CHILDREN'S PARTIES

When I was a child, birthday parties took place at home: my mother kicked off with children's party games - pass the parcel, of course, pin the tail on the donkey, musical statues - you know the drill - and then we'd have tea - cheese and pineapple hedgehogs, cocktail sausages,  jelly and icecream and a home-made birthday cake. Then, at home-time, off everyone would go with a balloon and a slice of cake wrapped in a paper napkin.

Fast forward nearly forty years and this kind of party seems a rarity - clever mums play it as a retro-riff and get away with it, but once the infants are primary school age, it seems one is expected to make the kind of effort appropriate to offspring of Oligarchs, or to the launch of a new beauty product. A venue must be hired, with an entertainer - possibly two - or alternatively, one might do what a friend of Trefusis Minor does every year, which is to hire an entire cinema for a preview screening of a hot-ticket children's movie. It seems that these days the food must be kiddie-lavish too - I remember a splendid party where the children were presented with the tiniest possible smoked salmon sandwiches, vast amounts of quails eggs, and a croquembouche of Ladurée macarons, but I suppose that's West London for you. Don't get me started on the awesome contents of party bags - I swear the infamously high-grade GQ Men of the Year goody bag has nothing on some of those Trefusis Minor has come home with.

Of course, these kinds parties are very lovely and the children have a marvellous time: I'm sure that if we were very well-off we'd pull out the stops too but we really can't run to that kind of opulence chez Trefusis: I do wish that someone brave would come out with a Party Non-Proliferation Treaty, and we could go back to the low-fi approach of the 1970's.


I'm old enough to know that I don't need to compete with the hiring of a cinema, or having a flower-fairy themed party with 'real fairies' in a West London garden square and until now, we've had parties at home similar to the ones i had as a child. However, if one has to invite the whole class even something very modest gets shockingly expensive - now that The TT is about to turn five and every single person she meets seems to be her 'bestest friend in the whole world', I've had trouble capping the guest list at school friends only. I can't see how I can get away without hiring the church hall and the thought of trying to keep thirty children happy for a couple of hours with me as the 'mum-tertainment' fills me with clammy-handed dread, so there will have to be someone hired in for a side-show too. I can manage the food on my own, and bugger the party bags - they can have cake and a novelty pencil - but still, it's working out at about £100 per hour. Yikes.

Does anyone have any suggestions about giving a fun children's party without busting the budget or a blood-vessel?

A LIFE IN SHOES

About a zillion years ago, one of my favourite bloggers, Christina at Fashion's Most Wanted, tagged me in a shoe meme. It's taken me such a shamefully long time to pick up the baton, I can't actually remember the rules of the meme, other than one had to post pictures of one's favourite shoes. 


This weekend, however, Mr Trefusis made me sort out my shoe cupboard, and I finally got round to taking some (rather bad) pictures. Like all women I have far too many shoes, yet end up wearing only three pairs, and those are either too worn or too boring to show here. My favourite shoes should really go in the bin - they're completely knackered but they're chocolate brown stilettos, with a very pointy Blahnik-style toe and schiaparelli pink detail and I completely love them.

These are Prada: Black kid with a natural coloured lizardskin and silver piping. Sadly, like their owner , they're getting on a bit and are a little tired and worn.  Nevertheless, every time I slide my feet into them, I feel like Zelda Fitzgerald - without the dodgy alcoholism and mental issues, obviously - but in a jazz age kind of way that makes me want to perch elegantly on a bar stool and knock back a couple of Sidecars.

These are also Prada: fabric with ostrich: I fell in love with the print and the bright turquoise toes and heels. Like all Prada shoes they're very comfortable, but they're a little too distinctive to wear often and so, despite being ten years old, they're still in quite good nick.

Bottega Veneta and my most bargainacious shoes ever: they were twenty-five pounds reduced from £250, presumably because there was no call for orange shoes in London 12 years ago when I bought them. Twenty five pounds. More than anything else, they make me feel like Summer's finally arrived: I like to wear them with a pink linen shift dress and with watermelon pink varnish on my toes.

