So what with illness, school meetings (5 scheduled for the week – if you include the Summer Project (it’s October FGS!)), a deadline for a website, torential rainfall and hot sun (could we please co-ordinate the rainfall with the sick days so we can get stuff done when it’s sunny, thank you!) – where do I begin?

At the dole office!

Mr Fusspot headed off on his first day “on the mitch” (as he put it) to the not-particularly-local dole office (they closed a few down during the celtic tiger, now the staff in the few remaining are run off their feet, whilst their colleagues from those that were closed down are now… unemployed?… no, does that happen in the civil service? – comment here if you’re one and please clarify). As he queued he saw smiles and laughter in several booths, but not so for him. He, of course, got the grumpiest I-wish-I-didn’t-have-this-job employee who asked him to come back the next day with his passport. He already brought his driving licence and birth cert and spoke in a local accent. I guess anyone with brown eyes in Ireland is potentially foreign! Someone thought Miss Fusspot was Spanish at Summer Project (I didn’t know they had pale, freckled people in Spain)!

When he returned on Day-2 of UE it transpired that they didn’t believe that his company would only have paid him statutory redundancy after nine years of service (he was lucky to get that, some might say). Thankfully, Mr F, always fussy about time keeping, was five minutes early for his appointment, scheduled for his old office’s lunchtime, and they managed to clear it up over the phone before lunch instead of sending him home with more paper work. Now why couldn’t they do that on day one?

That said, by Day-6 Mr F had cash in hand from the post-office! We’d heard horror stories of four month waiting lists! I can only assume that our dole office’s catchment area did not benefit so highly from the non-recessionary years (I know people are fed up with the term celtic tiger – send other suggestions below) and they therefore have a smooth running system in operation. By the way, does anyone else (among the great unemployed) feel like they’re going to get caught on the hop when walking the streets between 9 and 5? Or is this particular to Mr Fusspot.

The Food!

Recession/UE calls for different eating habits, as does a snotty nose, so inventiveness was needed this week – a welcome break from the laptop. We celebrated Day-1 by inviting friends (just two) round for dinner and the first of two giant pots of ratatouille this week was made. We particularly wanted to share (read ‘impress’) with our botanist friend, a pot full of homegrown tomatoes, peppers, courgette, aubergine and onion (well actually we’d run out of our onions and had to buy some, along with the garlic, at the last minute in the local grocers – we’re lucky to still have one). It was actually mostly tomatoes and courgette, but then such is life when you’re trying to eat out of your own garden – and sure nobody complained. See photos of giant (i.e. forgot to pick) courgettes on Mr Fusspot‘s page. It’ll be courgette and cocoa muffins for the weekend – cocoa as opposed to chocolate as it’s a non-dairy week with all the bunged up noses and the recipe uses oil instead of butter – see Mrs Fusspot‘s page for the recipe. The cocoa makes them look like chocolate muffins so Master eats them. Sure, what child could refuse chocolate muffins? Answer: Miss Fusspot – who I tell that they are just like her favourite banana muffins only darker. This line is also fed to Mr Fusspot. Don’t get me wrong, we ALL eat chocolate. We just don’t eat the same chocolate things. Of course not, that would make life so simple, and life is never simple chez Fusspots!

Master Fusspot was home sick one day with a sore throat (the one day we were supposed to meet with his teacher of course, so one meeting down. And it was the last day before my CMS/website meeting). For Master to concede that something hurts means he’s probably got a full blown throat infection. When he was little he climbed into our bed one morning and said “Mummy, will you fix my ear”. I knew him well enough by then to cart him off to the doctor, who looked at him and said “Sure, he looks grand” and then proceeded to check his ears – the one requiring “fixing” had a flaming ear infection and the other “good” one was on the way to having one! On one such trip I was so happy when he actually threw up in the doctor’s bin – See! He IS sick! Another day he sat through dinner and then said he had to rest his legs on the couch – he had two big holes in his knees with blood pouring out of them! Apparently he’d tripped in the garden when I’d called him in for dinner.

Anyway, of course he required special food – doesn’t he require it everyday! He was hungry (I even dreamt that night that he was shouting from his bed for food!), the kind of hunger a cold gives you, but his throat hurt and his nose was stuffed – oh, and did I mention he’s supposed to avoid wheat and… if possible… sugar! So I made what my family (comment below if it was you, as I don’t recall which of you said it) calls Pancake Free Pancakes, i.e. wheat free, dairy free, sugar free pancakes. See Mrs Fusspot‘s page for the recipe (or almost one, because I make them up as I go along, so bear with me till I figure out quantities for those who need them). They were delicious. I grabbed one as I ran out the door to collect Miss Fusspot.

Miss Fusspot, usually sullen, was happy – on two occasions I believe it was this week (well she is a tenager. No, I didn’t spell that wrong. She’s only ten but is over 5′/1.5M and way ahead of her classmates on the road to teenagerdom). One, she was asked to read one of her essays to the class (BTW I told her I would always let people know that I take after her, as opposed to the other way round, since she started writing first) and two, she sang solo in front of the class… with another girl (as a fully fledged member of Fusspots.net I was obliged to point out to her that it is in fact called a ‘duet’ when you sing with another person, but the use of the word ‘solo’ gave Master Fusspot an opportunity to flip into Starwars mode – the latest thing! – as the only Solo he knows is Han Solo).

So it’s back to the laptop and courgettes for week 2.

In the meantime recession hit and I felt it was all the more urgent to get this up and running before any (or any more) businesses closed down. People asked, but how will you make anything from this venture? I wasn’t sure but I felt I should do it anyway and faced with the wonderful abilities of those around me, this was the one thing I knew I could do.

Also, there is no reason why you can’t still be fussy in a recession and I want to share ways of living with high standards on low or no wages.

I have also often thought that the food I paid good money for was not worth it, be it from a supermarket, café, restaurant or even farmers’ market, so I intend to include some critiques here (who else here loves to read AA Gill?).

In the meantime, while I procrastinated, I took a few courses, one being The Artist’s Way, where I discovered I like to write. Not fiction, like Miss Fusspot (if you’re lucky I’ll introduce you – or perhaps more acurately, your little ones, to some of her stories another day), just to write about everyday life, which is perhaps not everyday life to everyone else or perhaps it is – your comments will be invaluable in assessing this! We are four fusspots in one household: Mr, Mrs, Miss and Master,  not a widely used term today for juniors but entirely correct in this case as master is a diagnosed Fusspot (or Asperger as it’s more commonly known).

The last and perhaps most important reason to finally start this page is that this is Mr & Mrs Fusspot’s first week, (2nd day, I so desperately wanted to start yesterday but picked the wrong CMS to try first. Should’ve gone to… WordPress first!) of unemployment, so stay with us as I let you know how we get on with this new state of affairs (both of us in the same month and even Aunt Fusspot too!)

As a fully fledged fusspot I really don’t like trying to read something with typos, but I confess I am not all-knowing, so please, please feel free, fellow fusspots, to send in any corrections I need to make or point out any consistent errors especially (though please do bare in mind where spellings are concerned that I am not North American and therefore will be conforming to English spelling, though I point out that I am not English either and sure don’t ye know some of the ould native language comes through in our way of talkin’, so please forgive me and help me be an even fussier fusspot!).

Yours fussily,

Mrs Fusspot