"You're a really Useless Engine" said The Fat Controller

I am home alone. Well not actually home alone but two and a half layers of the 3G team are not in the house. Which leaves me, my mother and our au pair. Its the weekend so our au pair is pretty much out and about - working, smoking, texting in no particular order - so then there were two. However I have already screwed up what should have been a lovely start to the weekend by getting over excited the night before and going for "drinks after work".

Yes "drinks after work" which just rolls off the tongue - "drinks after work", "drinks after work", "drinks after work" - if you say it fast enough and over and over again it sounds like the Thomas the Tank engine books I read to my son where the trains all talk in that train-like way "chuffitty chuff", "chuffitty chuff", chuffitty chuff" and suddenly when you've said it over and over again in your head it feels like a mantra which is drawing you into its murky underbelly - "drinks after work", "drinks after work", "drinks after work" - like a lilting sound of a train taking you to exotic places like the nearest hosteleries (pubs just isn't exotic enough) with really exotic sounding names like The Buck, The Stag, The Plough, The Four Feathers - oh the list is endless and when you mix them all up and put them altogether sound like the 'Carry-On' express train!!!

It also sounds so manageable, so effortless and so usual. But for someone who doesn't partake of the "drinks after work" scene (and for those who know me I am saying the 'drinks after work' scene is unusual NOT the partaking of drinks in the safety of one's own home scene as that is very usual) that often it might as well be saying lets get over excited, high pitched and messy in really no particular order.

I had big plans for my weekend in my reduced household setting which involved a lot of me doing a lot things for me with a little bit more me on top. I have planned a me love-fest and no not in a self love kind of way. I mean in a it's all about me kind of way (This isn't that sort of blog and there will be no webcam link thank you very much...)

So "drinks after work" in my head fitted right into "It's all about me" weekender. We go off to the pub and its feeling manageable, effortless and quite surprisingly but nicely usual. But somewhere between the first pub, the last pub, the first drink and fourth, fifth - well lets call it last drink - the gentle train with its lilting sound has become a runaway train which is heading, no careering, towards the over excited, high pitched and messy and you've been diverted from that exotic place to final destination "Hangover Central" calling at "Oh go on just one more", "Well I was going to get something to eat but yeah a bag of cheese and onion please" to "Oh if you're having one then we might as well get a bottle" to "Well I'm not waiting around for half an hour at the station so alright one more" to "Oh god no more wine I couldn't  - oh a vodka, lime and soda? oh go on then." 

Now add to this mix a timed window of opportunity. I am the mistress of my own time this weekend but I am remembering that its the me weekend and I need to get as enough me time as possible into that me weekend. So I still have my 'let's be sensible about this' head on and I have a cut off time in my head with a half an hour either side contingency planning. Now that should mean less in less time will be consumed but I'm still chanting the 'drinks after work' mantra and feeling I am on the Soul Train smooth on the tracks and gliding along elegantly and effortlessly. Laughing and throwing my head back to my friends amusing anecdotes, listening intently and tilting my head to one side to indicate the intensity of my listening and holding court to an attentive and enthralled audience. Well that is how I see it in my misty eyed or is that winey glazed way. Those three hours of opportunity are ticking by but I don't miss a beat and drink after drink flows and what in the old days would have been stretched over twice the time has been consumed in half because I've got a VIP ticket for the me weekend and I'm not going to blow it - "No way Jose" or "No way hosey" as my son says. I am now in full flow and we’ve moved off the Soul Train to the next fully loved up locomotion encouraging others to “Get on up, join hands - your on the Love Train, Love Train” which quite clearly none of us are!  

Abruptly hopping off the Love Train in a highly unelegant way I stumbled to the station and miraculously make it onto the first physical train of the night with some inedible delight to scoff on the way home and hope and pray I don't sleep past my destination. I am now officially on the way to "Hangover Central".  I somehow get home, administer drugs to my mother (is it an offence to be drunk in charge of a blister pack) fall into bed only to wake the next morning knowing shamefully that I've ended up derailed in the siding shed nowhere near the Island of Sodor. With no painkillers in the whole of the house I can't escape the fact that my "it's all about me weekender" has become the "woe is me weekender" and I can hear the voice of the Fat Controller ringing in my head "You've been a really Useless Engine." 

It's all in the name.

I have been threatening to start a blog for sometime now but like everything in my life I just keep putting it off. However so much has happened over the last few years that sometimes my life is unrecognisable to me! Though when I start this I'm sure it might be recognisable to others, especially those poor commuters who hear my tales on a sometimes daily basis... Actually its some of those said same people who have said that I should start a blog but as one of my lovely friends pointed out to me over a glass or seven of wine that its because they are sick of hearing them as opposed to them being hilariously funny. Friends can be cruel!

So why 'Life in 3 G'? Well this blog is not sponsored by 3G technology for a start as I don't actually know what that is, but if they like it they and want to shower me with whatever it is they do for free it would be rude not to take it, unless of course what they do involves any sort of pain then I am not so keen. So the title came to me after reading an article in a freebie newspaper on my way to or from work. It was about families of three generations living together and how in our changing society this was becoming a more usual set up. People not being able to afford to buy a home, get a mortgage, needing a deposit, help with childcare or support in one's old age. Whatever the combination I was amazed that somebody had taken the time or even been bothered to write about my kind of life especially giving it a really snappy little label of 3G. Making it sound like a tight compact team ready for action. Whereas I just called it living with far too many people one being old and sometimes cantankerous and the other extreme young and tantrumy with a couple in the middle who were whiney (moany and in the fuelled by vino sense) and exhausted - with an au pair thrown in for good measure. Making it sound loose, all over the place and splitting at the seams. However I was wrong it was 3G and it was hip and happening and as I have never been either of those things in my life I decided it was time to rightfully claim that title and make it mine.

So what better way to 'make it so' (in the words of Captain Jean-Luc Picard of the Starship Enterprise) then to blog about it and show to the world (or at least a couple of mates and the 'odd' neighbour - and there's plenty of them around) that my set up is of the moment and it has a name. But also that this wonderful and at times not so wonderful arrangement has given me the richest source of material which I have plundered shamelessly and shared mainly for my own amusement at first but what has turned out to be for others entertainment too.

So when I get started if you love it let me know, if you hate it then I'm sorry but think yourself lucky its not your life and hope to God you're not on my train of a morning. Anyway only unhip unhappening people would hate. The rest of you I'm sure will be wishing you to were part of the 3G movement. But you can be - it's easy. All you need to do is procure an oldie with onset dementia, a small child with Little Lord Fauntleroy tendencies, a constant cash flow crisis, stressful jobs mixed with liberal splashes of alcohol and mixed up with a young woman who can't speak a lot of English, is hormonal, homesick and probably with an eating disorder and there you have it - my Life in 3 G. It really is all in the name.