I meant to say this ages ago, well, last week when Gordon Brown made that gaffe and said he was saving the world (not the banking system), he got it wrong. It's save the cheerleader, save the world, Gordon.

Happy Chanukah

Tonight (well, this afternoon) was the first night of Chanukah / Hanukkah - the festival of lights. Actually, a minor festival that got bigged up because, depending on how the calendar falls, is adjacent/overlapping with Christmas. And as well all know, christmas is a mega-yomtov (I know this because this year I received my first serious amounts of christmas presents. It truly is the season of giving, in a save-the-economy kind of way).

Zoe sent me a link to Songs in the Key of Hanukkah by Erran Baron Cohen (who is Ali G's brother, and must be mightily sick of his fifty-word bio anywhere always saying that.)

I've been into Erran's music for years - his former (?) band, Zohar, had two excellent albums, Elokeinu and Onethreeseven, and used to have a residency in a bar opposite the Roundhouse in Camden before it got refurbished and I was (almost) a proper groupie.

I'm slightly out of the loop - being on maternity leave - so I've jsut downloaded the album, and I'm loving it. I'm especially loving (a) the Dreidl Dreidl song, which is a kids' song I used to sing in cheder with Auntie Sheila and is now, like, real music, and (b) the guest artists, especially Y-Love, who I totally fell in love with at Limmudfest this summer (I was seven months pregnant, I suspect it was not reciprocal. Also, I'm married.)

Here's what I'm thinking. Being Jewish never used to be cool. Like, when I was a kid probably most of the people I knew quite fancied dressing up as chasidim, and doing crossover breakdancing / weird kazatska / Russian dance that Jewish people insist on doing at weddings, and taking kids songs, and funking them up and getting people to rap to them... and now you can.

Suddenly, we're an ethnic group, even though most of my childhood people (adults) said Jewish in the voice (whisper) you use for saying people have cancer. We could kinda pass as ... whatever we're supposed to passing for, and that was good. Now, we're almost as funky as some underground bhangra club. If only people in Stamford Hill who don't have TVs knew.

I lit the Chanukah candles for the first time with Zaphod. My son. Weird saying that.

I have not yet made latkes but I have been researching some good recipes. Sour cream and apple sauce are my preferred accompaniaments.

This is a brain dump of some of the stuff in my head right now.

if girls say had a lovely time what should i say - Google Search

The combined wonders of stats tracking and google tells me I'm first on google for if girls say had a lovely time what should i say?

My answer (cynic): she's not interested, but polite.

My answer (believes in hope/love/open mindedness): she had a lovely time, she wants to see you again.

Yer takes yer pick. But believing the second makes you a lot happier, in the long run.

The Last Days of Decadence | Shoreditch, London

If I wasn't mostly staying home / sleeping, I'd definitely be checking out The Last Days of Decadence in Shoreditch, not least because I have more nine twenties clothes / Art Deco accoutrements than you can shake a stick at.

A friend said to me that "7pm doesn't even exist when you have children," so it may be that I don't even get to the theatre for like another fifteen years. I hope not.

Cold callers? Crank callers...

I just got a phone call on my mobile from 01792 350023 and when I picked up some blokey clearly reading from a script said "I'm from CCA, consumer credit advice, and I want you to know this isn't a sales call."

Except it is. And the script is way bad. And the blokey was a does-not-meet (in the language of some consulting firms performance appraisal), and when I asked for their website address, he gave me this , and he answered everything I asked with "oh, so you don't have any debt?"

Call centres are the modern equivalent of working down the coal mines. Except the output is annoyance, rather than energy.

Expedition: Brent Cross

Many new mums have told me that they spent their fourth trimester in Brent Cross - especially if it was winter, as it's guaranteed to be warm.

Aside: Brent Cross is the Westfield of North West London
And look - Westfield have done some rather interesting paid search - google on Brent Cross and you get Westfield - like you live in Hendon but you'd google and go to Shepherds Bush? I think not.

So I decided to take Zaphod to Brent Cross, specifically John Lewis and Mothercare because (a) I had something to take back to John Lewis, (b) I'd heard tell of their mother and baby room, and (c) Mothercare is about as much sophistication as I can handle, right now.

First, parking is a pain. No space, apart from a disabled one, is wide enough to let me open the passenger door far enough to get into the back seat and extract Zaphod's Maxi-Cosi-fan-Tutte car seat from its clip-in seat base. So if you parked next to me and have an imperceptible dent in your drivers' side door, sorry, don't park next to me again.