These are Kurt Geiger - satin with swarovski crystal studded heels and cripplingly uncomfortable - taxi shoes if ever there were any. They also upstage me terribly so, fabulous as they are, I've worn them about twice - once to a Harper's Bazaar party where I had to take paracetamol to be able to keep them on, and then once to a dinner party where I knew I'd be sitting down all the time. Are these what magazines call a statement shoe?

'No one would ever mistake you for my mistress in those shoes,' said Mr Trefusis, rather unflatteringly. I don't for one minute suspect him of having a mistress, but I do know what he means: you'd never slap a super-injunction on someone in Ferragamos.  However, what they lack in vampiness, they make up for in sophistication and I love them passionately not least because they remind me of my honorary grandmother, who had immense style, and swore by cashmere jumpers, linen sheets and Ferragamos with every outfit. 

I couldn't work out why these were the only flat shoes in the shoe cupboard - surely I must have other flats, I thought, casting around for evidence. I found a pair of Converse, a couple of pair of really beaten up ballet flats and (the shame) a pair of frog green Crocs: I seem only to wear flats to get from A to B, and then whip out the heels. I must have a terrible complex about being short, or maybe it's that unconsciously I think it's only worth spanking serious shoe money on what the Tiniest Trefusis calls 'heel-high shoes'. However, these glamorous gold Prada flats make me feel a bit Jacqueline Onassis. Is it just me, or do shoes have a transformative power for every woman? Is it the Cinderella thing all over again?

I couldn't photograph these to save my life - they're purple satin and very high and I wore them when I married Mr Trefusis, but that's another story for another time. They're Kurt Geiger.

My favourite shoes don't belong to me at all - the Tiniest Trefusis wore these silver Kicker boots not long after she first learned to walk.  She's very much her mother's daughter - the first word she ever said was 'Shoe'.  

HALLOWE'EN

As a child, we celebrated Hallowe'en in a curiously pagan way - the spooky shrunken heads of the swede lanterns were only the half of it: most of the rest of the entertainment seemed to involve apples. We'd peel apples, trying to get the peel off in one long ribbon, and then throw it over our left shoulders - it's supposed to land in the shape of the initial of the man you'll marry. I've never gone out with a man whose name begins with 'S', let alone married one. We did a lot of apple bobbing too - I told Trefusis Minor about it: he looked horrified and told me sharply that it was too dangerous and someone might drown. He is still the health and safety officer in this house. And there was also a game involving hanging apples on pieces of string from the door lintel - your hands were tied behind your back and you had to try and take a bite.

I've forgotten most of the witchy stuff now - it was pretty tame, I'm sure, and probably involved yet more apples and some candle magic. We weren't allowed pumpkins - if they were even available in the north of England of the late seventies - and although we had heard of 'tricky treating'[sic], the idea was considered 'American'. Nothing more needed to be said for us to understand that it wasn't something we would be able to do. Looking back on it with the distance of thirty years, I take my black pointy hat off to my mother and aunt - it takes some genius to keep a houseful of the under tens occupied for a whole day with nothing more than a large bag of apples and a few wrinkly swedes.

The Trefusis Hallowe'en is a little more commercial - these days pumpkins are more easily available than swedes in West London, and an awful lot easier to deal with. And if the children want to dress up and go next door to beg for sweets, then it's perfectly all right with me, possibly because I know they have no interest at all in the 'trick' part of the equation. It also offers a brilliant hook for keeping the children entertained for a whole day without them once uttering the vile words 'I'm bored'. I may not be much cop with apples and root vegetables, but I'm a dab hand at making spooky soup, and spider cake, and playing games like 'let's turn Daddy into a Mummy', though this is, of course, a terrible waste of a roll of white loo paper.

The Tiniest Trefusis has already had a fabulous preview of Hallowe'en fun, albeit not of the home made variety. She and I were lucky enough to go along to the press preview of Harrods' Hallowe'en programme, which runs over the Hallowe'en weekend. Activities on the fourth floor (toys, children's designer boutiques, Junior collections etc) include Fiendish Face painting (not terribly fiendish in the Tiny T's case - she wanted to be a butterfly), Creepy Crafts (we enjoyed making a bespoke witches hat), and Marvin's Magic's Freaky Body Illusionist (12-2pm in the Toy Kingdom). There's also delicious frozen yoghurt with spooky sprinklings available at the new YooMoo frozen yoghurt bar just near Way In, not that Trefusis Minor or The TT are ever to be fobbed off with frozen yoghurt - they think it's a terrible swizz and won't accept anything other than proper ice-cream.
For children between 5 and 8, Waterstones at Harrods is hosting a series of readings of Terrifying Tales (sessions at 2, 2.30 and 3pm) with tricks and treats for all and for grownups, my lovely friend Michael Korel is giving personal Tarot readings, also at Waterstones. For more information see the Harrods website.

