So, like, when I was 16 years old, I decided I didn’t like cats anymore. Well, to be precise, what happened was I decided that I didn’t want to be The Kind of Person Who Liked Cats. I decided that people who liked cats were, well, pussies, basically. I decided it one day. Just like that. I was going to be a DOG PERSON.
Na ja. And I tried. I really did. I remember practically snogging this spaniel in Italy when I was fairly drunk one night. But the truth is, all I managed to do was turn myself into the kind of person who hates cats and doesn’t dislike dogs but doesn’t really give that much of a shit about either animal. That’s all.
“I love Christmas,” a girl I know told me the other day. I did that blinking in the sunlight thing you do when someone tells you something your brain can’t process – it’s like you’ve been dazzled by the sunlight in the snow. I was really shocked by her statement. I’d always thought she was a fairly normal human being. She looks like one.
“You love Christmas?” I whispered, squinting.
“I love Christmas,” she said, nodding. “I love the trees, and the decorations, and all those funny, tacky ornaments in the shops! I love it that it’s so tacky! Every time I see a funny, tacky Christmas ornament, my heart gets lighter, like it’s filled up with joy! I love it all. I love the advent calendars and the advent candles – and I love baking Plätzchen with my friends and wrapping them up and taking them home – but most of all, I love the smell of cinnamon.”
I studied her face. I bit my lip. I analyzed what she had just told me.
“You love the smell of cinnamon?” I said, half-grimacing, half-flinching, half-wincing, and the rest of me shitting myself.
She nodded. “Whenever I smell the smell of cinnamon,” she said. “I feel happy. Inside.”
So. I’ve decided to become that girl. Come on. You have to do all that Christmassy bollocks anyways, when you’re a mum, so you might as well pretend you’re enjoying it. Yesterday I stood in Kaufland, looking at all their hideously ugly Weihnachstmänner ornaments and pretended to myself that the sight of them made me feel all happy and warm and glowy, etc. inside.
And you know what? It kind of worked. Well, kind of. KIND OF. Well, at any rate I didn’t feel that deadening, blackening, thunderous rage that normally comes over me when I look at hideously ugly Weihnachtsmänner ornaments and I also didn’t feel like I was drowning in a pit of despair whilst Nigella Lawson paddled by in a sturdy canoe with a bit of mince pie batter smudged across her nose, waving.
Then the success went to my head. I decided I wasn’t just going to get into Christmas, I was going to get into EVERYTHING and by EVERYTHING, I meant Halloween and Christmas. Yep. I decided to make pumpkin bread. Pumpkin bread, which my son could take to Hort with him every day next week, and thus enjoy a Halloween-themed packed lunch. Ja, genau. Sometimes I’m such an idiot, it’s a good thing we’re not living in Nazi times anymore or I would literally have to get myself put down.
We bought a pumpkin. We scooped out the insides. We baked it and then we turned it into purée. Then we whizzed the purée together with eggs and oil and water and shit, and then we folded in flour and sugar and cinnamon and stuff. Then we baked it. In the oven. It took me and my son at least three hours, EXCLUDING washing-up. So, then I get it out of the oven.
“Tra-la!” I say. “Pumpkin bread!”
“It looks good,” my son says.
“I wonder what it’ll taste like?” I say.
“Well, I dunno, Mum. I don’t want to eat it. You tell me.”
“What?” I say.
“I don’t like to eat such things.”
“What?”
“I like normal bread more, that is smaller and not to do with a pumpkin.”
I got him to eat a teeny-tiny cube, like the size of a sugar cube, by promising him a Grießbrei as a reward. He forced it down, weeping the whole time, and doing that face kids do when you force them to eat tomato or cabbage or something. Afterwards he said he would never have helped me make it had he known he was going to have to eat it. I looked at him and I thought to myself:
Why.
Do.
I.
FUCKING.
Bother.
