The Harridan

Sometimes, when you live with a bunch of people who are small and a bit prone to filth/lax hygiene, you get hit by gross stuff. A barrage of parasites. Here’s a recent unfortunate list – most, though not all, happening to me as well as affecting a good chunk of the rest of the family members:

worms

nits (x2, possibly still current)

stomach bug throughout half the family (featuring vomits and unmentionables)

cold sore on lip

back rash (mysterious, still present, halfway between an eczema splodge and shingles patch)

ear ache/strep A/tonsilitis

mice infestation

constant cupboard moth infestation

silverfish in the bathrooms (constant)

warts

athletes foot

ringworm

Most of these things have been resolved/slathered in oldish creams from under the bathroom sink, though a few stubbornly remain. Like this morning, I got up with Remi at 6ish to find Ned, the Perpetual Early Riser, telling me that he has seen a ‘dark shadow’ run from under the couch back into the kitchen. I wish a ‘dark shadow’ was a mystery but we all know it’s yet another interloping mouse. Apparently they have a new lot of babies every 21 days so it’s like this race to track them down and extinguish them before they take over your kitchen entirely.

The worst of all these modern-day plagues is probably the mice, followed by the worms, then the nits. I found out I had a head full of nits the evening after returning from a day at Soho Farmhouse. I had been lording it up there, swimming in the lovely pool and using their towels and sitting close to people in the sauna and then having the longest lunch amongst Chipping Norton’s finest media types (there were a LOT of them and they all didn’t seem to have proper/pressing jobs on this particular Friday and it did leave me scratching my head in wonderment though that could have been the nits) and then I came home to discover my poor old scalp was a louse playground. Nay, a louse breeding ground. Cue the tiny nit combs and oil treatments and a general feeling that we were all a bit unclean. Remi, of course, was Patient A. He had fat bold lice and the very worst see-through hair the exact color of the nits and lice as well as curly knots which don’t comb out that well. He ended up with a hair cut with George the Barber and now all his curls have gone along with the lice. I think they have gone anyway. My eyes can’t quite manage the strain of checking like they once could.

He was thrilled with his haircut. ‘Thrilled’ isn’t a word I use often but in this case it is a perfect choice. Also ‘chuffed’. It was like his real self was a boy with shorter hair but he just hadn’t known it. He smiled broadly the whole way and checks in the mirror in the morning to make sure the cut is still there. He gets worried if you ruffle his head in case it somehow brings back his former knotty bonce. He is also, in the photo above, sporting a faint leftover eyeliner moustache from World Book Day outfitting the day before.

In other news

Barnaby has a tattoo. I have mixed feelings about his tattoo.

I booked flights for our summer holiday which turned out to be horribly stressful as the flights kept going up each time I looked and the flight times get worse but I didn’t have a credit card with which to buy the tickets and so I just had to witness the brutal increases. A credit card did eventually come in the mail (that’s a whole other story about balance transfers and Martin’s Money Savers) and I came home late from work and felt the ticket-purchasing was critical to be done late on a Thursday night rather than on a day where I could be rational and calm about it and I ended up booking us flights home at 7am in the morning. This means a lost day, a terrible night-before, a shocking early morning transfer, and general discontent. I did this because of the Flight Purchasing Pressure. I would add this particular pressure to the emotional burden of women’s work. Mark doesn’t get involved in this kind of domestic chore thing. He did look up from the TV when I directly (loudly/aggressively) addressed him once I found out my booking error but his only contribution was to tell me he thought I said the flights were really cheap and he doesn’t want to fly home that early. No one engages in the boring hours of bloody flight searching but I SHALL EAT MY HAT if they don’t all moan when they have to get up at 4am the last day of the holiday.

Emotional labour is taxing.

Speaking of tax, how has our new-found allegiance to not-spending going, I imagine you asking?

Not very well. If there was some sort of ‘out of ten’ ranking awarded to people based on their new-found not-spending habits, I would give myself about six out of ten, ten being still blowing money like there’s an infinite supply, and one being like abstemious prudent people – the kind of people with apps that track their spending and ISAs and even weekly envelopes stuffed with cash that equate to exactly what they need for the week and once they run out they simply stop spending – the same people who use everything in their freezers and cupboards and who do a weekly delivered shop via Tescos rather than constantly run up to Waitrose from cremant and bacon and who go on shorter holidays in off-seasons and who borrow books from the library rather than buy and who do not buy Batsheva dresses from ebay on a bored whim. So I’m a six but I used to be an eight so I think that’s progress by anyone’s estimation.

I don’t buy coffee out anymore and I tell the children they must not steal any of my coins because they are very necessary. I try to cook up what we have in the fridge, drink less in the week, haven’t seen the inside of an uber for a month, and I returned a Solange Azagury Partridge cherry red lip ring because I thought the £150 would be better used on food. I fret about the accounts constantly and have anxiety dreams every night. I cry a bit more than I used to. Mark says YES THIS IS EXACTLY WHAT’S BEEN FREAKING ME OUT ALL THESE YEARS and I feel much kinder towards him and his tax-related stress wrinkles.

