does anything taste as good as skinny feels?

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Making the most of the world wide web

This evening a friend came over for dinner.  In between slicing onions and putting the children to bed I threw on what I considered to be appropriate evening wear for a relaxed dinner at home a deux.  Tight gold jeans and patent red high heels ensured my children were all twitchy and wanted to know where I was going.

Ever thoughful of my responsibility as a hostess I had organised the Tesco delivery man to arrive around 10pm.  He arrived bang on time to unload my carefully prepared pudding - a Terry's Chocolate Orange.  They were 20% off.  It'd be rude not to.

Do you think Kate Rothschild and Ben Goldsmith are mad to air their dirty laundry?

''To all the vultures harassing and taunting me, the people calling me a whore and a bad mother, the threatening emailers and callers: I have been with my husband since I was 17, my whole life from then until now has been dedicated to him and our children. Ben in a rational mood would be the first to say that my devotion to my children is unshakeable."  Kate Rothschild defended herself this week in a Twitt-war with husband Ben Goldsmith.

At best, my own parenting skills leave a huge amount to be desired.  The rest of the time they are merely dire.  There are times when my brain seems to unhinge itself from the tepid, liquidy comfort my skull offers and thrusts mouth and limbs into the most unsavoury of behaviour and speech.  Which is why I sympathise with Kate Rothschild and Ben Goldsmith with the highly public airing of the breakdown of their marriage over the last week.  It's a bit like Prince William allowing himself to be interviewed by Heat magazine after Kate snogs Harry in the toilet at Boujis nightclub.  It's also the reaction of two people who are involved in a most common but deeply upsetting facet of marriage and who have become removed from rationale.


In other news, here is me and my chum enjoying a quiet few drinks.

New job

The husband has found a great job.  I'm very proud of him as it's no mean feat at the moment.  The only snag is the job's in London which is 250 miles away from where we are living.  He is staying in the big smoke during the week then coming home for weekends.  Apart from the obvious downside of us not seeing each other or him not seeing the children, I can see a number of upsides.

The pay is way better then he'd get up here and there is masses of work.

One of the main reasons to be here is to see my parents.  I can see ma and pa constantly.

I can spend every evening on skype chatting to my mates in New Zealand without my husband raising his eyebrows in irritation at the content of our conversations.

The sky plus recorder is now rammed with series links of Made in Chelsea, The Only Way Is Essex, Peter Andre: My Life.

I can eat tinned spaghetti on toast with the children at 5pm and not cook dinner.

When the twins wake up in the night and want to sleep in our bed, there's plenty of room for them.

Every cloud and all that.

Tonight I'm off to stay at a friend's house for a sleepover with the children so we can focus properly on drinking wine and talking shit until late.

Internal and external photoshopping

Last night the husband and I went out for dinner.  I got changed about 18 times, tried to work out if I wanted to channel Liz Hurley/Mary Quant summer chic with white trousers and a glittery black top or show off my past two summer's efforts at eliminating strap marks by donning a new red strapless number I'd rather cleverly bought on ebay super cheap.
'Is that the one you bought online?' The husband buttons up his shirt.
'Yes, why? Do you like it?'
'It looks super cheap.'
I make a mental note to re-list the thing BNWOT and tap my lip whilst scrutinising my wardrobe.  In the end I decide to pay homage to Barry Gibb by sporting a black, flared jumpsuit, vintage (looking) silver belt and high heels.  Two kir royales later and I feel like the cleverest, funniest, most alluring person ever.  After dinner we go back to the bar and bump into some 20 year old friends.  I say friends - they are actually the offspring of friends.  Two of the girls very sweetly feign shock at my being a 37 year old mum of 3 children.  I simper and fob them off only half heartedly with a limp wrist and 'Oh don't be ridiculous'.

A band starts up and I dance like Bez from the Happy Mondays, making my fresh young friends look at me oddly then stumble home with the husband, happy and glowing.  Still warm with my imagined youth I skype a friend in New Zealand.  Her husband answers the call, looks at me and sucks in his cheeks with a whistle and says 'Fuck me, Rudd, are you at the back end of an all-nighter?'

It doesn't matter how generous you are with your internal photoshopping, the truth will out.