Second, it's not that easy to (1) extract the child, (2) leave the child in the car seat on the wet tarmac while you get all the other kit, (3) remember the changing bag, (4) get the pram out of the boot, (5) open the pram with a deft foot movement which is nothing at all as easy as the annoying woman on the Bugaboo DVD makes it look, (6) add the adaptors to the car seat so they fit on the pram, (7) do it all quite quickly. And if it's raining, there's like 14 other things to remember/do.

Third, people - The Public - are annoying. So after all the stress of getting out of the car, Zaphod was a little unrelaxed, as was I, and people give you dirty looks if your baby's crying and one women - a stranger - even came up to me and put his dummy in his mouth before I'd even had a chance to say to her "excuse me, who are you, and when did you last wash your hands".

Before I'd even done any shopping/unshopping, Zaphod was hungry, and I thought cool, I'll go to the parent/feeding/changing room in John Lewis and we can breastfeed there. Breastfeeding in public, I still find a little tricky and I thought this would be perfect. The room is the size of my dead-small ensuite bathroom. It has three chairs and two changing tables and is next door to all the loos (there is a parent with child toilet, which is great, because I queued for ages in the child-free women's toilet only to discover the buggy doesn't fit in).

But once I'd got into the parent room and squahsed the buggy in, and taken my coat off and balanced him on my lap and unhooked my bazookas, it just wasn't that easy, and I tried and tried and just got really stressed. After a short while, I gave him a bottle (we're mixed feeding) but I don't know what the answer is, because if it means he doesn't get breast milk every time we go out, then I feel like we shouldn't really go out.

Aaaargh.

The parent room had about six buggies in it and loads of mums and it was a bit like that puzzle where you have to move the letters around but each time you move one letter, it affects all the others; I needed to change his nappy, and it required three other women to reverse out.

By now, two hours was up, and we hadn't actually done anything.

Coming out of the parent room, people got annoyed with me because I couldn't manouvere fast/well enough and I ended up sitting in the sofa department in tears with Zaphod crying/shouting and feeling like, sheesh, is this what it'll be like for the rest of my life?

Clearly not. After a certain age, and certainly for adults, you don't have to wear a full-lenght snow suit to go out, and you definitely don't have to lie on your back to put it on. Although I got pretty close when I was pregnant. Weebles wobble but they don't fall down. Apart from in my case.

Next - will I ever be able to exercise again?

What do people (women) do on maternity leave?

People - some people - have asked me this. Like one friend said to me, basically, what do you do all day?

First of all, I should say, that being at home is not quite the party I led you to believe last week. It's nice. It's lovely. It's easier than running a business, but there's a relentlessness to the responsibility that is quite overwhelming, sometimes. Like, some days, when D comes home, I just give him Zaphod and go and have a rest and beleive me I was never the kind of woman who needed a lie-down during the day. Conversely, I often used to operate in two competing time-zones simultaneously (Asia and the US) and could survive on little sleep for sure, but it was different.

Back to what Zaphod and I do.

We have spent a lot of quality time with the PVR. I am in Season Three of the West Wing, have The Wire waiting for me, and have watched all flavours of CSI and NCIS multiple times. I've also been catching up on girl-flicks: this week, A Boyfriend for Christmas, Mean Girls and Legally Blonde 2. Next week, geek-girl flicks, including The Net.

Aside: you know at the end of Mean Girls when Lindsay Lohan breaks up the plastic crown to share it because she's seen the light of goodness? Well, she throws out more crown than there actually is. The continuity people were not on top of this.

Also, I've got back to cooking. This is good because in the last three months of my pregancny I basically stopped functioning, apart from for work. I couldn't walk (annoying pregnancy complication called SPD (I dare you not to click that link if you're a woman - it's really better not to know. You'd still like to have kids, right? Don't ask people about their birth experiences, and don't ask about complications), and I was in a bad mood, and I couldn't go upstairs, even. People don't know, because for work I just had to carry on, but I was living on pain killers and the kindness of friends (Z and J) who filled our freezer with home cooked goodies as I couldn't even make a piece of toast. Now, I've made chilli and banana cake, the inaugural humous (due the talent of my in-house Natural Search Director, I'm now number two on the whole internet for humous, whodathunkit), and next week I might try and make curry.

When you have a baby everything takes longer. So we can't really do more than one "thing" a day - today we went to visit a sick friend.

Mostly what I do is: change nappies. Feed. Burp. Feed. Change Nappies. Play with Zahpod. Cuddles. Change nappies. Washing (there is a lot more washing than you can frankly ever imagine). If there's time, I play on the interweb, including doing our Tesco order. Half-read a paper/book/article.

Sunday morning: I wrote this on Friday, and it never got finished, which is the story of my life right now. One friend said to me "you'll never have more quarter-drunk cups of tea in your whole life".

Or half-written blog posts.