The lapses have steadily crept back in however and I am somewhat ashamed about this week’s excesses. A beauty treatment that shall not be named ended up costing me more than I had budgeted for, and I am also off this morning to get my silver roots turned back into golden blonde because the silver hair is threatening to take over my head. I accidentally ordered a game of Linkee from the evil Amazon because it felt like a fun thing to do, and I paid for a backgammon board because Barnaby said it was a good game to learn. I went out for pizza twice this week, bought a round for old friends accidentally (because sometimes it’s just the thing to do) and we stumbled upon a local quiz at The Mitre pub on Tuesday and bought wine and chips. Obviously, I bought tickets to Malta. None of this is helping.

In other other news

I have given up on intermittent fasting because it makes no difference to the girth of my arms. I am instead eating kefir yoghurt in the morning to make sure I have outstanding gut health. I am also stopping my run midway to do five pressups on various park benches in order to address the upper arm girth. Last night I split a shirt because the arm girth stresses out my seams. I imagine this is some sort of perimenopausal as-yet-unconnected symptom.

Ned had a birthday:

Spectacular World Book Day efforts and a magnificent video of the children helping their dad butcher, mince, label and vacuum-pack the deer he shot last month:

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by jodi Bartle (@harridan1)

It’s Bagel Sunday again, which means I have spent another £21.50 on five bags of fresh mixed bagels from the new Jewish deli on Westbourne Grove which I pop into at the end of my morning run. I never bring a backpack because I think if I ran with a backpack I would collapse from the strain of carrying it, or would get sweaty along my back or would look like I was running to work with some sort of polyester creaseproof suit shoved into the backpack to get changed into later like I imagine corporate people in the 80s did, and I just don’t like the idea of any of those. Instead, I run home grasping two paper bags that always rip. But these bagels are really good with bacon, so there you have it.

Bagel Sunday also involves everyone sleeping off their Friday and Saturday night socialising and very often we have nothing to do except read the papers and attempt some homework. I think these are my favourite times of the week, each couch accessorised by a lanky boy, the ever-so-slightly too strong smell of teenage boy coming from their bedroom, cups of coffee to drink and washing to do and some sort of cake perhaps to make, but nothing pressing us too deeply. I hope the boys take something from these mornings into their own lives, a slow and sleepy end to the weekend with reading and quietness except for Debbie Harry singing French Kissing in the USA somewhere in the background pleasingly like she is right now.

It’s not always about the bagels

Last weekend we did a non-Bagel Sunday thing. We drove to Burnham Beeches for a session on forest bathing which does not involve actual swimming. Rather, it’s a Japanese discipline where you go and get a hit from the air, sights, smells, texture and the light from the forest, slowly walking through it in silence. It was quite marvellous and we all felt better afterwards but were also a bit embarrassed when we had to close our eyes and smell the soil and normal families walked on by. The soil smelling was an active thing, meaning we knelt down and scrabbled the ground to get a proper nosefull. Mark thought this was one step too far for him, and said he felt like laughing out loud when he peeked open his eyes and watched us get too near the base of trees to scrabble and sniff because, ‘that’s where a dog pisses’. Sure. One of us did seem to develop an allergic reaction on the lips after something fell on her or bit her during the smelling part, but, sure. Nature. Bugs. Dog piss. All probably better than an overheated basement flat and the whiff of a badly washed 16-year-old, right?

There’s been more birthdays – three weekends in a row, so that has exhausted us all by the singing and the cake making and the amazon packages arriving. We have four teenagers in the house now which is fun except for when it is not. Moods are boring, meltdowns are boring, and so are the times that they get offended by stuff we say and do and attempt to ‘call us out’. My eye-rolling right back at them doesn’t go down very well.

This is what three weekends, three different kids, assorted girlfriends, three cakes, various reused candles and a dwindling budget looks like:

The dwindling budget is a bit of a thing. I got an email late on Monday night from our accountant telling me that I personally owe HMRC a hunk of GBP, the same amount as my student loan added up to after five years of studying. Which is, frankly, a whole lot of GBP. I thought it was a mistake, but apparently it is not, and now I have to do some terrifying growing up in the money department. We have to budget, figure out a replayment plan, stop taking ubers willy-nilly, give up cremant, stop subscribing to Vogue, never order a cocktail again, go out a lot less, return things, pay the children less, give up gym memberships, sell our truck, never buy another dress again, stop Amazon packages every darkening our door. No more hair coloring, no more Soho House dinners, no more buying gold like an Italian heiress well might. I’ll say no to sample sales, late night ebay trigger-happiness, weekend trips to Portobello’s food market, too many TV channel subscriptions. No more sending the kids up to Waitrose to buy stuff and have them come back with sushi and individual Cawston Press fizzy drinks. No more Waitrose? Certainly no more bagels. Today was a send-off, of sorts.

I did a big cry, fretted, got ashen-faced, told everyone, panicked, cried again, checked the calendar and realised with some relief there won’t be any more birthdays for at least six weeks, so we are over the latest expensive hump. I used to think that having more kids simply wasn’t an economical consideration because they could just share clothes and shoes and books and we could make traybakes for everyone but it seems that my understanding of economics was, and is, fundamentally lacking. 2023 looks like to be our family-wide Year of Austerity and it’s probably not a bad thing. But oh, to be 45 and financially stupid is a bit shit.