Have you met Raymond Luxury Yacht?

It has been some time since the last update.  Let me fill you in.

We now live in our own house, 5 minutes walk from my parents and seconds from the best boozer in town.  It's fantastic having our own space and being able to see my parents every day.  I feel fairly sure my parents may well start to impose visiting restrictions.

We went to France with the children for a week for a friend's wedding.  It was the first wedding we have done en famille and it was utterly amazing, due in no small part to the bride and groom's unbelievable organisational skills.  They even had their own website which detailed which flights were the cheapest, what time food would be served on the wedding day, a map of where everyone was staying (the groom,an old school friend was delighted to get everyone 'on site' - one of his favourite states of being) and for how long, what the facilities were like for children, I could go on.  They made it impossible to not want go.  So we spent what can only be described as an idyllic week in the Dordogne at a rambling Manoir and a hamlet of gites swimming, drinking white wine, playing with the children, chatting to all my old school friends, sharing some appalling parenting stories and wearing high heels every evening. Seriously, I don't think I could design a better holiday.  It was particularly fun to do it all with the husband as the last few English weddings I have attended on my own.  It came to light he was also known as 'Eugene Travis' by his NZ crew.

'That's just my drinking name,' he said.

I was puzzled.  'I thought it was Chest Fernandez?'

'Nah, that's my DJ name.'

My school mates naturally wanted their own drinking names.  Step forward Raymond Luxury Yacht and Le Skud.

Before leaving New Zealand I was worried about the year ahead for the husband in the UK.  As he is someone who enjoys spear fishing and surfing, I was concerned that the delights of the Ribble estuary which slops past our little town across miles of quicksand wouldn't hold the same attraction as the stretch of glittering ocean where we are lucky enough to live on his side of the world.

In the run up to us leaving we hadn't spent much time together (probably because I had little time spare between all those leaving parties).  For the last month or so since we arrived we have spent almost every hour God gives us glued at each others' hip.  My whining refrain of 'We really need to have quality time together if we want our marriage to last the distance,' has been replaced with a shifty 'I'm just popping out to get some milk' in order to have 5 minutes to myself.  Actually I'm thrilled, it has been a hugely bonding month for our family and really great for the children to be picked up from school and nursery by both of us as they settle in.

HRH has generously supplied us with a fun filled weekend of Royalist fun.  We have friends coming to stay and I can barely contain my excitement.

check your passport before you fly

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See you on the other side

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Daddy's little girl

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unanswerable questions

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Glam or pikey? You decide

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He who talks loud says nothing

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Camper van holiday. Check the small print

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I nearly died. This is how it felt.

My blog has moved, please see this post at
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You can subscribe to my blog on the new website.  I hope I see you over there x

new blog at www.jennyrudd.co.nz

my blog has moved to www.jennyrudd.co.nz
come and join me over there.  You will be able to subscribe to the blog over there too.
see you over there xx

Dear Giacomo Puccini

Dear Giacomo
A few years ago living in London my cousin and I went to see the Tosca at The Royal Opera House in Covent Garden.  We shuffled in amid glances at our scuffed trainers and ripped jeans and found a spot on the floor in the bar to sit and drink our Cokes.  I don't know what your expectations of decorum were in the early 1900s and I apologise if our dress and giggly behaviour didn't quite meet the mark but we felt silly and end of term-ish as we were fish out of water.  I couldn't believe my eyes when we looked through the programme and saw that a boy we went to school with, Toby Stafford-Allen, was in the performance.  I'm sorry to have to tell you that our skittishness continued as I regaled my cousin with stories of snogging Toby Stafford-Allen in the laundry cupboard at a party when I was fifteen.

Sitting in the rather grand seats at the Royal Opera House we dug out 50p for the opera glasses and gazed round at the navy velvet and gold.  Luckily the sense of occasion got to us and we managed to exercise some self restraint, calming down to watch the opera you had scribbled down in your villa in Torre del Lago some hundred years previously.

I have to say, we were both overcome with tears during the gorgeous duet Qual Occhio al mondo.  We walked out at the end wiping our faces and attempted to haul ourselves back from being bathed in a beauty of such magnitude I didn't really know existed before to the reality of 10pm on a Saturday night in London.  My cousin and I have always been very close friends but we felt so much more connected to each other by your music.

