Wednesday 9th April 2008 Exorcism

Wednesday 9th April 2008.

Great news. We weighed Falcon on Sunday and he has put on four grams, taking him from 171 to 175. This is very encouraging.

Shilma is a pain in the backside. It's as though she's toying with me. I worry myself sick about her and then just at the point where I'm at my wits end she starts eating. I stop worrying about her and she stops eating again.

Last week I called to make an appointment at the vets on the Wednesday night. I couldn't see my vet until the Friday but on the Thursday night Shilma ate for me, she ate the following night too. I figured .. panic over.

I cancelled the vet's appointment and from that day she stopped eating again. Ruby was holding her on Sunday and commented that she was feeling and looking thinner. I had to agree that she was right. I tried feeding her every day and every day she refused. I'd decided to get her in today, Wednesday but last night she took three crickets .. so once again I'm holding off. We'll see how she goes over the next few days and check on Sunday to see what her weights doing. If she's lost this week then eating or not she's going to the vets.

We had Tia to stay on Saturday night. She was no trouble at all, but then she never is. Everything went smoothly. I never said a word about her table manners, which as always were appalling. Thankfully there were no ructions and all went smoothly.

Russ does have a new obsession with her though. The other week Tia had complained to her nother of having a 'tummy ache'. Alyssa made an emergency appointment and rushed her down to the doctors in a state of panic. Jesus, the kid had a belly ache.

They did some tests.

The outcome?

Ta da, ta daaaaaaaa ... she may have a wheat allergy. That is may, might, there is a possibility, perhaps. Oh my God, Alyssa and Russ in con flab over what Tia can and can't eat, you'd think it was the earth summit. They debated (at length) whether she can have a bit of veg curry from the Chinese, “Traces of wheat, traces of wheat,” she's shouting like a confused parrot. Tia is sitting on the sofa taking it all in and feeling very important.

I had to give a run down of everything that we'd fed the kid. Because Tia was sitting there, I bit on my lip and said nothing but I wanted to grab the sanctimonious cow and sling her out by her silken cravat.

Alyssa is a snob. She's clever, loud and thinks she knows everything about everything. She's the typical 'stage mother' taking Tia to every pop concert that she can. Last week it was The Sugar Babes. She then pushes and shoves her way through to the front and spends the entire performance trying to get Tia over the barriers and onto the stage. If this doesn't work they'll leave the concert half way through the second set so that they can be first in line outside the tour bus. Tia has been on Stage with Mika, the sugar Babes and Alicia Keys and she's sat on Lily Allen's knee inside her tour bus. I find it all a little bit sickening.

But that is not the reason that I wanted to throw her out of my house. She came in on my invitation, pulled a face and spent the entire ten minutes that she was in my house holding her nose.

I find that rude and offensive.

She came half an hour early and I was right in the middle of cleaning out and doing the morning poop scoop. I can't open any windows until all the viv doors are closed and my plan had been to do morning routine and then sweep the floor and open the windows for ten minutes before Alyssa was due. I know myself that it can be a bit rich first thing in the morning. If I've used a lot of soft fruit the day before then that has fermented in the vivs overnight. You can not have twenty odd reptiles in one room and not have a bit of a smell first thing in the morning when the viv doors are opened.

Now I am completely paranoid that my house smells like a sewer all of the time. A hundred people can come and tell me that it doesn't ... but I won't believe them. Everybody that I've spoken to says that it only smells before the animals have been cleaned out every day and that once morning routine is over and the house has been aired then it's fine and doesn't smell at all unless one of the beardies does a particularly ripe one that needs to be removed. I still can't believe them when they say that my house doesn't smell like a zoo.

After she and Tia had left I finished cleaning out the animals and then went into the kitchen and literally beheaded the salad and veg with my biggest knife.

“Okay,” said Russ, coming up behind me, “What's wrong?”

I turned on him with the point of my huge knife darting dangerously close to his chest as I stabbed my point home.

“How rude,” I ranted, “how damned rude.” I was yelling like a banshee at him and flinging the knife around like a baton. “What the hell did you see in her Russ? Go on, tell me. Tell me one pleasant personality trait that that woman has.”

“Well, Jane comparing her beside some of the men you've had and the things they've done to you. I think she's probably a saint.”

That took the wind out of my sails a bit. “True,” I said, far more calmly, “But that's not the point. What kind of woman goes into somebody else's house and holds her nose for the duration of the visit? That's just bloody ignorant.” By this point I was back on my high horse and the knife was flashing again as I used it to pontificate.

Russ was leaning back against the dining room table smirking at me. I wasn't angry with him, and it wasn't a nasty kind of smirk. “What kind of person,” he said grinning, “screams and yells and threatens her fella with a knife when he hasn't done anything wrong.”

I grinned realising that I was doing a fair old Rumplestiltskin at the wrong person. “I didn't threaten you with the knife.”

“It's in your hand,” He took it gently off me and laid it on the counter. “Better now?”

