Seeing Red

'Ooh, lovely, year Five Mummies, good to see you. Assembly this way, dunno where you're going to put your hymn books though...'

Hurrah, another one of Freddie's assemblies this morning, made all the more exciting by the fact they had to wear ONE item of red clothing for Heart Week or something else that any Good Mummy would be up on. We had under six minutes between them telling me and me exploding before we left the house, so Rose was verging on St Trinians in a spray-on red t-shirt and thigh-length grey socks and Freddie wore her red Hello Kitty dressing gown, which trailed along the ground behind him. He was like a hammy Sunday afternoon costume drama thesp, swishing it about camply while he was mobbed in the playground by all his mates in cop-out red football shirts. Apparently we parents were supposed to wear a red thing too - I managed a red bulldog clip on my lapel - pathetic. The vicar's wife had a hand-made red scarf and two other mummies were in football shirts. Gits.

In Assembly, they did a great long mumbly thing about how, if you did a good deed, you'd get it back in spadefuls. They lost me, I'm afraid. Last year I found three hundred quid in a cashpoint on Picadilly. Louboutins? Ha! I handed it in to the bank. Not because I am a seething mass of morals, but because I thought it was so bloody unlikely to happen, there had to a camera there somewhere and how would the bots bear the humiliation of their Mama being nationally outed as a fashion-obsessed petty thief. As I slumped regretfully, and empty-handedly, toward the big Jigsaw next to Charing Cross, an Irish navvy flew after me and flung his rugged arms about me, thanking me, Mary, Joseph and all the saints for my honesty and kindness at saving his old mammy from certain death and other Angela's Ashes type nonsense. About an hour later, I was having a drink in a pub on the Mall and some bastard stole my bag. I know what the moral of that one is.

Anyway, afterwards the Head, a West Country lad, peered at us over his specs, Paxman-style. 'Isn't it lovely, everybody, all this red? Though I must say, year five, a bit less of the Arsenal tops, eh? Year three, all those Man United supporters, you'll have minus house points. And Mummies. What a shame not to see a few more Bristol Cities.*'

I had plenty of red nail-marks on my palms from trying, and miserably failing, not to laugh.

*For American readers: Cockney Rhyming Slang for 'titties.' Which frankly, I suspect he knew.