic to fish, nuts and sesame).
All this was passed onto me by Angel, not the Siren. As I'm sure you are guessing from my general tone, I took no notice. If the Siren wants to give her cash (possibly my cash in the form of the child support payments, who knows?) to a Chinese herbalist
quack, and seriously expect a six-year-old to pass on the salient details to me, and for me to
actuallylisten to this crap, take note, and change my daughter's diet to fucking filtered water and lettuce leaves (which is frankly about all the poor girl would have left to eat and drink (assuming the filtering process didn't leave zinc in the water I presume!)), then she is frankly quite mistaken.
Just for the record her eczema was particularly bad when Angel came to me, and I had to be particularly vigilant to stop her scratching (my sports socks on her hands and lower arms, in order to stop her scratching in her sleep) and I had to apply the aqueous cream to her skin practically every three hours or so to stop her skin drying up and cracking.
Oh yeah! The Siren's new treatment regimen is working an absolute treat!
As a result, Angel ate normally this weekend, without any of the actually
life threateningly dangerous food stuffs anywhere near her meals, but the rest of this tortuous crap, ignored.
Not good enough for the Siren though, no! Remember she's pissed off at being told no, only 49 hours previously.
I have to stand on the doorstep and listen to the rabid woman repeat her point of view several times, each time not actually listening to my response
*4. Then she goes off into a fugue state about me 'undermining' her with the children. (Note to the wise: if your wife
*5 is as dumb as a box of rocks, do not let her anywhere near a child psychology course to pass her bored-housewife time, she won't understand it (in fact you'll end up knowing all about it, in order to help her with her fucking course work, go on ask me about first year first year degree-level Philosophy and Caribbean Studies too!), but she will sure as hell know how to drop in the occasional misplaced word into conversation, thinking that it makes her position unassailable.)
Again, not used to being told no by me, she was somewhat dumbstruck, when I just stopped her during mid-rant and told her that ranting at me with a raised voice, while not actually listening to what I was saying, in front of the kids was doing them no good, and as such I was leaving. I was angry, but there was no way I was having a screaming match at her in front of the children. Again, I think my credibility as a decent parent remains unscathed.
And all because a revisionist lunatic expects me to foot the bill for stuff she hid from me to be removed from a place she used to live in!
You have to laugh (well I do anyway). C'est la vie!
*1 Like a couple of thousand books for example, that fact that I was a voracious reader really offended for some reason. Go figure.
*2 Excluding addicts, paedophiles and all other 'bloody obvious' categories, this is a hyperbolic statement after all.
*3 Intolerant not allergic, so yet another bullshit 'take the money of the stupid middle class person who needs something other than religion to believe in, now that religion is so passé' concept.
*4 Give me a bit of letter headed paper, so that I can see the qualifications for myself, with the definitive list of dangerous foods on it. And if the qualification pans out, I'll exclude the foods from her diet. Not an outrageous position to take, I hope.
*5 She was my wife then, she's not now thank the baby Jesus!
