Mumaversary

I’ve just celebrated my mumaversary, one whole decade since I pushed a human out. 10 whole years of keeping it alive, and some selfish people are taking my glory away by referring to the day as “Percy’s birthday”.

Here he is on every birthday so far….

Percy got a card this year saying, ‘double the digits, double the fun” which has inspired me to design cards for 100 year olds that say, “triple the digits, a very small fraction of the fun”. 

This year he decided to celebrate by going to “Arriba Arriba” the climbing wall with a Mexican restaurant. We tested it out in the summer and they had a lot of fun, so it was chosen as his birthday destination. He invited 5 friends and 4 said they could make it. The week before one of the friends said could we give them a lift, and we said yes. My parents were going to be visiting at the time so we already had 6 people but we do have a 7 seater so technically, yes, we could squash another child in no problem. Then on the night before the party, just before Percy went to bed, 2 of the parents messaged to say they didn’t know how they were going to get there. They were working or whatever and hadn’t thought about lifts. We put them in touch with each other to see if they could come up with something, but they couldn’t. 

We talked about many solutions. The place is 25 minutes away and not really accessible by public transport, we sort of felt like it shouldn’t be our job to fix the problem for the parents that hadn’t thought about this until the night before, but on the other hand Percy would be really sad if 2 out of 4 kids couldn’t come to the party. Eventually we offered a mad plan for my parents to get a train into town really early, because that’s when the train was and then they would get a taxi to the place. This would free up 2 spaces to bring these other kids, but the mum of one kid still didn’t agree because the kid would have to leave the non-compulsory holiday reading lessons that the school were putting on half a hour early. So that kid didn’t come, but in the end we made space for the other kid by Dan cycling and me driving all the kids plus my parents. So Dan did a 40k round bike trip that day just to make space for this other kid, what a hero.

Everyone had a great time climbing and eating Mexican food. We brought in a cake and sung happy birthday, and the kids came back to ours to play afterwards. Then in the evening we all watched an Ice Age film together. Percy had some lovely gifts, Eric got him a folder that holds Pokémon cards. He’s been planning this for ages, about 6 months ago I found him trying to work out how you would make plastic wallets into Pokémon card holders, which I dont know if there is a way but we just ordered a little folder that holds all their many Pokémon cards. Eric was possibly more excited about Percy’s birthday than Percy was. He loves to give gifts and he was really excited for the climbing too.

Percy is a big fan of saving the environment and wants to be a re-wilder.

We got him (among other things) the kids version of the game Cards Against Humanity. It’s where you make silly sentences and in the kids version it’s mainly about poo and bogies and farts and stuff. They giggle so much playing it, but what they think is hilarious is totally different sentence combinations to what adults would find funny.

Playing the game with Granny.

You might notice this is not a house. We were staying on a boat the last few days, on the Canal du Midi. I’ve done a lot of boating before but not on a river boat. I’ve done a lot of small sailing boats across the Channel, and a bit of canal boating. So this felt like a luxury in terms of space. And no one had to sleep in the bed on my dad’s old boat that we all referred to as a the coffin. 

What’s more exciting than a boat trip on the Canal du Midi? Pokémon.

See my boat tour video here

On the Canal du Midi every lock is manned or womanned by a lock keeper, and we briefly looked into how you get to be one and especially how you get a free lock keepers cottage. Every kind of employment is an option for us now. Well actually not quite every option, I got 2 offers of having a sugar daddy in the last month, really quite reasonable requests too for a lot of money, but I turned them down. They both came as private messages from guys after I had a viral video, which is currently on 5.5 million views. It turns out if 5 million people view a video about 1000 will follow you about 5 will private message you to say hello and 2 will offer to be a sugar daddy. It’s pretty flattering at my age actually.

Before the boating and Percys birthday we had a few more nice days with my parents. One was a lovely sunny day where we had a picnic on the beach, I swam in the sea and it was lovely until a jellyfish stung me. 

I also took my 67 year old Dad to my roller dance lesson. That was a good laugh. Last week I was saying that I couldn’t come because my parents were visiting and they said bring them and my Dad actually did skate in his youth and once at my 36th birthday party. 

So he came along and did pretty well. There was a cute moment when 2 young people were trying to explain to him in quite complex french how to do a roller skating move, they were super patient with him. It’s such a nice little club there. The guy who runs the dance part of the roller skating club is 61 and an amazing roller skater. See my little video of Dad here.

This week coming is another week of half term. We’ll mainly be doing boring stuff like getting the kids to do their homework. I have some private English classes to teach and Dan has some jobs to apply for and a few bits of work, nothing fun but I am trying to do more art making. 

I started a kickstarter about 10 days ago which is now 78% funded! I’m so grateful to everyone who’s donated to it. If I make it to 300 pounds I’m going to buy a printing press and each person who donated is going to be sent some Hannah original artworks in the post made, with the new press. It’s all or nothing so you only pay if enough people agree to pay. But I only one need another 3 or so people to reach my goal. I really didn’t want to do it at first because I feel like I’m always sharing stuff on social media and asking people to come to my gigs or like my pages or watch my videos, if I could have afforded to just buy the press then I would have, but there’s no way I could have justified doing that given our current job situation, and it was too much to ask for for a birthday or Christmas present. So I’m supper happy that it looks like I am going to be able to get this anyway. I hope it will make my prints look a lot more professional, and I could maybe try and start selling more work.

