Zen and the Art of Mother Maintenance

Well it is the calm before the storm around here because my Austrian mother is arriving for a soujourn on Saturday. We usually end up having a blazing row by day three but this time I will suck Valium and try and generally stay very Zen and not react and generally be very mature. Last time she asked our 68 year old neighbor Lottie if she and her husband still had sex to which Lottie replied, "Oh gosh no, we don't do that anymore!" Apparently Lottie wasn't offended. Maybe she is deaf and thought my mother had asked her whether they still played tennis. In any case, there are sure to be lots of swings and roundabouts on mama's visit. I have given her a project to organize Sausage's sixth birthday party so no doubt it will be a big event. I am hoping for the Alice in Wonderland theme so I can have plenty of magic mushroom tea but other party themes are welcome.

Any ideas how I can stay calm and collected amongst much nervous tension which don't involve firearms?


In other news my romantic comedy Confessions of a Cake Addict is to be published on July 31st by Agora International in English and Spanish. Initially it will be published as an ebook but they may do print later. If you do only one thing for charity this year do this, reach deep into your pockets and buy this book. It will make you laugh! It will make you cry! It will make you hungry.

What's the book about you may ask? Well...

When she's down, Londoner Kate Pickles reaches for cake. While she piles on the pounds she loses hope that she can ever find love. Until, on a whirlwind trip to Vienna she gets involved in the filming of a Bollywood movie, meets the man of her dreams and loses her heart and the pounds in the process. The inspiration for the novel came from actually watching a Bollywood movie being filmed in Vienna, which set my imagination in gear to create the tale of a plump girl who conquers her fears and her dependence on cake.

Mainly, it's hilarious! So buy buy buy. Do you like the cover? It has made me hungry.

Tango Time

Now back in the USA and what a strange sensation. I feel exactly like Dorothy in the Wizard of Oz when she segues from the black and white start of the movie and wakes up in technicolor Munchkin Land. Because in Buenos Aires most people wear black, the vast majority of people have black hair, the buildings are mostly black and white, the smog from the traffic grimes everything dark, and it was winter and thus foggy and rainy. So it was a real shocker getting back to the USA and everything so clean, colorful and sunny, a dazzling assault on the senses. Buenos Aires is a slightly melancholy place it is true but I still love it.


On our arrival in Buenos Aires there was the slight indignity of being handed facemasks as we got off the plane. "Who do you think I am, Michael Jackson?" Emma asked which now seems like a joke in stunningly bad taste. After that the tour of Argentina hit all the right notes with Emma ....

This was the beautiful apartment we stayed in:



Going up in the funny lift:




Great cookies


Lots of jews so you need a Kosher McDonalds in Buenos Aires


Sausage as Bluebeard says: "I demand to have a kosher Big Mac or I will put a curse on you!"


Doing the tango



Girl drinking matte









Beautiful buildings and street markets selling funny junk


Dog walkers take twenty dogs at a time


Went to an artist's atelier and painted a portrait of Scarlett





Boat trip on Delta del Tigre river

Don't cry for me Argentina ...I'll be back. SOB.

Black Lung in Buenos Aires

Well twelve days in Buenos Aires and still it is so romantic. It rains today and everywhere around me there are people with hacking coughs and swine flu masks. There is so much pollution dripping from the walls of the streets that I think I have the black lung. I cough and cough and feel surprisingly upbeat.

Staying in an apartment has its charms. I always did live in an apartment in London and there is definitely something charming about being woken at 3am by two people upstairs having a blazing row, the thunderous sound of a toilet chain being pulled, the theme tune from Hawaii Five O suddenly starting up and the general sinister groans of an old building. One man´s meat is another man´s poison and I have to say I love old things. The elevator is about 150 years old and is like a little black cage. I love the high celings of the apartment, the crown molding, the parquet floors etc etc. We are staying in an apartment in Congreso which a friend told me is ´downtown.´ It is a nice enough area. And there is something of the hustle and bustle of a megacity that I have missed living in a small town like Baltimore.

There is such a process of adjustment. It just makes me laugh all those people for example in the USA who say "oh I am fat because of my metabolism or I am just going to accept that I am fat and that´s just the way I am." Being here has shown me just how abnormal being fat really is. I have seen maybe three fat people here and I am pretty sure they were American tourists. Everyone else is pretty slim, I suppose because they walk a lot.

We were looking at various apartments maybe to buy as investments or maybe to move here eventually to which most people scream but why would anyone want to move to a third world country? To which I would reply you can´t help it if you fall in love with a place. Some people fall in love with places like the USA I suppose because it is clean, featureless and as soulless as a plastic manniquin. Others fall in love with the grinding poverty, and old fashioned glamour of a place like Buenos Aires. Of course the real point is that if one has money one can afford a decent place in Buenos Aires. Would you believe that the poshest avenue, Avenue Alvear, featuring Louis Vuitton etc is posh simply because it does not have pavements swimming in dog shit?

