The Sunday Salon – Mums@Home again (a review)

After my earlier Sunday Salon post, I have now managed to finish Mums@Home by Sophie King, so two Sunday Salon posts in one Sunday! Mums@Home turned out to be an easy but engrossing read, perfect for a lazy, sunny, not too taxing Sunday. Involving an interesting premise about the lives of the parents who post on an internet parenting site and how they intertwine with each other, it is typical chick-lit but quite cleverly done. I like Sophie King’s use of other media to segment her work, in The School Run she used clips from the radio and in Mums@Home she used internet messages.

I thought this one was a bit better than Sophie King’s The School Run, which was very orientated towards mothers and their children (although there was a token male). As I said before, Mums@Home is still chick-lit and does involve troublesome teenagers and nasty spouses quite heavily but I think this one is more relevant and has something more for the general reader.

Now back to my crime thriller, had my chick-lit dose over and done with for quite a while. 

The Sunday Salon – Mums@Home

Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell are still missing in action and I’ve temporarily abandoned ‘I’m Watching You’  for a couple of Sophie King books after seeing her at a talk recently. The first ‘The School Run’, I finished yesterday, the second Mums@Home, I’m more than half way through, would probably be on the home run to finishing it actually (these books are nothing but easy reads) if Girl Lacer hadn’t snuggled up to me on the sofa whilst I was reading and said,

“Mummy, that’s not housework.”

“Mummy, you should be doing housework.”

“Mummy, you should be putting washing out on the line or something,”

She pulls me off the sofa.

“Come on then!”

So, I put the washing on the line, which did actually need doing, as does the hedge, which Mr. Lacer wanted to know whether I was doing it “sometime this weekend or was it the next?”. I have to do the hedge but I’m currently on the sofa with Mr. Rabbit who’s asleep, whilst Boy Lacer goes and gets him a drink and some icecream.

Anyway back to Mums@Home, it is very much like The School Run, in fact two of the characters from The School Run do make a brief appearance as just about the only happy people in Mums@Home (although in keeping with what seems to be the norm in Sophie King books they were pretty miserable in The School Run). In both The School Run and Mums@Home, which as their titles suggest are about parenting and children plus also about the relationships between the parents, the characters are miserable because a) their partner has cheated on them b) their partner is possibly cheating on them c) their partner has probably done something dodgy and the children are all complete nightmares. All in all although it is perfectly readable it does get a bit depressing, although books where the parents are happily in love and the children are reasonably behaved little angels probably don’t make much of a good read.

The School Run by Sophie King

After seeing Sophie King a.k.a. Jane Bidder talk at a writers’ talk recently, it made me tempted to read some of her work. The first The School Run, I finished today. Telling the story of seven families sharing the same school run, it follows a week in their lives. It’s like watching a car crash in slow motion, as the majority of the characters spiral out of control, a bit addictive but a bit disturbing at the same time. A good book if you have children yourself, other than that you might not ‘get it’.

I’m now reading her second, Mums@Home, I may possibly go into Sophie King overdose, reading two back to back, but Mums@Home has an interesting premise about parents using an internet parenting forum, something I’ve used heavily in the past.

In Search of Mister Rabbit

I’ll get to the rabbit in a minute, but to warn you that this is one of those ‘what me and the kids got up to today’ posts, so I’ll start at the beginning.

Pretty much an average day today, still lovely warm weather. The morning was still me trying to put some semblance of order back into the kids room, it’s slow going. I was trying to grab sneaky chapters of my latest read; Sophie King’s School Run, I saw her speak yesterday and so far it’s a really good book, indicated by the fact that I keep on trying to find a few minutes to read it, a book I’m finding hard going and you won’t find me doing that during my average day. I have to precise my glowing praise by saying School Run really is one of those books that you’re only going to probably like if you have kids yourself, but if you do, you’ll find a lot of sympathy for the characters.

Afternoon was of course nursery for Girl Lacer and shopping for me and Boy Lacer. Boy Lacer really needed some summer shoes, however shoes are a tricky issue with him, with his hyperextension he really does need support in his ankles, however summer shoes don’t really do that. He has a pair of clumpy shoes (so clumpy I think when he trod up my foot two days ago he managed to break my toe!) but they’re very hot (his socks after he’s been wearing them in those boots, extremely sweaty, yeuch) and also a pain to put on, he walks round the flat barefoot most of the time, but if he wants to go out in the garden I do an inward groan because it means I have to struggle with his boots or if he just needs his shoes on to do the nursery run. So although they’re probably not the best shoes for him, I’ve got him some Clarks Doodles, he is extremely smitten with them, they’ve got a lion on one and a monkey on the other. He’ll still wear his boots if I know he’s going to do a lot of walking, but I know that me and his have very similar feet and there’s one thing worse than painful feet, swollen, hot painful feet, so it’s a case of weighing the pros and cons.

