Navel Gazing Q&A (aka my first tag)

Lovely Mama at Manana Mama has just tagged me.  So now I've got to bare all.  I hope my happiest moment is yet to come.  I have gone straight to The Guardian piece that inspired MM's tag, and have not come up with my own version (as the ever-creative MM has).  We have Wyoming in common when it comes to happiness!

When were you happiest?
Oh God - can I have three moments?  No, make that four:

1.When I realised I was pregnant with my twin girls

2. & 3. in South Africa and Wyoming, both times up a mountain on a horse (not the same one, and not when pregnant).

My POV astride the stupendous horse Ace, descending a mountain into a lush valley

4. Walking my dogs down a valley in Gloucestershire where we rented the gatehouse of a famous writer.

Which living person do you most admire, and why?
Bryn Parry (Help for Heroes charity founder) for showing us that compassion and drive can take us a long way

What is the trait you most deplore in yourself?
Insecurity

What is the trait you most deplore in others?
Unreliability

What was your most embarrassing moment?
At Prep school when, as usual, I wasn't concentrating in a history lesson and thought shell-shock happened on a beach

What is your most treasured possession?
My under-used office at the end of our garden

My office in the London snow

What makes you unhappy?
Selfishness

What do you most dislike about your appearance?
Frown lines

Who would play you in the film of your life?
Meryl-bloody-Streep - sometimes my life is that serious

The most flattering photo of Meryl Streep of all time?

Which living person do you most despise, and why?
Nicole Kidman - overrated and over-botoxed

What is your favourite book?
Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier

What is your guiltiest pleasure?
Chocolate, chocolate and more chocolate

What do you owe your parents?
I owe my father everything, and I owe my mother a care for personal grooming

To whom would you most like to say sorry, and why?
My father, for not being able to introduce him to his grandchildren

What or who is the greatest love of your life?
My children

What does love feel like?
Unconditional, except when I'm tired and somebody is tantrumming

What was the best kiss of your life?
Wiith an ex-flatmate in Antibes in about 1998

Who would you invite to your dream dinner party?
Bradley Cooper for sex appeal, Michael Macintyre for humour, Daphne du Maurier for creativity, and closest friends for friendship.

Bradley Cooper: the photo speaks for itself

If you could bring something extinct back to life, what would you choose?
My Greek rescue dog, Klefti

Klefti, our charismatic Greek stray and a very pregnant me (not sure why K is wearing a harness and a lead)

What is the worst job you've done?
At the BBC working for a woman who hated.....women

What has been your biggest disappointment?
The conviction that I needed to settle down in my early thirties

If you could go back in time, where would you go?
The Wild West

When did you last cry, and why?
Can't remember, but it won't have been long

How do you relax?
Yoga

What single thing would improve the quality of your life?
A bigger home

What song would you like played at your funeral?
Imagination by Belouis Some

How would you like to be remembered?
Did her best (kind of)

19. Memories Part I: Four-Legged Bodyguards

Klefti (left) and Purdey (right) proved to be capable sentinels

For those of you that have been following my blog for a while, you will know that Klefti, our Greek stray died last summer.  The madness of trying to control his energy, while bringing up baby twins, was one of the reasons I started this blog only a couple of months earlier.  He was, after all, a wily survivor, a beach dog, with whom we fell so madly in love we had no choice but to bring him back to the UK.  We even bought our flat for him, as it has an 80' garden in a desirable part of town.

A surrogate child?  No, never.  We have always adored dogs.  He, Tatty and Purdey came first, and if children followed, they would be a blessing.  Dogs are not a dress rehearsal.  I always feel sad when dogs are rehomed when people have children.  To make a multi-species household work, you have to love your dogs as much as your children (a different love, but a love nevertheless).  You need patience.  They need love.  Sounds familiar?   Well, we didn't have dogs to test out what commitment felt like.  They just happened.  Big Daddy bought Tatty (the Westie) before I met him, but Klefti and Purdey were strays that we rescued; the first in Greece, the second in Ireland.

I stumbled across this picture of our bemused canines 'guarding' our newborns and thought I should share it.  When the picture was taken, the babies were about a week old.  Magpie is on the left, The Tank on the right - not that you can see very much of them, they are so tiny, cocooned in their swaddle blankets.

Klefti never got to do rough and tumble with the girls, as they were still 'drunken totterers' when he died.  We always loved watching him humour kids in the park, play-bowing and showing his teeth in a submissive smile.  He was a clown in dog's clothing. The girls would have their very own clown - or so we hoped.

Now that job is left to Purdey, who patiently allows the girls to ride him, stroke him, take his toys and, of course, feed him.  I'm not sure Klefti would have been so amenable, ('look, girls, I'm not a bloody horse,' he might have said) but his willfulness and surety of his own mind is what made him so unique, so strangely human.

15. Love and the Lexicon of Little People

Magpie calls Big Daddy 'Andu,' possibly because I'm such a nag it's the most easily imitable word she knows.  (Ok, I might be giving his Christian name away).  The Tank calls me 'Ma!!!' and the punctuation I have just used is entirely appropriate.  If she gets a toy stuck, drops some food while strapped in her buggy or is being annoyed by her sister, I am supposed to be there within milliseconds, sorting out the problem.

Rearing children can be tiring, it can be hard, but it can also be intoxicating.  I learnt this on two occasions, all in one week. 