To cheer me up, and perhaps any of you who enjoy bad haircuts, here’s a selection of my most intense mullety-looks. The first two were taken before puberty where the main bits of hair had a wave, but not an uncontrollable one, the kind of hair you would brush softly and maybe push back to half stand up. There was possibly some hairspray involved to keep the ‘shape’. Please note the same jumper in both photos over two years. My mother knitted it, I loved it, it was worn purposefully for school photo day. My mother is a wonder.

Back to the hair. Puberty brought out the big powerful curls and it all became simply unmanageable as a mullet. See below for evidence of this:

A few years later my mother took me to Wendy Moser, an at-home hairdresser and part-time opera singer, and she cut the long bits off. My cool older brother, I remember, was quite relieved.

Enough of that. When I was feeling more flush, before the Terrible Tax Sitch, I went to see Babylon for a Bafta screening not because we thought the movie would be any good but because Brad Pitt was going to be there for a Q&A. Just look at him:

All sexy and thin in his nice-fitting suit. It was pretty much the best thing that has happened in 2023 thus far.

We did celebrate our 25th wedding anniversary which was nice and involved cocktails before we instigated the new, brutal cocktail embargo. This is us, all free and financially uncompromised in a land far, far away:

Lastly, but never leastly, here is Chris in a Christmas present shirt that features Magic the communal dog:

It’s a Sunday and the smallest child has just hit his 9 year old brother around the head with a plastic beaded necklace and refuses to say sorry. Casper has taken off with his friends with a £10 note and the aim to eat at a Gordon Ramsey restaurant to try the Beef Wellington.

Noah is cutting onions and peeling garlic to help Mark make burgers out of the deer he stalked and killed late on Thursday night in the freezing temperatures somewhere in Kettering. I was out at a Bafta screening that night scoffing canapes, popcorn and drinking as much of the flowing Piper Heidseick champagne that I was allowed while stuffing my bag full of the complimentary sherbert discs and oat milk chocolate drops to take home to the children, and so did not have to witness the deer being hauled onto our kitchen table and being cut up into red meaty chunks. When I got back, everything was wiped down nicely although the overflow fridge was literally overflowing with stainless steel bowls of newly-dead deer. It is hard to stomach. But there are burgers to be made, and Noah is helping mince and season, chop and shape.

Ned is watching a movie but is nursing a terrible ingrown toenail because no one has noticed that he has a habit of picking his toes to shreds – not noticed until now when the fleshy mess is bad enough to make him hobble. He says he has to keep his socks on all the time because it is too sore and too embarrassing to be let out. I have suggested a plaster and tea tree oil and have made a mental note to look closely at my children more often. Barnaby has just made an excellent joke about Shakespeare and Otis has made his packed lunch ready for Tuesday when he will sing Christmas Carols at Kensington Town Hall for “an audience of thousands”. The bagels will be stale, the ham kind of warm, but he won’t be dissuaded. I’m also not sure who will constitute the “thousands”.

I, meanwhile, have not gone for a run because I have another chesty pink-eyed snotty coughing thing. Instead, I got ready to go with Charlotte for a hotly anticipated church fete in Camden where she and I would most likely buy ourselves vintage trinkets, books, antique lace things, mid-century lamps and costume jewellery to hang whimsically on the tree but alas, when we arrived at the church, it seemed that church was actually still going on rather than the fete, which had, once we reread the flyer, been held the day before. Which makes sense, being a Sunday, etc etc.

This is us trying to find it. A day late:

But no matter as we pootled around the shops and drank coffee and ate brunch and bought things from charity shops which wasn’t quite the same but close. And I was a bit excited to be in Camden because the shows we have been watching – Everything I know About Love and Trying – are both filmed in Camden and it felt quite movie-set-ish today with the trees and people in hats and frosty winteryness everywhere.

Because, Christmas. Last week was notable for the school Christmas fair held on Friday. I baked three cakes frantically on Thursday – one banana chocolate cake for the fair and two others, another banana chocolate and one coconut for us to eat – because one is never enough. But on Friday during the school run the dog finished the cakes off. The rage! The fury! The wasted eggs and butter and desiccated coconut. All gone into the furry belly of that fat, naughty dog. He must have really worked at it, fishing for the cakes on the tray in the middle of our huge table, willing those paws and claws to stretch further, aim higher! He was very sleepy all the rest of the day, way beyond shame. I think he just doesn’t do shame anymore.

I had a sample sale triumph last week – there was a bit of a strange sale with mostly stupid shoes at the Music Room but also some Roksanda clothes on a rack which sounded far too small but massively discounted. I raced in and bought a big pink and black floor-sweeping gown in heavy double-lined silk, hoping it might fit, and which was listed on the Harrods website at £2600. I got it for a measly £80. I wore it to a lovely friend’s farewell at the pub and nearly tripped up on my way to the loos. Practical for nothing, but I shall endeavour to continue to wear it anyway.