A LA RÉCHERCHE DES VACANCES PERDUES

'I've turned into my parents, haven't I?' I said to Mr Trefusis halfway through our holiday, as I tuned the car radio into Radio Four and suggested we might stop to have a look at the view. I found myself parroting phrases like 'Just in case' and 'You can't trust the forecast' as I packed cagoules and cardigans, sunhats and suncream, and insisted on the children getting out to the beach even when it was far from warm for 'a bit of a blow'. Worse still, every time anyone yawned, I said 'Tires you out, all this sea air'. It's true: it does.

The piéce de résistance of my search for early eighties authenticity was dragging the tirelessly good-humoured Belgian Waffling down to the beach in a howling gale so we could enact the time-honoured British Tea Ceremony, Holiday Edition. I think we managed one cup each from the outsize thermos and a scone, crunchy with wind-whipped sand, before the charm wore off, but it evoked the requisite nostalgie de la boue. The only way we could possibly have trumped the experience would have been to drink the tea in the car whilst watching the sea and the lashing rain. But I think you have to be in Filey for it to work properly. I spent several summers as a child on the North East coast, and apparently I used to go swimming quite happily - God knows how I avoided hypothermia.

Even Mr Trefusis - who, like the Bromsgroves, came from a family that went Abroad for their holidays - fell for the charms of lovely Ventnor, even if he spent most of it pretending to be Alain Delon, hanging out in a fishing village somewhere on the Cote D'Azur.

Steephill Cove, our nearest beach, is the Petit Trianon of the British seaside. Tiny as it is, and accessible only by foot or by boat, it manages to boast not only the kind of rockpool action beloved of the Cappuccino Classes but also two of the best fish restaurants on the island, and café-cum-shop selling a mean espresso, Minghella's ices and cool retro sweets like Starbars, Fry's Mint Cream and Sherbet dibdabs. I muttered something about it being the new Dorset, and took Trefusis Minor and The TT down to the shoreline to build sandcastles and swim in the sea, leaving Mr Trefusis to 'watch' us from his favourite table, whilst simultaneously reading one of those 'The Girl with ..' novels and taking surreptitious peeks around his sun specs at the pretty girls coming in and out of the café.

Yet it wasn't all about trying to recapture the holidays of my childhood - as The Waffle's charming brother said as he took us all out on a boat, it's about making new memories too, even if some of them are inspired by old ones. 'I'll never forget the first time my dad took me fishing.' he said, as the mackerel lines were passed around. Fishing for mackerel off the coast of the Isle of Wight is infinitely more satisfying than catching crabs - the little blighters jump with lemming-like enthusiasm onto your hooks, and even The Tiniest Trefusis caught three, first time she dropped her line over the side. Trefusis Minor was less successful - he's more likely to remember his valiant attempts not to be seasick. We caught twenty-five mackerel in about ten minutes - and took them back to the lovely holiday house and baked some en papillotte with cider and onions, and froze the rest to take home after the holidays.

This morning, before leaving for the office, I made Mr Trefusis some mackerel pâté with the last of them (not as goddessy as it sounds - it's an insanely easy recipe, involving nothing more trying than mashing the ingredients together with a fork). I took the cooked fish off the bone by hand and as I sat on the bus on my way to work, I couldn't help noticing how appallingly whiffy my fingers still were, despite washing them several times. Ick.

Mackerel-scented fingers are too prosaic as a memory trigger and can hardly compete with Proust's madelines for romance, but all the same, I spent the whole journey wrapped in the comforting memories of a blissful fortnight spent in wonderful company, rediscovering simple pleasures.

