Will you slow dance with me?

Well, will you? If you're in a hurry, don't hang around - we're going to take it eeeeaaasy. It's the weekend after all. For today's illustration, it was a toss-up between Eric Carle's worthy 'Slowly, Slowly, Sloth' and Alexis Deacon's 'Slow Loris' with his pimp hat. Carle's classic 'take your time to find/know yourself' fable is enchanting, but in this house the Loris wins hands down. Look at that hat. Need I say more? Dude. Appearances can be deceptive. During the grey old day, Slow Loris does nothing ... very slowly. Come nightfall - hello! Maybe you know the stories - they are both great, but perhaps I am more Loris like (like most of us mothers he/she looks like us, sleepwalking during the day, but once the children are tucked cosily in their beds, we whoop it up with our writing at night). I'm tired of worthy, think I'm old enough to know myself by now - the thought of earning a Huggy Bear style hat like the Loris is much more fun.

Did you ever play the cloud game with your kids? If ever road trips are getting out of hand, the toddler has flung the last DVD out of the window like a Frisbee, I-spy has lost its interest, and someone is saying 'I need the toilet NOOOOWWW' this is our 'make it to the next service station' game. The rules are simple - spot an incredible cloud, and tell everyone what it looks like (a dog, a duck, a house). Our kids love it. It stops anyone in their tracks - and even when we're not playing they will now say 'Look! Look, that cloud looks like a crocodile' to the confusion of our more 'normal' young passengers. Zone out of the chaos, concentrate hard enough as an adult on those open-vista highway/motorway journeys and you can see the answer to everything. When I found a version of 'Slow Dancing ...' accompanied by clouds, I knew it was the perfect one for this post.

I first heard this song on 'Leaving Las Vegas' - a film which in spite of myself I love. It's heartbreaking (spoiler: love is not enough to save Ben/Nicolas Cage from drinking himself to death in Vegas). It goes against everything I believe in - salvation, love conquers all, love saves you. Thing is, you have to want to save yourself, and as much as Sera loved him, Ben didn't want to live. The song was beautifully chosen for this bittersweet film - Mayer is known only in the UK as Jennifer Aniston's ex-arm candy, which seems a shame. I love Blues almost as much as Jazz, and he seems a likely candidate to take over from Clapton if not Hendrix (as a few overexcited reviews have suggested). You cannot be fast to the Blues. It's the weekend - why not kick back, relax, and slow down. B B King, John Lee Hooker or whoever you choose. Couldn't find Hummingbird which always reminds me of home. (If you like the JLH song there are better recordings but in honour of Slow Loris, we have a Hat Thing going on).

Everything goes by so fast. Now that the years are broken up into term-sized chunks again, it seems the months are accelerating. Every day when Dad dropped me off to catch the 7am bus to school in Exeter he would say 'Don't forget to smell the flowers.' Every day. Don't you hate it when your parents give you good advice? Even now, 25 years later, and he is five years into fighting Non-Hodgkins having actually died but fought back - again - this summer, I realise I just haven't been taking his advice. (Did I ever?) I finally printed off digital photos from the last three years - I look at my baby son and can't remember him being that small. Where did that baby go? Where has the time gone? I have lost nearly three years consumed by waiting to be settled, waiting for our own home, waiting for the book to be published. This is time you don't get back. Maybe you have the same things going on with your life, the waiting - how does that make you feel?

What matters to you? Is it slothful not to have a showhome, when you would rather spend your freetime writing rather than polishing? If the basics are there - the children are loved, contented, fed, your other half remembers what you look like and nobody is dying of dysentery does it matter if you haven't ironed the underpants?

In 1980 we missed the strangely erotic subtext of the Cadbury's rabbit helping Mr Beaver keep his log aloft, but she had it right. Take it easy - particularly with something as sociable as food. Tonight, the pilot is in Mexico (probably working his way through the all you can eat breakfast buffet with chilli on everything before flying a 767 home). The children ate with their playdate friends three hours ago: bangers & mash, ice cream and berries - then we made popcorn which is now adorning the toddler's bedroom (perhaps he thought it was confetti). I lost the will to live, and carried him to sleep under his rainbow bed and glow stars, popcorn crunching underfoot. Vacuuming can wait til tomorrow - this is My Time. Friday nights used to be high heels and gladrags, Margaritas, dancing, dinner, or Ronnie Scott's. An old friend reminded me last night how young we were. This was me (far left, with Gaia, Amanda and Katie) on some 1990 Friday night gone by with much loved old friends - heading out for a party, why we are all carrying flowers like we are going to a funeral who knows. It's probably the last photo of me as a single woman - shortly after the pilot and I became an item. In fact this photo kills two birds with one stone - Ophelia, hiding behind the bolero jacket and those hideous yellow carnations is the skin tight, Robert Palmer minidress of near 20-year old lore that you said it would be fun to see a photo of:

Clement Stone said 'what the mind can conceive the mind can achieve.' Someone else put it more usefully as 'keep buggering on.' Some of my nobility seems to have been rubbed off lately, but I'm determined it will all come good. I have all these dreams for us. Friday nights when I won't be sitting here alone wearing two sweaters, Uggs and a blanket because of the wind whistling through the gaps in this old beamed cottage, listening to cheery groups of people heading for a pint in the pub opposite. We are working for these dreams - that's why the pilot is on the other side of the world, and I'll be sitting up until the early hours on book three. In the sidebar is a world webcam - I have this as my screensaver. I love how random and slow these images are, and how poignant. Some of the images remind me of holidays or what the pilot might be seeing so many miles away from us. Not everything is immediately beautiful. Empty car lots and abandoned picnic furniture - each fresh image has an aching beauty to it (they remind me of that sequence where they filmed the floating carrier bag in 'American Beauty'). It is a daily reminder of how vast and how small this world is, of our importance and insignificance, how close we are and how far apart - to take it easy, and see the beauty around us.

TODAY'S PROMPT: If you have kids, I can't recommend the Eric Carle or Alexis Deacon books enough as lessons to take things slow. If your life has been feeling frantic this week (like mine), why not take a leaf out of the sloth and loris' books, and slow down. What does slow mean to you? Do you remember your first slow dance? (Mine: he asked me, I stood up and towered over him. We danced with his head nestled on my shoulder. When you are 13, nice to be asked for the first time all the same). Maybe you have some memories of when you were forced to slow down, and how it gave you a chance to appreciate things you would have missed? I remember after 'O' levels, they packed thirty 16 year old girls onto three canal barges and set us loose. It was mayhem (we managed to wedge one of the boats across a narrow section of the canal, and spent most of the last night touching up the paintwork with nail varnish). Looking back it was a wonderful way to say goodbye to people who were like sisters and I haven't seen since that day. I remember every late night conversation lying on the top of the barges looking at the stars - you can't help but move slowly on a river barge.

Closer to home - the next time you think you want it all to go faster, remember everything passes, none of this lasts forever. All you have is now - and for parents maybe remember this poem I found last weekend tucked among the kids' paintings I'd stored:

'Beattie is Three'

At the top of the stairs
I ask for her hand. OK.
She gives it to me.
How her fist fits my palm,
A bunch of consolation.
We take our time
Down the steep carpetway
As I wish silently
That the stairs were endless.'

(Adrian Mitchell from 'Heart on the Left' Bloodaxe 1998)