Here’s Remi at the school Christmas fair, foregoing a jacket and snacking one of many packets of popcorn:

Yesterday, in the spirit of Christmas tradition, we met up with a group of friends and took the Elizabeth Line to the Prince Charles cinema to a Sing-a-Long Muppets Christmas Carol and then to dinner with 24 other people at a Chinatown dim sum place. It was magical and heartwarming and lovely and only a little bit dampened by my constant coughing and strained vocal chords. The energy required in singing all those Muppet songs was taxing. We passed a Santa pub crawl as we made our way to the theatre:

The coughing has been a problem – Mark is coughing too – and every night it has been a struggle to work out how to get past the tickly throat thing to start getting sleepy. I’ve been having hot showers for the steam and then wrapping up warm and pouring on Vick’s Vapour Rub in the old skool tradition and remembering how my dad says you must keep your chest covered up. It has made me think that coughing is like eating crisps. If you give in to one you are just screwed and you’ll eat the whole packet/cough the whole night. I tried to be mindful and talk myself out of the tickling throat – to decide it was just an illusion. It hasn’t worked very well.

This is the last week of work and school – a few more days of strange pickup times, badly thought-out present buying, more sample sales, Canary Wharf visits, pink-eye, and snot – before we drive to Devon to swim and make pavlova and panic-buy more presents and watch all the great, crap films. I cannot wait!

Just the Queen’s, mind – we have only had reasons to celebrate here and absolutely no one has died. Two birthdays in quick succession: Otis turned nine and I turned 45. Here’s Otis doing what he likes to do the very most – presiding over something made of sugar:

I say that we’ve only had reasons to celebrate here but we have also had some sadness and a fair amount of marital discord. We’ve experienced the first real teenage breakup which was so much worse than I anticipated, although I am not sure I had given The End much thought. I haven’t personally had a breakup ever*, which makes me unusual and a bit out of my depth. I tend to get quite weird around vulnerabilities – my default is to get all stoic, distant, and cauterised rather than meet the vulnerability where it lies. It’s all ‘chin up’ and ‘don’t fuss’ and ‘suck it up’ in my narrow, brittle-hearted world.

But this wasn’t something I could easily ignore and all of my limited stores of empathy and care and softness and kindness came spewing right out. There were mutual tears, leg stroking, cups of tea, emotional check-ins, hair-ruffling, hugs, and a fairly extended amnesty from having to do the usual chores for a bit. It was just so heartbreaking.

As the old lady now in the room, I also become aware of what I’ve lost – that innocence, naivety, and sweet, deluded optimism. That total belief in love, in that it is special to you and different from everyone else whose love stories aren’t quite as real or lasting as yours are. Everyone else has slightly inferior love. While this is sweetly arrogant and quite wrong, feeling this way for the first time is something I know now to be a beautiful, short-lived thing. Wasted on the young of course, etc etc.

Mark was a bit brusque about the whole breakup thing until I reminded him about when he got his heart broken by someone called Leeann who dumped him when he was young and in love and new to it all. He said she blind-sided him completely and he felt so sick he couldn’t eat or sleep and wondered how he would be able to live through it. I reminded him of this and asked him to dig deeper and it suddenly hit him – that terrible time came back for a moment. Which was lucky because up until that point he was flailing about and actually said the thing about there being more fish in the sea. I think I might have kicked him in the shins.

*No breakups because I married my first boyfriend!** Can you imagine?

**There was actually a week-long tentative boyfriend/girlfriend situation with a plain boy called Matthew Keen when I was 11 but that lasted a week, involved one out-of-school conversation via the family telephone, and then Matthew fatally asked to see me after school one day and I freaked out and had to end things.

Things have begun to settle down now and the sadness feels lighter and more manageable, except that Remi is now extremely morose about having to go to nursery every single day. The shock of it gets him every morning – what, again? He keeps telling us emphatically that there is no nursery in the morning, that it has now closed. Like, out of business closed. Big fat tears roll down his face as he scoots silently along the road, trussed up in his oversized uniform of burgundy trackpants with a massive, clean backpack which sits covering his whole back and bum. Luckily I don’t take him there in the mornings so I only hear tales of the crying and the misery, the nerves which see him sitting on the tiny baby toilets for a bit before he goes in. MY POOR BABY!

Other sadness

I guess it is fair to say we all felt a bit sad about the Queen, though the day off work was quite cheering. The best bit (if I am not struck down for suggesting there is a ‘best bit’ about an old, familiar and hard-working lady dying) was when the casket got driven down the road a few streets from where we live and the whole family stood out in the rain to wave her past. I didn’t go because I was out for dinner eating very good roasted aubergine and roasted peaches from Honey & Smoke, which was just one of those things as we booked before the whole ‘dying monarch’ situation. But I do wonder if I will always regret not standing in the road along with the whole neighbourhood in our raincoats, doing a bit of crying. I’m almost regretful about not standing in that queue for 20 hours, but then I remember my knees. There’s a limit. I did go and see the flowers in Green Park which was pretty nice, wandering among hundreds of people in the afternoon instead of preparing dinner.