THE TRAVELLING TREFUSII

As a child I was deeply envious of friends who holidayed abroad, particularly the Bromsgroves who, every summer, would pack up their Volvo and drive off to the South of France, returning relaxed and happy, tan marks livid against Piz Buin bronzed skin. I wanted to be one of those families, off for a fortnight on a beach in Spain or France, the children left to their own devices way past their usual bedtime, whilst the parents got mildly wasted on Rosé or Sangria. But no. We went to Norfolk, or Dorset, or Devon. Our entertainment came straight from the pages of a Ladybird book, digging endless sandcastles and dragging shrimping nets through rockpools, punctuated by the odd trip to a National Trust house or the treat of a coca-cola and a packet of crisps in a pub garden. The sense was that there was something decadent - slightly degenerate even - about the Foreign Holiday: we were above such things, in the same way we were above having a pumpkin at Hallowe'en, and instead if we wanted a spooky lantern, we had to spend an entire afternoon hollowing out a turnip with a dessert spoon.

But now I'm a bona-fide grown-up and can choose my own holiday destination, do Mr Trefusis and I bundle the infant Trefusii into the Audi and head off for the fleshpots of the Midi? We do not. The early programming was too effective. Holiday heaven for me means the Great British Break and doing my best to repeat the highlights of childhood summers of the nineteen seventies. If there's a tea room to be visited, so much the better. 

It means a spot of unspoilt coastline, preferably with a proper beach café. We have yet to try the crab tea, but I'm longing to.

My childhood memories are, like everyone's I suppose, all shiny and golden, full of endlessly balmy summer's days. I tell a lie, there was a holiday in 1982 which was mostly full of thermos flasks, anoraks and windbreaks, but mostly there was sunshine - I promise you it's a myth that the weather in England is unremittingly and uncharitably wet.

This year's holiday is no different. So far, we have honestly had very nice weather, well, mostly - today decided to be the exception that tested the rule and indeed, it was like this, and I wasn't the only one who was glad I packed the waterproof bhurka-style pacamac. Anyway, here is Mr Trefusis, the day after we arrived, trying his best to pretend it's thirty five degrees as he reads his copy of The Week.

Why is it that fathers can read the newspaper - every section, even the Review and the motoring bit - whilst also 'supervising' the offspring. I have to start breathing into a paper bag if I take my eyes off them for an instant: He's entirely unconcerned that the children are hurtling into the sea fully clothed.

We get on with the lovely business of poking at rockpools: half afraid, half hopeful a crab might nip our fingers, but ready to settle for finding a whelk or an untethered limpet.

And then spend the rest of the afternoon trying to execute an over-ambitious sandcastle

before working out that the water is actually really lovely after all, perhaps not quite lovely enough to swim in, although people were, but definitely perfect for paddling.

(with very many thanks to Belgian Waffling)

THE GLORY OF THE INTERNITS

I'm delighted to report that the Tiniest Trefusis and I are now nit-free - we tried a combination of the wonderful suggestions that came pouring in (thank you, internits!). I was particularly interested to try the mayonnaise cure, but Mr Trefusis finished the last of the Hellmann's on his sandwiches before I could annex it for nit-smothering purposes.

However, it seems that constant vigilance is the key in the war against the horrid little pest, and lest I let down my anti-nit defences, I'm going to invest in this cautionary print from the fabulous Jason Freeny and display it prominently chez Trefusis.

In case nits aren't your thing - though from the number of comments on the last post it's hardly a niche interest - take a look at the equally wonderful Gingerbread Man Dissected.

Many thanks to India Knight for sending me Jason's Cootie picture, and to Jason himself for kindly giving me permission to reproduce his work for this post: do visit his website and have a look for yourself at his clever and quirky prints.

NIT FAMILY TREFUSIS

Every morning, at about half four, The Tiniest Trefusis climbs into bed with Mr Trefusis and I. Still more than three-quarters asleep, she clambers between us, and welds herself to me, head pressed against mine, a hot arm thrown round my neck, icy feet jammed into my side. Her snuffling breath blows stertorously into my ear, keeping me awake, but I don’t mind. She’s my baby, my last child, and the more Trefusis Minor grows up from infant to boy, each passing week ushering in the wilful independence of six, rather than the boyish neediness of five, the more I cling to the fleeting babyhood of Tiny Trefusis.

