“Let’s? just have? a sandwich for lunch,” said Darling Wifey. “I like the look of that place on the corner opposite the castle in Helmsley.”

“Two prawn sandwiches, please,” I asked the waiter.

They took our coats from us and served us drinks in the lounge. Then we were led to the conservatory, next to the pool, where we had a starter (a starter for a prawn sandwich!) of carrot & coriander soup with fresh baked basil & mint bread. Normally I would have crossed the street to avoid this sort of stuff, but it was actually pretty good.

Then the sandwiches arrived, with a side salad and some chips. And I never knew that chips could be cooked so perfectly: crunchy on the outside, fluffy on the inside and exactly the right shade of golden. And they didn’t even mark the plate with oil. Oh, and a sprinkling of freshly crushed rock salt.

I would have snapped my fingers for the waiter, but he was there before I had finished raising my arm. The coffee was obscenely delicious. In fact, only complaint was that the parking space didn’t have my name on it.

Anyway, now I have to write a begging letter to the bank…

It doesn’t just make waffles. It farts at the same time.

Little Madam is growing up.

We’ve just got home from Durham Airport (formerly Teesside Airport, but it’s considered to be a bit more glamourous to allude to Durham than Middlesbrough. After all, in Notes from a Small Island, Bill Bryson didn’t write, “If you have never been to Middlesbrough, go at once. Take my car. It’s wonderful“) where we have handed Little Madam over to the care of? her much-doting grandparents. They are off to another small island in the Mediterranean for a week.

Readers who know Darling Wifey’s mother will understand when I say that grandma’s standards had not slipped; Little Madam was expected to be presented at the airport in her new travelling clothes, with her hair done just so and plenty of reading matter (so she won’t distract grandma from the important matter of Looking Good and Creating a Good Impression.)

Little Madam looked every inch the glamourous, jet-setting ingenue. (God help Mr Darcy when she finds him.)

Operation Wipe Clean has been progressing well this year. The washable paint is now on the walls in two rooms and is wonderfully efficient. We have wooden floors that resist stains and spills beautifully? (although the two rugs are very vulnerable) and our leather chairs laugh off smears of food, bodily excretions and mud.

That was until? Little Madam left her glittery golden nail varnish within reach of little hands…

According to the Today programme on Radio 4, George W Bush regrets his “bellicose rhetoric” on the run up to the Iraq war.

Little Nutter has been learning all about animals this year.

The donkey sanctuary has been bringing two donkeys to school, and another charity has been bringing an assortment of other animals into school for him to investigate. Then there are the various trips to farms and other places with animals in them (students’ union bars?) and last of all, the ducklings hatching in Tiny Flirt’s nursery.

He has learned to be very quiet, move slowly and touch very gently. He has learned not only that some animals like to be stroked, but also that they will show you how they like to be stroked by rubbing gently against you.

However, this is all new to the cat - who can clearly remember three years of being rugby tackled by a manic Little Nutter every time she moved slowly.

So we are regularly hearing the sentence, “Oh no! The cat has gone away!” and having to comfort a tearful little boy.

I’ve had lots of good ideas recently.

The first one was to put my work locker key and memory stick in a really safe place. That was on Friday. I found it last night.

The second was to put the remote controls for our TV, DVD player? & decoder in a nice, high place to stop the children from turning themselves into couch potatoes (and then forcing me to search the house when I want to be a couch potato!) Little Nutter just scaled the? West Face of the bookcase like a rather noisy little? Sir Edmund Hilary. And when he retrieved the “Telly Calculator” he jumped.

Then I had the idea of dumping? the separate antivirus contracts for all our family laptops and stuff, and buy one “Wireless Network” contract, which decided (against all logic and the handbook) that it didn’t like Darling Wifey’s Apple and banished her from the Network summarily and with no hope of appeal.

Autism: we need a debate? - a response to the article I mentioned here

Eurovision

I can’t decide what I love most about this - Sir Terry at his very best, or just the sight of most of Europe taking it all very, very seriously whilst England and Ireland just take the piss.

I’m supporting Finland? this year. Enough said.

Some ‘autistic’ children aren’t ill, they’re just badly behaved? (an article by Katie Grant? in the Sunday Times.)

Frankly, this idiot woman has said that 9 times out of ten, Autism is actually the result of bad parenting, family breakdown or even putting young children into nurseries instead of letting mothers raise them in the home. She regards Autism as “an ism” adopted by trendy parents as an excuse for their brats’ bad behaviour, calling it an “illness” and clearly distinguishing it from “children who really do suffer from neurological disorders” - but one which parents like to claim because, she says, they get an £80 a week disability allowance for it. (I wish it was that much!)

If she wanted to write about the 600% increase in diagnosed Autism in this country, then perhaps she should have written something about? the massive improvement in diagnostic tools available to the medical profession? and the differences between the two extreme ends of the Autism spectrum.

But that would have taken research, which is hard work? - and wouldn’t have been even slightly sensational. Almost boring. Not deceitful, anyway.

Instead she has ranted about all parents of children with? Autism, failing to make any accurate comments about the condition, and demonstrating that she hasn’t made a scrap of effort to discover what life is actually like for these parents. It’s almost as if the entirety of her research was in the pages of Mark Haddon’s book, which she implies is to blame for the glut of trendy parents exploiting this lucrative new excuse.

As one mother at ASDf said, “Surely she cannot be unaware that less than a month ago a mother of an autistic child killed herself and her son because she could not cope. Perhaps she crumbled under the strain of being so fashionable and well-off?”

There was a time when mental disabilities were called “feeble-mindedness.” These days, that view is rightly considered too offensive to repeat. There was also a time when the mothers of children with Autism were blamed for it, and called “refrigerator mums.” Before the weekend, I thought that was now considered too offensive to repeat.

And it doesn’t make a scrap of difference that Katie Grant explicitly excludes ‘the tenth time out of ten.’ Her article is overflowing with errors: confusing Autism with ADHD (kind of like confusing paraplegia with having a broken leg); grossly overestimating both the size and ease of claiming the DLA; calling Autism an “illness.”

This is journalism at its worst.