A bad bit was when Remi got lost in the crowd while in Hyde Park watching the funeral on massive screens. I didn’t even know Remi was lost and accidentally blurted that out to the cop who had him. He was not amused and it became a little written-down kind of police-ish incident. Luckily Charlotte was on hand to document my moment of maternal humiliation:

Green Park Queen flowers:

As to marital discord

We have been having a little tussle over a cane basket filled with cassette tapes. I am sure this isn’t the first time I have written about this cane basket, as it certainly isn’t the first time we have had terrible fights over it. Basically, one day Mark came home with a big cane basket filled with many cassette tapes that he rescued from the skip of a London record producer.

The ideas behind the skip foraging and subsequent hoarding were:

• the tapes might contain something of value – an unreleased INXS recording, say, (which we do seem to have in our possession, but as to its value, and as to whether it is actually unreleased as opposed to us just wanting it to be unreleased is another whole thing), and we would sell it and have enough money to buy a house, or
• that Mark would one day be able to play the tapes because one day he will have a beach house with a tape recorder in it and he and I could while away many kidless hours (there are never kids in his fantasies) listening to cassette tapes as the imaginary but atmospheric rain lashed the corrugated iron roof.

Obviously, these things have not come to fruition quite yet but the cane basket and the tapes remain in our bedroom, stuck awkwardly out in front of our filing cabinet which houses 20 years’ worth of paperwork. The bedroom also contains a massive bed, a cot, too many perfumes, an amp, two guitars, golf clubs, a camping chair, a map of the world, a Victorian room divider, my clothes, Mark’s clothes, quite a few unwired lamps from skips/auction sites and piles of to-be-read novels. I have argued for years that the cane basket and tapes are just one step too far, but Mark sees this as some sort of affront to his authority and puts his foot down about it. The basket and tapes are not going anywhere, apparently: he gets all flinty-eyed and humourless when I say anything about them. So I don’t. I just put up with it as one of those marriage compromises, though it pains me deeply. Actually, it fills me with perimenopausal rage. But I choke it down and carry on.

Anyway, to put this into context, Mark has cleared out storage we have at the front of the flat so that our eldest son can make a kind of small cupboard-y bedroom to get away from the small children who go through his stuff and drive him mental. It has taken Mark years to find somewhere to transport his stuff – a friend felt sorry for our kids all sharing a tiny space and so asked her neighbours to give up their garage space so Mark could clear out the storage area and create a ‘room’ (hollow laugh) out of the old coal store. But finally it has been cleared out and all we need to do is paint the front bit and then the cupboard-y bedroom will be ready for a very big son desperate for a little privacy.

Mark, however, apparently had a bit of a plan to stick the cane basket and the cassette tapes into the tiny space – space that I think should be reserved solely for the eldest, longest-suffering son. I was not amused and tried to explain that Mark should think twice about colonising the new room – that, actually, his stuff is all over the flat, and that the eldest son of ours needed to be fully free and able to be alone, not sharing with anyone or anyone’s stuff any longer. Taking back something we had just given him seemed to be a heartless thing. But Mark disagreed and the flintiness returned. I left it at that because I know the drill.

So a few weeks ago, Mark came out of the bedroom with a bleeding leg because the cane basket scratched him. Like a vengeful cat. I laughed and said it was God telling him to chuck the bastard thing out. Mark got mad and told me that IT WAS STAYING AND WOULD GO INTO THE CUPBOARD-Y ROOM, LIKE, TOMORROW! The next morning I hatched a plan to take the fecking useless cassette tapes and transfer them into my stack of Matches Fashion marbled boxes that sit atop our bedroom filing cabinet, before Mark could get to them. They would be hidden but safe for the one-day-a-beach-house-outing that we one day may get to experience. But as the secret transfer was taking place, he came into the room and said

NO WAY

and dragged the entire m’fo basket and its out-of-date crap cassette tapes into the new ‘bedroom’ and left it there. And so I am still sulking about it.

I know this fight is not really about a basket and some old crap tapes. It is about much bigger things – about what it is to find yourself compromised, frustrated, older, resentful. What it is to feel like your life isn’t what you hoped for. It is about feeling trapped and bossed around, told off and a little mocked. It is about mortality, the passing of the baton onto your children who are becoming men and you didn’t even see it coming. It is about facing uncomfortable truths. About marriages. Feeling stale. Taking charge when you don’t feel in charge. Repressed feelings, unexpressible feelings. Missing your mum. Missing your youth and the smorgasbord of choices you had then, and missing the beach. Looking around an overcrowded basement flat in a city you came to once, on a whim, when you were young, and wondering why you are still there. With nowhere to shove your stuff.

I have sympathy for that, and I feel my own disquiet creeping up sometimes. But still, I just wish he would chuck the basket and the shit tapes out anyway.

Photo essay time

Me and Charlotte, finally appearing on Antiques Roadshow. I said nothing but nodded a fair bit and had a problem with hand placement:

My fella in a less flinty and more humorous mood, bowling. It’s our origin story, the bowling alley:

And finally, a bowling alley son. One might say, a natural progression:

I’m going to be 45 next month, and the weather has changed, the first kid goes back to school tomorrow, and so it feels like high time for a September Stocktake. That’s a thing I just made up so that I can do a bit of an introduction for any new readers*/readers who are forgetful/readers who haven’t been paying any attention and then segue seamlessly into the story of why I cried last week quite so much at a restaurant in Turkey.

