Warning: the following post contains a lot of sniggering bathroom references. I’m afraid that, despite my best efforts,  I’ve been powerless to eradicate them all, because, well,  they make me laugh. So here goes.

Regular readers *tee hee* will know that I’m not one for faddy diets. Or diets at all. Frankly, I’m too greedy. But I am interested in keeping the whole family healthy, so when Kelloggs invited me to talk about their new All Bran Challenge, I was raring to go *tee hee*. Of course, the fact that the meeting was at the blissful Sanctuary Spa in Covent Garden, and involved a lot of pampering, didn’t make that decision more difficult.

I didn’t mention to the lovely Kelloggs folk that I had a slight bias against All Bran, as a close family member used to call it All Brown. Quite offputting. But I had no idea how much All Bran had moved on since the grim bowls of my youth. All right, you can still get original All Bran if you want to go hardcore, but for wimps like me, there is All Bran Golden Crunch or All Bran Red Berry Crunch, not to mention flakes, yoghurty flakes ….oh, you get the picture. It’s not All Brown any more.

With the help of Kelloggs’ nutritionists, we really got to the bottom * tee hee * of the benefits of wheat bran, the fibre in All Bran. It is very efficient at carrying things out of your system, mainly as it is pretty indigestible itself and sweeps out lots of stuff which would otherwise be left behind in your 30ft maze of intestines. Bits and bobs can linger (yuck) for up to three days normally. All Bran aims to help get everything moving in a day and a half.

The medical profession made a strong link in the 1930s between constipation and depression, and it’s hard not to feel a bit downcast at the idea of one’s insides being cluttered, like a dirty forgotten cupboard, with lots of stuff that your body really doesn’t need. And, unlike a cupboard, your unhappy gut is prone to all kinds of rumblings and audible announcements of its discontent, not to mention puffing itself up and making you feel blobby and horrid. I’m not going to ramble on about the menopause again but suffice to say that all these things get Much Worse once you hit a certain age. So it was not long before I was merrily agreeing to start the All Bran 5 Day Challenge.

Basically, you eat a bowl of All Bran a day for five days. How hard is that? Well, as I discovered on the train home, not very hard at all. Despite being beautifully fed and watered (champagne and a gorgeous club sandwich) by the Sanctuary and the Covent Garden Hotel (delicious fruit platter), I was absolutely starving on the way back to Blended Towers. So I gnawed open my goody bag box of All Bran Golden Crunch and scooped out a cluster. And another. And another. By the time I got home, I was well and truly started on the challenge.

The rest of the family have now entered the fray. The Red Berry Crunch is scrummy and leaves the milk in the bowl a pale shade of pink – very popular. My only question now to Kelloggs is – can you actually overdose on wheat bran? I’m trying to increase everyone’s water intake, as Kelloggs advise. It’s probably not surprising that I’ve had to order two more boxes of cereal from the Ocado man. And that the downstairs loo has blocked. Ooops. Probably too much information there.

Yum yum yum

Well, why not? It’s been horrid. And everyone else moans.

But now, thank goodness, I’m beginning to feel a titchy-witchy weeny bit more perky. Though I still have sudden attacks of what I dimly remember a Belgian friend calling a ‘coup de plomb’, or attack of lead. You may know the feeling. You’re bobbing along fairly well, just tootling about your own business, when suddenly you feel as though you have lead weights on your eyes. You’re so exhausted you could drop off right there, whether ‘right there’ is at the wheel of the car (eeek!), in the supermarket (not so surprising) or in the middle of an important meeting (I should be so lucky).

I’ve just got to get that under control, then I’ll be ready to face the world again. Bear with me.

Weighty matters

Look, no stabilisers!

My eldest daughter absolutely loves her new school and, much to my relief, is really thriving there. The one thing that drives us both mad, though, is the dress code. She’s in the sixth form, but they don’t have to wear uniform – they are supposed to turn up each day in ‘interview wear’. This is absolutely fine for the boys. They can get a couple of suits, five shirts and even fewer ties, and they’re done for the year. For the girls, though, there is endless, quasi-philosophical questioning to be done. What is an interview, exactly? A good question, as none of them have done a proper interview yet, apart from school interviews, for which they would most probably be wearing school uniform.

So, is it a job interview they are dressing for? I can only imagine it is. But that doesn’t answer the question of what to wear at all. Because we need to know what the job is. Are they dressing to be investment bankers? Art teachers? Creative writers? Language students? For a boy, a suit covers all these and more. For a girl, we’re spiralling into nightmare territory. Clothes say so much about you, and so quickly. At a real, genuine interview, you are summed up in seconds as soon as you walk in through the door, and what you are wearing is a huge factor in the impression you make. A sombre dress can be smart – or it could be downtrodden, depressive, lacking in self esteem. A fuschia blouse could be fun-loving and outgoing – or it could be strident, bossy and rude.