First, witnessing the Tank's face crumpling when Big Daddy tickled me.  Tickling reduces me to a squirming victim, and on seeing her 'Ma' as a helpless girl must have ellicted filial devotion.  The Tank wanted - or so her expression said -  to defend me from my 'aggressor.'  Klefti, our dear departed Greek dog (for those who have been following my blog for a while), would have done the same.  Children and dogs are very loyal creatures.

The second occasion of parental intoxication was when the Tank said 'Mummy' for the first time.  Not 'Ma!' her appellation since the end of August, but Mummy.  The proper word.  The word that one day may be preceded by 'I love you,' Mummy.  It hit me right in the gut.  Yes, I am a Mummy.  The Tank's Mummy.  It is only when one's children confirm the fact, I realise, that it feels really, truly real.  Of course I am also Magpie's Mummy, but she is yet to say it and thus confirm this fact in all its metaphysical glory.

On the birth of my girls, when a childless friend asked me over dinner with slight disdain 'so have you fallen in love, then?'  I answered the question with awkward dismay.  'No, it's love, but it's a different love.  It's not being 'in' love. 

Everyone hears the myth that this is what happens as soon as you give birth but of course it's not comparable.  It's a huge, irrepressible love that makes you want to be a knight in shining armour for your children, always there to save and protect them.   For many, myself included, it gives your life meaning you never thought possible. 

However:

I didn't get butterflies and lose my appetite (quite the reverse)

I didn't suddenly feel horny all the time  (quite the reverse)

I didn't dash out to buy underwear and take a fresh interest in my appearance (quite the reverse)

The same childless friend who asked me about being 'in' love also asked me if I pined for my babies whenever I left the house, and was it all I could think about.  No, no, no, I didn't and it wasn't!  I wanted to think and talk grown-up stuff with grown-ups.  Playdates with 'mummy friends' are for talking breast v bottle and swaddling v sleeping bags, not evenings out with old schoolfriends, for God's sake.

I love the hell out of my children, but I also love, nay, relish a bit of grown-up time now and then.  I'm sure there must be some poetry out there that encapsulates the true sentiment of parental love, but it isn't like a spell that is cast on you and that lifts you onto a magic carpet.  Yes, of course there is magic involved in watching your babies turn into toddlers, toddlers into children and children....into....teenagers (ok scrap the last bit).  But ultimately it's an often tough, occasionally exasperating but mostly rewarding reality. 

4. For the Love of Dogs

My Goddaughter Minky stayed with us at my mother's this week.

Children seem to find their own amusement. The Tank played endlessly with two upturned flower pots she found on a white metal jardinière while Magpie sat on the lawn with Minky, fat and happy, eating daisies. How can she eat flowers but hate vegetables? I must check if daisies count towards a child's five-a-day.

I hosed off a snorkling mask, and other accoutrements of youth which I found in my mother's gazebo. The water from my cleaning efforts collected in a puddle next to a oval-shaped flowerbed, which Magpie decided was far more interesting than the mask.

She sat, wearing only her nappy and smart purple pants (knickers, as opposed to trousers), in the muddy puddle, patting the wet ground as if she had struck gold.

The Tank, never to be bettered,joined her.

My mother makes a move to rescue the mud-bound girls, and I'm not sure what Minky's mum thinks.

'Leave them,' I say. 'They're happy and they seem to like the mud.'

The fact that the mud gave me five minutes peace was an added bonus. It was far more savoury than eating snails, stones and cigarette butts.

I wonder if I have spent too much time bringing up dogs? Do I treat my babies too much like them? Is that why I do not panic at the sight of chubby toddler hands wrist-deep in good, honest soil? I am far more used to dogs than I am children.

'It's nearly bath time,' I add, as justification. 'Don't worry the girls will scrub up like new.'

I text a photo of a muddied Magpie to Big Daddy. He approves.

Our daughters appear to be unneurotic and happy. Maybe our life as dog owners has served us well?

It's been a strange week for canine and human comparison.

Klefti, our wonderful hairy, fat-pawed, naughty, willful dog, who looks like a bearded man in a dinner jacket with his black coat and and white chest, has a lump on his throat. Several lumps in fact. I don't know how we missed them.

It seems mad to write about him in this context, when as readers you don't even know him. He is a clown. He was a clown when we first met him in the car park at Ios Iannis in the Greek Pelion region, what, eight years ago? He was our holiday romance. We were waiting for a bus to take us somewhere and there he was. This silly puppy with huge white-tipped paws, a wise man's beard, a plumy tail and glistening chimp eyes, playing with a pack of fellow strays. He oozed charisma. We were transfixed. He tried to get on our bus. He stayed with us in our hotel annexe where we smuggled in bacon butties. On a beach he stole a woman's sandal, and ran off with a man's money belt. That's why we gave him his name, Klefti: the Thief.

He lived with us on the West coast of Ireland, when he was at his naughtiest, running at a sprint down to the gates to bark at passing cars, or chasing gulls on a wide, tideless beach. He has lived with us in Gloucestershire at a famous writer's gatehouse and in South West London, making himself comfortable wherever we let him, rearranging cushions with his teeth to suit his needs.

A world without Klefti would be a strange one. He has been family for nearly a decade. He is a loving animal, with a mischievous sense of humour. The Tank reminds me of him. She has the same sense of mischief. Is that why she loves him so, leaning on him as if he were a giant teddy bear, looking at us for approval?

Klefti is an excellent guard dog, but with sleeping babies his warnings are not always welcome. Today, having picked him up from the vets for more tests, I do welcome them. Tatty, our Westie, likes to join in the chorus, while Purdey the ever-hopeful lab has no ear for intruders, only a nose for food.

Long live Klefti. We love him.