*there are never any new readers

The Inventory

Perhaps The Manifest? I don’t know. Anyway:

Me: I’m middle-aged but I’m also well, apparently. This is something I know because the doctor confirmed it after I asked for a series of tests in case I was perimenopausal and therefore in some need of those wonderful-sounding HRT patches. I thought I was menopausal because I don’t sleep that well and I often get worried about stuff that used to not bother me in the slightest. I have also been getting hot. The bloods came back; I’m grossly healthy. The sleeping thing is most likely because I lay my weary head next to a consistently loud snorer (and I’m fond of a glass or two of whatever’s going of an evening), and my anxiety has, upon reflection, settled down now that I’ve started work properly. The ‘getting hot’ thing was just…summer. The GP said all is well. My new job has some sort of health check component and I did a questionnaire and the algorithm said I was a bit too fat but I think that algorithm was probably not accounting for my new heavy muscles acquired through my once-weekly self defence classes.

Exercise: As well as self defence class, I do a weekly yoga class and run 20km every week. So there, cruel and judgey algorithm.

Kids: My children are getting old. They are 17, 16, 14, 12, 8 and 3. The Baby is still called The Baby but this is patently wrong. I have to start taking the small baby clothes that sometimes appear under a stack of old towels to the clothing bins. That part of my life is over and this grieves me greatly.*

*more on that later

Schools: From this week, the children will be attending five different schools – in Islington, Bayswater, and Pimlico. Luckily I am not a very engaged parent because if I thought I had to be involved in these different institutions I might have a total breakdown. Everyone except the younger two has to sort themselves out – they have to get there on their own, figure out timetables, sort out their clothes and books. Mostly this system works – but we shall find out this week for sure.

Holidays: We’ve just been away for two weeks to a glorious spot on the Turkish coast. We have one holiday like that per year and one week at Christmas in Devon with an indoor pool. The Christmas holidays are cosy and not much happens other than lots of swimming, films, trips to odd market towns and windy walks on deserted beaches. The Turkish holiday always involves high drama, intense heat, pools and beaches and private boats, restaurants and precarious drives over mountains and throwing ourselves into the sea from volcanic cliffs. The children think the Devon trip is just as nice which is great but makes me wonder about the cost-saving implications of this data.

Marriage: Mark and I have been married for nearly 25 years. This happened quickly. It turns out he is what you might call ‘A Good’Un’. Kind and fun though not keen on domestic duties. Luckily we have someone come in and do a giant amount of the domestic duties, because other than cooking, I don’t like it either. And we are both what we like to call ‘collectors of things’, though others might less kindly call us ‘slight hoarders’. In a pretty small flat.

Sometimes, of course, we don’t like each other and then when that happens we go along to marriage counselling. That hasn’t happened for a long time. I like him very much overall and would rather watch The Goldbergs with him on the couch that anything in the world, except maybe for going away on holiday with him. He reads, loves hanging out with our friends, makes a very nice G&T, looks after us all pretty well, does helpful manly stuff (like he got the glass stopper unstuck from my Chanel No. 5 bottle yesterday using a vice) and he never ever says anything about me buying clothes except for ‘that’s a nice dress’. He really loves my cooking and is not afraid to say so.

Jobs: Mark runs a property renovation company and I have just started fulltime as a content manager for KPMG. This is exciting and so far, so good. The work seems to be right up my alley as it were, and the boss is supportive and kind. It feels surprising to be working as a grownup might after years of freelance graft where you’re either working too much or not at all, and nothing ever feels particularly ‘safe’. I’m going into the office on Tuesday for the first time where I will have to wear an actual lanyard and book an actual hotdesk and WEAR A PROPER OUTFIT! I am a little worried about my nails and hair as these are not tidy aspects of myself, and also shoes are perplexing because I only really want to wear trainers but will probably settle for ankle boots so as not to look like I don’t care that I am working in the London office of one of the Big 4 accountancy practices IN THE WORLD. No idea how this has happened.

Housing: Ah yes, the flat. The flat is a biggish flat for London standards because it is in the basement of a Victorian building in a very, very lovely communal square. We have lived here since our third kid was six months old. The rent has only gone up twice. While it is biggish, it only has two bedrooms, so we have had to add bunks to the walls as our family has grown. We are at a kind of weird critical mass kind of point right now, where it is unlikely any more babies will arrive (I live in hope) but the existing oldest four children are all as big as weedy men. They share a room and while the staggered bedtimes mostly work, sometimes it doesn’t and they all kick off. They sort of hate each other quite a lot too, which is awkward. But we are stuck really – there’s no chance of affording a house or flat that would fit us properly, and anything we could afford would be so far away as to necessitate new schools, new working practices, new commutes, new social lives. And they will soon empty out, one at a time, so the crisis point just has to be endured. Which brings me to:

Crying in a Turkish Restaurant

It was the sixth night of our two-week holiday and our dear friends had arrived. We were all giddy with excitement to see them and ordered too many bottles of Turkish red wine. We were feasting on 24-hour lamb and crunchy lemony salads and crusty bread and Mark was tending to the charcoal BBQ, the kids all running around under the grapes and in the heat. My darling friend Joan and I were talking about our housing situation and specifically about how the 17 year old had mentioned to me his plan to move out a year earlier than he needs to so he could ‘get away from his brothers’. The plan, he carefully explained, was to live at the hotel where he works, and his wages would go towards his room. The hotel apparently does do this for staff, as well as feed them and do their washing. When he had originally told me this, I was pierced in the heart from the sadness. He seemed to quite enjoy his piercing of my heart at the time, (I remember his eyes glittered with the power of it all) and so I just kind of gave my pierced-heart sad smile and took the news into my bleeding inner ribcage and sat with it. Mark thought it was a brilliant plan and pretty much everyone I have told this plan to agrees that it is clever and would work very well considering our small flat, the brother situation, etc. The hotel is only one street away and he would presumably come home sometimes. How brilliant. How resourceful and practical.