A year later my highly adventurous cousin decided to cycle from John O'Groats to Lands End.  A mere 1188 miles or so, she wanted to raise money to fund an upcoming trip to Nepal were she'd live in a village and help set up a school (yes, I know, she is an absolute twinkling star).  She told me that within a day she was crying and complaining about some fictitious ankle injury as the vastness of the task ahead sat like a mammoth monolith in her mind.  She listened to Tosca on her walkman all the way as she cycled.  She arrived in Lands End in, I think, 13 days.  I can't tell you how proud of her I was.  I can feel my heart swelling like a balloon as I tell you.

I spent much of my time in my tiny 1 bedroom flat on Gloucester Road singing at the top of my lungs along with Maria Callas and when the opportunity to see Tosca presented itself again, I jumped at the chance.  I went with a friend and spent the entire time aching with emotion.  My friend told me I had ruined the performance for the man in front, I hadn't noticed but he kept turning round and tutting in annoyance as I hummed along.

This morning I dug out the CD and felt that love and passion steal into my body like smoke.  Thank you, Giacomo Puccini for giving me some of my most cherished memories with my cousin but I really, really just cannot thank you enough for the beauty of Tosca.  I wonder what you had experienced in your life to be able to express such love in that way.

Love Jenny Rudd

First day at school

Today lad started school.  He scampered off to his teacher very happily so fingers crossed it's a smooth transition for him.  Change has never bothered him and although he prefers to observe before trying out new things like big slides, swimming and games with children, he has always happily gone to new places: friends' houses, new countries, school and kindergarten.  I felt very proud of him this morning, chatting to his mates in the class and informing his teacher of his weekend activities.  He barely turned round to say goodbye to the husband and I until the last minute when he gave us both a big cuddle and a huge smile.  It's a wonderful, sunny day and I'm so excited for him.  I hope school is as happy a place as it was for me.

Taking clothes off with one arm

I have always been hard wearing on my clothes - like most people I wear the same stuff over and over again.  Jeans and t shirts fall to pieces within 3 or 4 years.  Being able to use only my left arm means that the stress on clothes is quite specific.  My jumpers have little holes just below the label on the back where the threads have worn thin.  This is the place my left hand grabs to yank jumpers over my head.

Shirts and jumpers end up with a patch on the left elbow.  I often steady my hand by resting my elbow on flat surfaces.  The newest area of weakness is on the seam at the back of my knickers.  I had a look through my undies draw this morning and found 4 pairs had suffered the same fate.  The seam has detached itself from the rest of the material.  I thought it was a manufacturing fault until 10 minutes ago.  I stood up from the sofa and my jeans were sagging slightly so I hooked my fingers under the waist band at the small of my back and hitched them up.  This rather unsophisticated and slovenly adjustment was accompanied by the sound of ripping material.  Another pair bites the dust.

Old and young

The children are all in kindy and I have 5 minutes before interviewing a seriously fascinating lady called Judith Bell who wrote a book called I See Red.  She changed her name to Steven Tindall - the owner of a huge company in New Zealand called the Warehouse which sells everything under the sun very cheaply.  She makes all the costumes by hand for a vintage costume catwalk show every two years and looks like a movie star from the 1920's.  Extremely graceful and clever, it will be an interesting way to spend the morning.

Then it'll be back to kindy to pick up the troops plus a friend of lad's who is staying over tonight.  I really love that sharp contrast between the energy created by different people and by the hormones rushing round us at varying stages of our lives.  Little children tend to inspire you to be a bit more interested in simplicity.  "Mummy what's rain?" and "why don't we lay eggs?"

Spending time with someone older than me starts off all sorts of questions in my head.  I especially like the questions which challenge my opinion and start off a completely new chain of thought.

Here's to variety.  What's not to love?

Fuel those removing Rena's fuel from our beach

Clearing up the oil on the beach is a bit tricky with the children and my gammy arm so instead I'm helping Larry's Tea House coordinate the feeding of the masses of determined, cheery volunteers who are generously giving their time to clean up our beach.  If you are handy with an oven glove and a kilo of flour, or even just adept at throwing a bag of apples into your supermarket trolley then this is how you can help.