One of my early tips to Child One was to see what others wore and adapt accordingly. But, as we watch the other girls parade through the gates in the morning, I’m rather glad she hasn’t taken my advice too much to heart. One or two of her cohort definitely appear to be auditioning to be lapdancers.

Anyway, it’s all costing us about ten times as much as a uniform, as of course she CAN’T be seen in the same thing twice and she MUST have a whole selection of options. Thank goodness for shops like Uniqlo and New Look. They’ve just brought out some shift dresses which may just save our bacon now the sun is out. Otherwise it would be straight to debtors’ prison for us. Without even an interview.

Anyway, the assorted teens, all around 17 years old, were merrily watching away, while I was in the study with the door open, earwigging of course, but discreetly. The episode they were watching was on sex education, and obviously it would have been way too squirmy for all of us if I’d sat there amongst them. Ughh. Perish the thought.

So the episode rumbled on, with Alfie (the world’s worst teacher) desperate to impress his inamorata, the beauteous biology teacher, with his huge amount of knowledge on the subject (not). All goes swimmingly, until the French exchange students arrive. They turn out to be Dutch, super-cool and way more knowing about sex than Alfie and even his highly precocious pupils put together. For some reason, Alfie invites questions from the audience (which includes a bunch of horrified parents), when a likely looking Dutch lad pipes up, ‘during foreplay, I like to strum the clitoris.’ There are quite a few confused shouts of ‘what’s a glitoris?’ from the bad boys at the back. I was sniggering away in the study, when I heard one of Ella’s girlfriends say, ‘but what is a glitoris?’

I was stunned, to say the least. It soon transpired that she had no idea what it was even when it was pronounced  properly. And she wasn’t the only one.

Let’s put this in context. Every year since she started in secondary school, Child One has had at least one day devoted to PSHE. I can never remember what the acronym stands for, but it’s basically sex education. The girls’ school is in the London borough of Lewisham, which has the highest rate of teenage pregnancy in Europe, so they tend to labour the point, as it were. Well, they seem to have covered reproduction – Child One even seemed to do a GCSE in the menstrual cycle. I tell you, there is nothing she doesn’t know about lutenising hormones, follicles and glands. But the school teaches them nothing about pleasure, apparently.

Is this to make sure they don’t think sex might be an interesting thing to try? Is it a cynical way of keeping down those pregnancy figures? Or is it part of the old, old idea that women are not supposed to enjoy sex? I read Lucy Mangan’s column in the Observer a few days before the girls came round. She said her mother, a doctor who talked on sex ed in schools, recently despaired when it seemed that girls had no idea that sex was supposed to be nice for them as well as for boys. Is it this dehumanising internet porn, that’s supposed to have had such a catastrophic effect on boys? Is it very, very low expectations in girls? Or is it educators trying to put everyone off (as if that is ever going to work)? Whatever the reason, I find it very sad. Of course, it’s nowhere near the evil of female circumcision. But female oblivion isn’t much good either.

Spot the glitoris

The UK didn’t used to be like this. Before I left to live in Brussels, all the way back in 1989, you’d be hard pressed to buy a coffee in most high streets, let alone the plethora of muffins, cookies, paninis and whatnot that now come with them. After eight long years of Belgian coffee, which is always served with a chocolate on the side, I was rather thrilled to come back home and find a Starbucks in my local branch of Sainsburys. Although, as I soon discovered, the coffee there came in cups as big as baby baths and if you wanted a snack, you had a choice of huge, sticky pastries, instead of a tiny slither of 70 per cent cocoa chocolate. Dark chocolate is actually good for you (all right, all right, in moderation, I know) whereas pastries are NOT in big, bold capitals.

Child Two was absolutely right. It is very, very hard to stay away from temptation. It’s really surprising that the whole country is not featuring on Secret Eaters wearing vast sweatpants and saying, ‘I don’t know where the weight comes from,’ hiding a Big Mac and crossed fingers behind its back. Do we want to get as big as the poor US citizens who can’t even get cremated any more, as their fat keeps on burning away in the ovens? Either we should all issue our children, and ourselves, with blinkers when we venture into a public space, or we should get this government to do something about it. If they can organise a tricky funeral, surely they can sort out some sort of plan to save us all from the worst sort of eternal flame.