What´s not to love about a place without a work ethic that has people eating leisurely breakfasts at 11am on a week day? Yes I appreciate the irony, if one had to live like the average Argentinian it would be hell for someone used to the first world but if one can afford the so called luxury lifestyle which would not actually be luxury it would just what we call average then one would be not so much part of the society but a glorified outsider peeking in. So would one really become a genuine Buenos Airean or just remain a foreign ponce looking to experience some kind of genuine ethnic experience?

Well the kids didn´t like it here much because they had to walk for miles but I rather liked the city, even in winter, it had that chill depressing feel in the air that I have missed from London winters but the upside was plenty of delectable cakes and icecreams. So should I move to Buenos Aires, it just sounds so glam, "I live in Buenos Aires." Yes there are some open sewers that stink and I don´t really want to think of what it smells like in summer. But I am a restless person and maybe I will end up here. I will post my pics when I get back!!

Flap Trimming on the NHS

Okay, well I am gearing up for my trip to Argentina next week. I have had a Brazilian bikini wax and have stocked up with pills for the twenty hour flight with two kids - I think most of you will understand if I pack a few Valium, no?


I am also packing my binoculars so that I am sure to really get to see all the cultural sites in Buenos Aires such as:



These lads are from some Argentinian rugby team called "Los Pumas". And apparently the polo players are even sexier. Maybe I will 'Do a Barrantes' like Fergie's mum did.


Susan and Hector Barrantes

Remember Susan Barrantes, who got one sniff of polo player Hector Barrantes and bolted to Argentina with him in 1972? What a lark, eh?

If you find you are feeling withdrawal symptoms from my caustic wit while I am in South America don't fret pet - I am writing for a fabulous new site called Powder Room Graffiti. Check out my article on Designer Vaginas about the current mania for trimming one's flaps. My pal MsMarmitelover told me via twitter that she has a friend in the UK who had her flaps trimmed on the NHS, apparently she only had "slightly uneven flaps, not that I saw. She had a phobia about it, so our govt paid for her flaps to be trimmed. Nice eh?" I am sure Electro Kevin will be spitting blood when he hears about this waste of public or should that be pubic funds, eh Kev?

Anyway if I don't see you before I take off do wish me bon voyage!

Emma
xxx

High Infidelity

Infidelity is a complex subject so I'm not going to try and give a few glib answers about why people do it but it does seem to me that people are a lot less enlightened about infidelity these days than you might think. In the old days it was, Oh Mrs Simmons from 93 had an affair and everyone knows her son Jimmy isn't really Mr Simmons' but let's not talk about it. Basically you just ignored the fact your husband or wife was up to no good and let the pain fester like a septic wound until you died because divorce was taboo.

I remember visiting my granddad (83) after being out of touch for many years - a British upper class somewhat overbearing character - in his cottage in England. My grandmother had died ten years before and actually I was pretty fond of her. So we're having a chat about the weather and the price of petrol when I notice there are no pictures of my gran anywhere in the sitting room and there is some other old woman plastered all over the place. So I say, "Oh, who's that?"

He doesn't bat an eyelid and says, "Oh that's Daphne, my lover. She's been my lover all my life." He then goes on to tell me he's been bonking her all these years while I want to put my fingers in my ears and scream, please make him stop! Then he goes on to say after gran died he married this old bird and bought her a flat and they moved in together. All very touching, until she died after falling off a bus. I don't know, I just thought, you jerk. Did you really have to tell me that you are basically going to pretend your wife didn't exist? It really turned my stomach. His attitude was quite modern I suppose: let it all hang out, let's not brush this under the carpet, but he was the type that existed then and exists now, a kind of sociopath who feels no guilt whatsoever for his behavior even though now, looking back I am sure my gran knew what he was up to because I remember her calling him ten times a day at the office and being jealous of other women etc etc.

But my point is this, it takes two to tango and the one who is cheating does so precisely because they know he/she can get away with it. I know so many women, married with kids, whose partners have cheated and they sort of forgive them and then guess what, the guy does it again. I think maybe you can forgive them once but after that you have to simply slash their tires and change the locks.

Like this woman Sally I know who has a daughter and told me recently that her husband has been cheating on her for the ten years they have been married. She said, "He recently confessed that two months after we were married he was with some prostitutes, but that doesn't bother me, that was just blowjobs with condoms."

"I don't get that. How could he do it after two months?"

"Well he'd do it after we'd had rows."

"Still ..." The situation here is it was obvious this guy was a real weirdo if he was doing this so soon into his marriage. Maybe it simply slipped his mind that he was married.