So we were discussing all this and I feel the pierced-heart get all freshly activated and then the red wine-related tears came. And they came and they spilled and they came and they spilled some more, as I snottily and incoherently tried to explain that I am so sad to be at the beginning of the end of my mothering because I have loved it so much, and the moving out stuff just feels too sad and too awful. The next point that I tried to express through the noisy tears was that I feel like everyone leaves and never returns, basing this, I think, on my family history because my father’s four brothers all took off early on and never came back ‘home’, living in places such as Papua New Guinea, Canada and different ends of Australia, while my mother’s sisters spread out throughout New Zealand, and now me and my own siblings live very far from ‘home’ both geographically and emotionally. I left home at 18 and never really returned. My brothers and sister and their kids all live abroad, far away from my parents. We don’t get together as a whole family and probably won’t ever again. I haven’t been back home to New Zealand in 12 years and can’t see a time when I will. Meanwhile, everyone is getting older and more entrenched in their lives and there is very little holding any of us together and it is really, really sad.

Luckily Joan is a psychotherapist and she patted my arm and said “I didn’t realise you have abandonment issues” which made me cry even more. Then my big boy came over (surely mortified but also kind) and patted my arm and said he would come back. That he would always be a part of our lives, that he didn’t hate our home, that he just needed some sort of space. All of which was entirely reasonable but in my addled state I wasn’t having any of it.

“But you’ll never come home!” “I’ll lose you!” “I’ll miss you so much!” “I just want to be your mum!” “Everyone leaves me!” “You’ll get married and your wife will hate me!” “I’ll probably hate her!” etc etc

waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah waaaaaaaaaaaaaaah waaaaaaaaaaaaaaah sniff choke sob cry eat some lamb wipe tears waaaaaaaaaaaah blow nose start crying again ignore waiters sip wine try some bbq’ed lamb chop cry sniff feel tired go home get embarrassed send whatsapp messages the next morning apologising for breakdown but still feel sad

That’s why I cried in a Turkish restaurant.

Here’s me jumping from a cliff`:

Here’s my heart-breaking kid who I love so much that I might die:

These two now hate each other:

Here’s me jumping from a boat:

Youngest and oldest loving each other (actually wading through water and probably concentrating more on feet placement rather than familial love but bear with me):

Otis crab-hunting:

A fig:

I’ve worked myself up into another weepy state but this too shall pass. Any questions for the imaginary new readers? Did I leave anything out of the Inventory? Is this weeping part of the imaginary perimenopause?

Last Saturday night we had a resident’s party in the garden. I was on the organising committee and did a spectacular job of almost ruining it all. I have a bit of a ‘thing’ against numbers – I find them a bit stressful and confusing. For context, I’ve specifically come to find the month of July hard to see as the 7th month, because Noah’s birthday is on the 18th of July and so July ‘feels’ like an ‘8’. It doesn’t feel like a ‘7’. You get me? No, probably not. That’s fair.

But anyway, I was in charge of booking a caterer and there was a bit of to-ing and fro-ing about what we/the committee wanted (a bbq, obvs), and what price and would there be halal and vegan options and was that excluding VAT and would there be pudding, etc etc., on and on which is hard for me because I like a quick ‘yes’ or ‘no’. Details are a bit boring and conversations about costs are particularly painful. But we found a place that promised the right amount of meats and salads and dips and crucially could do the following Saturday because it is peak season and by this time any real choice of caterer was pretty much nonexistent.

But then we discovered that my numbers problem meant they were booked for August, not July. I booked them for the 8th month, which is what July should really be known as by caterers and party-organisers alike. As a solution/explanation this really didn’t fly, and with a week to go, after sending out polls and a series of emails enticing the 350-strong neighbourhood households to buy tickets and after giving them an actual menu, we were stuck with no caterers at all. So I apologised, died a little bit, hit myself on the forehead muttering ‘sort this numbers thing out, you adorable dimwit’, put on some lipstick and found another bbq company. And no one really knew how close it had all come to being Mark and I burning sausages for 150 people on a balmy Saturday night.

It turned out to be not just balmy but also magical. This was less about the (perfectly nice) food (phew) and more about the people, the lights, the music. We had on decks the saxophonist and songwriter from Sade. I mean. Sade! We also had, amongst the assorted guests, Amy Winehouse’s old manager.