So really, much against the better judgement of Mr Trefusis, I can’t quite bring myself to put her back in her own bed. We both crave the comfort of each other still, listening as the intense intimacy of mother and newborn baby echoes back at us over the intervening years. Every time she hops in it reminds me of those precious weeks after her birth, when we seemed to spend most of our time in bed together, she dozing at my breast, and me too awed by her fragile beauty to go to sleep. We’re both caught in the no man’s land of toddlerhood: she reserves the right to be simultaneously ‘a Big’ and a baby, and I can’t bear to discourage her.

However, now that she is on her way to being three, and has started Montessori, this physical proximity has its disadvantages. I waved her off on her first day, and not a week later, as I sat one afternoon at my desk, I started to feel a tell-tale prickling on my scalp, behind my ears, and near the nape of my neck. It quickly became more than a tickling irritation, and I found I could no longer suppress the urge to scratch and furtively shoved a plastic fork underneath my hair and wiggled it about, scraping about the roots as gently and subtly as I could.

Nits. The Tiniest Trefusis had given me nits.

Scratch. Scritch. Scratch. Scratch. Scritch-scritch. Scratch.

As the afternoon wore on, I could find no relief in a little light fork therapy: I locked myself in the ladies lavatory and gave into an ecstasy of scratching; scarlet fingernails whirling dervishes underneath my hair. Oh, the rapture. The elation of being able to sate the insane itching. I emerged to look at myself in the mirror. Any vestige of a once elegant coiffure excised by the beserker action of my fingers, I looked as if I’d had a particularly enthusiastic run-in with a live cable.

The relief was short-lived. As I travelled home on the bus, I had to sit on my hands to stop them going to my hair. To keep myself sane, I focused on the image of the rather ancient nit comb rusting at the bottom of the medicine chest in the bathroom.

Scratch. Scritch. Scratch. Scratch. Scritch-scritch. Scratch.

I gathered the Trefusii together, larded them with the only conditioner I could find – an extremely expensive Kerastase hair masque, rather too fit for purpose, and ignoring their screams as I pulled heartlessly through tangles - Mr Trefusis the loudest of the protestors, naturally – I de-nitted them. Astonishingly, Trefusis Minor and Mr Trefusis were entirely nit free and in a fit of pique I threatened to send them down the road to the Glaxo Smith Kline laboratory to see if they had any special immunity that could be bottled and patented as an expensive anti-nit vaccine. It could make us rich beyond our wildest dreams - I’d pay, wouldn’t you?

The Tiniest Trefusis had six proper nits. Nits so big, you could give them their own sideshow in a flea circus, and they didn’t appear to bother her remotely – not a surreptitious scratch or poke into her still downy baby hair. I started on my own. I’m secretly immensely pleased with my hair – it’s very long, and very thick, and the greatest treat I can think of is a visit to Graham the Hair God for a re-blonding, or a blow-dry or for one of his more elaborate confections should I have something exciting to go to. It’s a devil to get a nit comb through, though. I think it took me a full thirty minutes to comb the Kerastase through the lot. And if I wasn’t as badly affected as The Tiny T, the little buggers were certainly in there. On the upside, of course, we're the shiniest-haired family in Shepherds Bush.

Of course, the problem with treating nits is that you have to keep it up – one session with the nit comb and the conditioner isn’t enough: I’ve been taking the family through the nit ritual daily, and in the case of La Princesse Pou, twice – once with conditioner and once with a special evil battery operated comb which is supposed to condemn the nits to death by electrocution. I’ve developed a whole range of severe, scraped back Let-Me-Be-Your-Stern-Mistress hairdos – the nit comb conditioner trick takes so long in the morning I don’t have the time left to blow dry it, and I’m pretty keen to keep my hair up and out of everyone’s way until I have the nit all-clear, particularly given the amount of air-kissing that's obligatory in my line of work. It also means I can poke hair pins at the itchy bits mid afternoon, on the pretext of tidying my 'do'.

I’m very over all this – how long do I have to keep doing it? Do you have nits? Any cunning ways for getting rid of them that I don’t know about, short of making the Tiniest Trefusis wear a bedcap so she doesn’t keep on sharing her nits with me at night?

Scratch. Scritch. Scratch. Scratch. Scritch-scritch. Scratch.