"But recently he got involved with a woman at work, emotionally involved, and that really bothered me. He told me it was finished but then I went round to her flat and found them in there and I confronted them, and I really think that affair is now over. And now I've joined a church and Peter is coming and he's going to get control of his impulses. It's for our daughter - you can't just throw in the towel. He says he's sorry and he won't do it again and I believe he can change."

Well I applaud her faith in human nature but I don't think he will change. Now, I'm not saying I am pure as the driven snow. I had a boyfriend once - for some reason although we were very close we could never commit to each other - who after we split up moved in with another woman and we'd sleep with eachother sometimes and I can't say I felt any guilt. Still, I wasn't the one attached (justifying it to myself!)

So, where would you draw the line? Could you forgive your wife/husband/partner for cheating on you? It just seems to me like it is a slippery slope.

Wanted: One Baby Bird Murderer

Yesterday I walked to school with the kids and Scarlett found a robin's egg on the pavement and was very excited about it. She asked me to take it home and hatch it.

Me "You are joking?"
Scarlett "It would be the easiest thing in the world. You'd just keep it warm."
"How?"
"Under some blankets."
"It would suffocate."
"Then sit on it like a bird."
"Yes good idea. I could build a nest in the front room and sit on it for a week wearing a Tweety Bird costume. Then when it is born I could chew worms and feed them to the tiny hatchling with tweezers. Er, no. Why don't you just take it and show it to your science teacher?"
"Oh mum, you are so mean."


Emma getting ready to sit on the nest and hatch the robin's egg

Then Scarlett came home from school screaming saying on the way home the egg had got crushed in her hands and yolk had come out. She screamed that I had killed the bird. Well I just ignored her and later while Scarlett was out with her dad I found the little one aka Sausage - who can pick ANY lock or get into any password protected computer file yet can barely read and would have been a shoe in for one of those child pick pockets in Fagin's Gang (Oliver Twist) - poking a little key that Scarlett had hidden God knows where into her sister's locked diary. I said, "Why are you doing that? You can't even read, let alone the fact that your sister would not want you to read it." She says, "Oh I'm just going to look at the pictures." After a while she says in a sweet little voice, "Can you read it to me? I want to learn to read." She is an MLB (Manipulative Little Bitch) so before I know it I am reading aloud from Scarlett's Diary. I was amazed at her poetic licence. There were two recent incidents of torture, one human, one animal:

"1. Daddy pulled out six splinters from my feet today but made it hurt a lot more than it should of. He was trying to kill me I think.

2. I found a robin's egg on the way to school. I wanted to give it to mum to take home but she hates animals and said she would not raise it. By the evening the egg had smashed. Mum is the one who killed that robin before it was born."

Let's hope the contents of that diary never get out. Sitting here waiting for Social Services to phone up looking for a Child Torturer and Animal Murderer.

So what do you reckon - am I a bad mummy and should I be punished?

Bruno's Austrian Nuts

If you are feeling a bit down I guarantee you will laugh your socks off at this clip from the MTV awards. Sacha Baron Cohen is now Bruno - a flamboyantly gay Austrian fashion correspondent hoping to make it big in Hollywood.



Seems like a fake "controversy," since everything is fake these days on TV but then why does Eminem storm off?

At last I have an ambition in life, I wanna be Bruno's bitch so bad. And as an Austrian I am highly qualified to assume this position.

I have already written him a job application to this effect (I really did always want a gay son):

Dear Bruno,

The moment I saw you at the MTV awards with your arse exposed I knew that we were soulmates and that we were destined to be together. You are the son I have always dreamed of. I do have two children - who are unfortunately girls - but it has always been my dream to have a gay son. Who doesn't dream of one day watching one's son wearing his first pair of pink spandex shorts and sporting his first set of pink rollerblades? Who doesn't wish for that first ballet recital when your son is the only boy up on stage in a mauve tutu? And then, when a gay son grows up you basically have a free interior designer to obsessively worry about your drapes, carpets and sofa arrangements and to tell you straight, "Mama, that dress makes your arse look the size of a hippo."

But enough crying about what could have been. I was unfortunately born too early for the docs to isolate a gene for gayness so that I could have made sure I produced a flaming gay baby. But the longing is still there and as a fellow Austrian I feel we could be very good for each other. It seems that some people in Hollywood believe you are a no talent guy who's only assets are a pair of tight cheeks but let's prove them wrong Bruno. Let's prove that Austria isn't just a place where men wear Lederhosen and ladies wear Dirndls. Let's show them that Austrian fashion is truly spectacular and unique.


Dear Bruno - Let's change the face of Austrian fashion together

In short, I wanna be your bitch. I'll do anything for you Bruno. I'll made sure your nuts are in good shape, I'll polish your jockstrap and make sure that an unfortunate accident like when you fell onto Eminem's face never happens again. Do we have a deal?

Your humble servant

Emma K
xxx

I will be checking the post with bated breath over the next few days. And what about you? If you had to be someone's personal slave who would it be?