I nodded but had to have the last word. “And anyway, you did do something wrong, you married, that, that, that...woman.” I told Russ that in future his ex-wife is to be kept on the doorstep and not invited into the house. We'll have Tia ready to just take out and hand over to her. Russ quite happily went along with this decision. But when I'd had time to calm down and think about it I'm not going to stand by it because it won't be nice for Tia. Estranged parents should get together and talk about their children, even if it is slightly sickly in this case. There is no doubt about it that one day not too far away from now that woman and I will be knocking horns. One day I won't hold my tongue for the sake of Russ, Tia and harmony and she will get both barrels. The snotty cow.

I so hope those test results come back negative. The child is a nightmare to feed without a wheat (and maybe even lactose) allergy. The kid rocks up with tummy ache and suddenly I'm paying four pounds fifty for eight wheat free sausages and every meal time requires half an hours deliberation before I can even begin cooking.

Which brings me to an observation.

When I was doing my nursing training, I had a placement in a Social Services nursery. There was a little girl there with coeliac disease. She was a chronic sufferer and just a couple of grains of wheat would send her into anaphalactic shock. I was seventeen or eighteen and I had never heard of anybody being allergic to wheat before. I think there was one girl in our primary school that couldn't drink the milk. When I was in care I don't remember a single person out of four hundred kids who suffered with either gluten or lactose intolerance.

Why then in the year two thousand and eight does it seem that every third child born has either a gluten or lactose or both intolerance? Is it a fad? The latest 'must have' post natal fashion accessory? Mammas and pappas buggies are out and gluten intolerance is in? What's that all about?

A few years ago everybody you spoke to was on anti-depressants or tranquillisers of some kind. Ten kids in every street suffer with ADHD.

Russ is a slave to his inhalers. He tells me that he has Asthma. In a year and a half I've never once heard him wheeze. He works, would you believe, in a soap powder factory. They have to have their peak flow measurements tested regularly for health and safety reasons. Russ gets through two inhalers a week and yet if he had Asthma he would never have got the job he's worked at for eleven years .. and he's tested every six months as standard. He's so reliant on his inhalers to get through the day (though not when he's at work) that if he's parted from them he goes into major panic mode. Yes Russ, that new sensation is called Breathing!

I firmly believe that millions of people are being treated for illnesses that they simply don't have.

And while we're on with medical fads... let me predict the next big thing to hit Britain.

Demonic possession!

You mark my words, in the next few years every angry teenager is going to be possessed of the devil and their families will be calling in the neighbourhood exorcist.

I watched a programme about this last week. It's hugely popular in America and if you don't have a demon or ten the you're just not with the in crowd. It was the biggest load of drivel I've seen in a long time. I say I watched the thing, actually I only watched a bit of it because it continued scenes of vomiting and I had to turn it off. But I saw enough to have an opinion.

This man right, celebrity exorcist to the stars and anybody else who feels a nasty bout of demons coming on, is raking it in. He has performed over ten thousand exorcisms, ten thousand! That's one man, in one area of the United States.

It was pathetic to watch. Two moody Goth teenagers, well we can all argue that they've got a bellyful of something, but whether it's the devil or not is debatable. These kids had seen enough horror films to know what was expected of them and when the man yelled at them they began to growl and spit a bit and put on a show. It was pathetic.

Crikey, I know for a one hundred percent certainty that if that guy saw Marty in full flow he'd tell me he was full of demons. He can growl and snarl and do the moody teenager thing to the hilt.

Another case was concerned with a devout Christian woman who goes to church every week, but when she prays at home the demons come out of her and choke her. Yeah right! If she really had some kind of devil inside her, do we really buy that he'd just let her walk in and out of a church. Oh, sorry, I get it, yes, Sunday, the Sabbath, day of rest and all that. Silly me, I should have realised, it's the demon's day off, isn't it? The union would be down on him like a penance if he was caught working on a Sunday, more than his job's worth.

So this man screams and yells at the possessed victim to taunt the devils out of them. And then when they're growling up a storm and spitting and hissing at him, he gets this house brick of a bible and whacks them full on in the stomach with the binding. In a frenzy of spectacular showmanship he yells some hocus pokus containing the words 'come out and be damned' and low and behold, right on cue, the victim falls to the floor and pukes his demon into a bucket ... exorcism finished .. demon banished to the pits of hell forever, exorcists beaming like the hero he is.

What a load of bollocks.

Daz is giving me cause or concern at work. He's getting a little bit work shy and too big for his boots. I've had to have several words with him lately and he narrowly avoided an official warning last week. I have enough on him to give him an instant dismissal for gross misconduct but I don't want to lose him.

I am in the middle of re-classifying all of our DVD's (two thousand of them) a job I was going to half delegate to Daz this week, but as he's called in sick again I'm having to do both mine and his share of the work myself. This week it's his wife, or girlfriend or whatever she is who's sick. This means that Daz has to look after the baby so he can't come in ... again. If he can't do his rostered day and a half, how the hell is he going to manage a sixty six hour week when I'm off?