Doughnut eat this

But not for everyone. I suppose I’d heard vaguely of Adolescent to Parent Abuse, or APA, but I thought it was mostly the sort of thing that crops up in gritty dramas, shortly before the adolescent in question runs off to a sticky end in the big city. Apparently not – it’s now a ‘thing’, like cutting, which I’d never heard of until a few years ago, and is now almost literally all the rage at one of my daughters’ schools.

Obviously, APA is a very disturbing trend, if trend it now is, and that’s why I am writing about it, having been asked to by documentary makers ZKK TV (they are not paying me for this, by the way). At the bottom of this article are the contact details if you have your own story of APA to tell.

You can see how APA could easily grow out of the ‘pester power’ that smaller children deploy so ruthlessly in order to get parents to shell out for all manner of rubbish. If it works with a Barbie when you’re 3, it will probably be an effective way of prising an iPhone or whatever the lust object is out of an exasperated parent later on. And then, according to the experts, it’s not such a great leap from verbal to physical abuse. Psychologists say there is a lot of it going on – but that parents don’t speak out about it. I can see why it could become taboo. Parents no doubt feel guilty, ashamed, desperate and alone.

I can imagine it’s a hard cycle to break. Better not to get there in the first place. I don’t claim to have any answers, really, about parenting. I just know what has worked for us, so far, and I’m touching wood as I say this. Just in case it’s useful to you, I’ll tell you my way of coping.

It’s not easy to say no to your children. You want them to be happy, and, if you’re like me, you want to avoid too much conflict. There’s nothing worse than a constant war of attrition with a whining child. But the easiest way to avoid conflict is a firm NO. Any chink in your armour and the child knows, by some unholy sixth sense, that it can push at the weak spot until the parent gives in. It’s your job to pretend you don’t have any weak spots. I’m afraid I adopted a Thatcherite mantra when my children were at this annoying age (from about 2 to about, er ….), which was, ‘Say No to Terrorism.’ The Lady’s Not for Turning would have been as good, but I liked the juxtaposition of armed aggression and pestering/whingeing. If you’ve spent more than five minutes with a child determined to have the latest My Little Pony or bust, then you know all there is to know about terrorism, believe me.

Unfortunately, even in the teenage years, you have to hold the line against various new forms of terrorist demand … ‘just half an hour more at the party, pleeease …’ ‘but everyone except me has Uggs/a pony/a tattoo ….’. Try to hold the line. Remember: No Negotiation with Terrorists.

* ZKK TV are making a documentary about parents who face violent behaviour from their teenage sons and daughters. 

Do you feel your teenager is out of control? 

Have they ever hit you? Or are you concerned they might do? 

Does your teenager wreck your home if they don’t get their own way? 

Does it feel like you are losing your child? 

We have begun filming with a small number of parents who have decided to tell their story in the public arena and we would like to talk confidentially to more parents and teenagers about their experiences. 

If you would like to know more (no obligation and completely confidential), or if you would like to be involved in the programme, please email Rebecca.moss@zkktv.com

All right, it’s not exactly finished, and yes, it’s one short of a pair, but I’m pretty proud nonetheless. Look at the lacy bits!

OMG isn't that pretty?

It’s meant to be a surprise for Child One, whose hands go purple when she’s playing the piano. Admittedly, the heating is not on in that room, but I think it’s more that she’s inherited my unenthusiastic circulation. My blood scarcely bothers to go down to my toes. Well, it would only have to come back up again, wouldn’t it? It saves itself the bother and stops somewhere around my knees. The result is that my feet maintain a steady sub-arctic temperature and I always sleep in socks – mostly two pairs these days. Poor Child One has the same problem, but with her hands. I feel guilty at having passed on this flaw – I thought the deal was that our children got our good bits, and none of our bad bits – hence the gloves.

Mummy's little helper?

I’m not actually supposed to be making anything for Child One at the moment. It’s Child Two’s turn, and I’ve been happily making her a blanket for a while.

One of the squares for Child Two's blanket

But, calamity has struck – and I never thought I would use that word in conjunction with knitting wool – as the white colour doesn’t seem to be available any more. Thus I am regrouping with the glove. Gosh, it’s not easy being a crocheteuse, or whatever we call ourselves. But the good news is that I will soon be able to share my woes with a like-minded group, who meet at the local library’s Knit and Natter sessions. This sounds a lot more friendly than the Stitch and Bitch sessions I’ve heard of before. Gosh, I lead the life of a little old lady. Thank goodness I have a brood of clamouring offspring to keep me young (or deaf).