If you want to support my kickstarter by buying a print click here

Ups and downs.

Last blog I talked about how the jobs I thought I was going to have in September failed to materialise and I ended up with just one job on Wednesdays teaching English (plus a bit of graphic design stuff) but now I’ve lost that one job! Or more accurately I quit that job, which I know might seem insane given the lack of work me and Dan have between us, but it got to the point where it was impossible to stay. I won’t go into all the details, but let’s just say the things I was being asked to do, and asked not to do were becoming more and more unhinged, to the point where it felt more like we were in rival drug gangs, instead of just being two people in separate villages that want to teach English to children. So I’m doing it on my own now, I had a few kids come to a free trial lesson last week and then I did my first real lessons this week.

We had visitors last weekend, my lovely friend Helen and her husband Graham. Me and Helen have been friends since 2005, and have done many bizarre things together, like attend a medieval dance class at a Polish arts festival, went to a basket ball match in Palestine, got told off by the police for doing fire circus tricks in the park, and when I had only just passed my driving test I drove her while she held a fish tank full of water and fish, which sloshed around a lot. But these are the kinds of things that make a friendship. Helen moved out of Liverpool to the south in maybe 2009ish so we don’t get to drive fish tanks around much anymore. But whenever we do get together it’s always a good time. 

On an outdoor ice rink in Norway 2008

Força Réal 2024

That friendship group we were in was the absolute best. I’d already been in maybe 3 good friendship groups before that at school and sixth form and unfortunately I’m not friends with any of those people anymore. A lot of them are all friends with each other still, and I wonder what I should have done to still be in their crews. But anyway when I met this bunch I thought, “I have to stay with these people forever even when we’re not all living round the corner from each other, these guys are the best.” And I have, kind of. Everyone is more spread out now, internationally as well as nationally, and a lot of people have kids and partners and you just can’t hang out in the same way. If I had a time machine, I wouldn’t stop Hitler I’d just go back to a Saturday in 2007 where we just hung out in each other houses, playing board games going to the park, playing ready steady cook where we all buy the most obscure item we can find and then cook a terrible meal. 

So it was super nice to have one of the original crew in our little corner of the world showing her the sights. Our kids didn’t remember them at all but they quickly became friends, and got some great banter going with Graham. It was nice to have a break from everyday stresses and just be reminded of what a beautiful place we live in. 

Eric looks like he’s in love with Graham

The beautiful town of Eus

And I’ll probably look back on this time the same as 2007 like, “remember that time we lived in France and the kids were at a fun age and we went to beautiful places” and I won’t remember all the stress and the times when the kids are grumpy. While Helen was here, we still had to do annoying things like fail to get my new ‘I’m still allowed in the country card’. I am still allowed in the country but I have to wait another month for my card, which is in turn delaying any benefits I’m entitled to.

But it was fun to then forget about that and hang out with my mate. We phoned some of the old crew including Will in Australia and Joy in L.A. And Josh in the Lake District. We haven’t spoken to them for years! And it’s mad that you can call someone for free and video chat but we rarely do. If you want a video chat let me know, I know some people find them weird but I’m always up for them. On the last day we were seeing Helen and Graham we were having lunch together and there was a knock at the door. It was a signed for letter from our landlord telling us what we roughly knew anyway. We have to leave this house by 11th April. Cheers for ruining our lunch landlord. It was kind of a sad goodbye after that. I don’t know when I’ll see them again because although we do come back to England its tricky when there’s lots of people to see and you dont have a car to make it down to the middle of nowhere south. 

It is an odd feeling not knowing where we’ll live or even which country we’ll be living in, in a years time. But that’s enough sad stuff now, let me cheer you up with the happy news that we won a weekend away in a holiday park! Maybe we should go there on 11th April and then just squat. 

In the summer we had Dan’s parents visiting us and they very kindly paid for us all to stay in a local holiday park in Canet. And while we were enjoying our free holiday I saw a sign for winning a holiday by sharing a photo on social media so I shared this photo:

And we won second place! Which is a weekend in any of their parks. We could go to a local one with a nice pool or we could go anywhere in France or the Netherlands. I’m tempted by Paris because we wanted to go there anyway, and although it doesn’t have any nice pools it is a free weekend’s accommodation just outside of Paris.

This week I’m in an art exhibition which has been nice, and a definite bonus of living here, there are a lot more inspiring things to paint. These are my painting from the exhibition it’s on until Sunday if you’re in the area.

The other bizarre kind of fun thing that happened this week was, for the second time ever, I had a video go viral. Really viral like at its peak it was getting 2000 views per minute.  It’s slowed down now but it’s on 2 million views. Unfortunately I dont make any money out of it, but I have got what money can’t buy….a lot of data about what people call a “Chinese Burn” in other countries. Wow it’s a minefield. Very interesting. I’m not sure what to do with this knowledge now. I might actually be the current world expert on this very niche subject having read the majority of the 10k comments.  Here’s some of that data on a map…. 

And last bit of happy news for this blog is Dan has an interview next week for a remote job. Thanks for reading.