We were in the shoe shop for a while, so didn’t have much of a chance to do much more shopping, however we needed to go and find a new Mister Rabbit for Boy Lacer. You see Boy Lacer, historically, has never really been one for cuddly toys, however he’s recently developed an extreme attachment to one of Girl Lacer’s toy rabbits, he even gave the (as far as Girl Lacer was concerned) nameless rabbit a name, he decided to call it Mister Rabbit. However, you know how it goes with kids, as soon as one of them shows an interest in something, the other suddenly thinks that thing is way more cooler than they had previously thought, so Girl Lacer had to be coerced into letting Boy Lacer sleep with the rabbit, but that couldn’t continue, so I had to search for another rabbit, ideally the same one. Unfortunately as the rabbit in question had been brought over Easter it was a seasonal thing and not available anymore, however we did find something very similar and thankfully Boy Lacer has taken it to his heart as Mister Rabbit and it is already a true little boy’s toy, covered in dirt (from being dragged around outside, rabbits are good for dragging due to their long floppy arms and legs and ears) and snot from Boy Lacer’s nose as he’s snuggled into it. Mister Rabbit has had a ride in the pushchair with Boy Lacer, a ride on the toy car and been fed lots of ice cream (a toy boiled egg).

In other news; we’ve had another complaint about our Russian Vine, it’s currently invading three other gardens and committing rose-icide in one. It was a ‘nice’ complaint, which of course made me feel guilty, so we’re cutting it down. That russian vine has been a bane of our gardening lives since we’ve moved in, we’re constantly cutting it back, ok in August – September when it flowers it is pretty stunning but when it’s not it’s nothing but hard work. I cut it back majorly over last winter, in the space of literally the last week it’s now like I did nothing at all. A quick google of Russian Vine removal just now found lots of references to ‘not for small gardens’, so whichever eejit planted it originally in our ‘small garden’ needed their heads seeing to. So this weekend (by which time it’ll have probably grown another metre), we’ll cut it right back to it’s roots and let the existing growth (which is really difficult to remove) die naturally. The fence it’s on is about to come down anyway (once we’ve agreed who’s fence it actually is, yes we’re still disputing that). I know to remove it completely we should be trying to dig up the roots, but it’s a very old, very established plant and trying to dig anything out of our soil is a nightmare, so I doubt our ability to do it properly, so um we won’t bother. So yes, I know it’ll be a problem again at some point, we’ll just see how quickly it does grow back, the lazy so and so in me says maybe it’ll next become a problem long after we’ve moved out of here but if it does grow back too quickly, well we’ll have to try and dig it up (don’t want to use chemicals as I do try and garden organically).

Writing from Home

I went to the second Alison Baverstock talk today, part of the Kingston Readers’ Festival. Tonight was on the subject of Writing from Home and featured the authors Sophie King (journalist Jane Bidder) and Catherine Jones/ Kate Lace, it tackled the topic of writing from home on two fronts; the obvious physical act of writing from home plus the use of what you know as inspiration.

On the act of writing from home, it was nice to hear others acknowledge how hard it is to write whilst looking after small children. It was also quite comforting that two of the authors actually, when they were starting out some years ago, writing with small children like me, were actually pretty much living round the corner from me, so not that it actually makes any difference at all but it’s nice to know that two local writers in a similar situation to me made it!

On the subject of using your life as inspiration, it was nice to hear how other people take aspects of their life in their writing. It’s been quite timely for me, I’ve resurrected recently an old project, set on a street not too dissimilar to the road I live on. I’ve actually been writing it longhand after a suggestion from the first talk and so far it’s going well, I’d been abandoning various projects over the years partially because I feel I’m developing so much as a writer and writing something takes so long, that within a few months of working on something, the beginning is a completely different standard to the middle and I feel I’ve lost continuity of style. So the resurrected old project is an attempt from me to rewrite the beginning of an old story of mine using what I know now, that I didn’t know at the time.

Other interesting bits that came up in the question and answer session included:

• if you’re going to use a pen name pick a surname roughly in the middle of the alphabet, as when people go into a bookstore they tend to first look in the middle bookshelf at the top apparently, also choose a name that’s easy to spell. Funnily enough the pen name I use (and no it’s not Lacer) is pretty close to the middle of the alphabet, chosen because a) I needed one, people have trouble spelling my real name, I had visions of failed searches on Amazon (if only) b) the surname is quite tough and no nonsense, which I like and the name was chosen as it’s the same as a screen hero I’m a big fan of. They also said pen names were useful to provide a ‘fresh start’ for a writer.
• a chapter should be no more than 2000 words and have at least two big action events and a cliff hanger. The ideal book length these days is apparently 80,000 words as paper is getting expensive!
• not having a chance to write actually helps, as when you can write you get a ‘subliminal uprush’ and the ideas all come rushing out.

So, a good session. I ended up breaking my no fiction book buying rule and got two Sophie King books and an Alison Baverstock book as well. Buying some new fiction to read was such an amazing relief, regular readers will know I’ve been trying to get through the dregs of my to be read pile and it’s been dreary trying to get into books I’ve had for three years unread, so actually my rate of reading has dropped dramatically. So I literally felt like a dog with fresh prey between my teeth taking those books to the till and I want to devour them now, instead of picking over the left overs I have had!