Here’s me and the most softest, fluffiest Amanda:

Mark and Joan under the lights:

A little Fleetwood Mac:

What else? Only that I have a proper fulltime job as a Content Manager for KPMG Law starting in a few weeks which feels mostly wonderfully exciting with only a slivery wedge of terrifying.

SCREAM!

I feel like maybe my time is now, in a careery-kind of way, and eternally grateful to the succession of women who have championed me and said ‘yes, you adorable number-illiterate dimwit, you can do it’. As much as that sounds like a bad Oscar acceptance speech, it is entirely true that I’ve been helped and supported by women bosses, colleagues, and friends and that is an entirely humbling, wonderful thing.

By September, the adorable baby will be fulltime in nursery and things should be firmly on the road, as it were. I will be managing content like a content managerial superstar and might have overcome some of the imposter syndrome that dogs me pretty much constantly. Here’s to finding a proper job in your mid-40s!

I’ve also been to a filming of Antiques Roadshow which was sunny and nice in Clissold Park, a glorious East London place full of well-dressed people and genteel cycling. Charlotte, her husband and I were there to discuss the painting that Charlotte bought on Friday morning from a dealer in Portobello Road. It’s a sexy kitschy 70s portrait of a naked starlet in a beige linen mount, covered in glass. A big old thing, difficult to sneak into the house, bypassing husbands who are wary of their wives bringing in more household clearance items of junky joy. Charlotte tried to get the painting in and tucked away safely for a few months so that when she did finally stick it onto the wall she could confidently say ‘Oh, this old thing? I’ve had it for ages’ but her husband met her at the door, portrait as tall and as heavy as a ten year old child, and he busted her. He liked it, luckily, as did I, especially when Charlotte did some rudimentary googling and discovered it was by a Czechoslovakian count, strapped for cash but good at portraits, and the painting is of a young Helen Mirren.

DOUBLE SCREAM!

I then really wanted it for myself, but Charlotte has a whole house with actual wallspace (plus, it was actually hers) so I had to make do with stalker-buying one of his paintings of an anonymous person at auction, just to lessen the FOMO.

Here’s a funny story. The producers at Antiques Roadshow tried to get Helen Mirren to come along to see the portrait of her in her nipply Bardot-esque youth, but she wasn’t in the country and so we had no surprises awaiting us. BUT, while we were nattering away on camera, a woman passed us and the painting which she recognised because she had been the artist’s girlfriend for 10 whole years. Oh yes. And so she told us all about Count Nicholas Egon and his mad portrait-making, his nice face and his way of paying people with his work. Here they are, reunited all, in the tiniest photograph known to humankind:

Here’s me and Charlotte and an Antiques Roadshow superstar whose specialist category is apparently “Miscellaneous”:

Barnaby and his glorious girlfriend at our party. If he sees this he will kill me with his angry betrayed eyes/a hammer so if I soon don’t respond to whatssapp/texts, that’ll be why. But it’s so worth it – look at them! The youth! The hair! The eyeliner! LOVE LOVE LOVE:

The neighbours have bought up a massive old two-storied flat and the builders knocked through a sealed-up room under the road and found an 18th century toilet for the guy who powered the electrics. I am mesmerised by this:

And finally, because it is sunny outside and I have wasted too much time trying and failing to make Charlotte and the Young Helen portrait download in a bigger size, here’s your last shot. The baby, no longer a baby, in his sunglasses collection:

Here’s a thing from today that has blown my mind. Apparently, when you say the phrase ‘social mores’, you pronounce it like this:

‘Social MORAYS‘

Is this too tricky to even imagine? If so, do as I do and picture a bunch of moray eels hanging out. Of course, the correct pronunciation of this odd word may well be obvious to you all, but not to me. It turns out I’ve been uttering the occasional ‘xx mores’ in this kind of situation like, well, ‘s’mores’ without the first bit. How many times must I have been at a party or in a work situation and I’ve bemoaned other people’s lack of ‘social MORZ’? I am dying. If I’ve been wrong about that, what else have I been wrong about? I have a friend who cannot say ‘menstruation’ correctly and I’ve never corrected them, and Mark, as you may well have been informed last blog post, cannot pronounce the word ‘wasps’, so it isn’t just me.

But what else do I say that has other people cringing? I need to know, painful as it is. Please feel free to give me a little tap’o’the shoulder and a whisper’o’the ear if you are ever in earshot and I do it again. This linguistic mishap-laden road is leading to quite a bit of paranoia, I tell you.

And where does this end? How many things can a person continue to get wrong as they surpass youth and head, sun-spotted nose and creased-forehead first, into the middle age? I would imagine quite a few. Entirely wrong song lyrics, an inability to manage simple maths, no understanding at all of geography, not being entirely sure if badgers are real, inexplicably confusing the words ‘sausages’ with ‘potatoes’ if overtired…is all of this normal? Is it just the kind of charming thing that makes up the patchwork of one’s life, or did that term I missed in primary school with a terrifically bad bout of glandular fever make me dumber than I thought?

It could be the peri-menopausal brain fog I keep hearing about. And if it is all to be traced back to my hormones (or lack of, or an uneven mix of them, or whatever it is that happens to women right about my age) then this would make sense because, as well as suddenly a bit thick, I seem to be cripplingly tired all the time. This Platinum Jubilee weekend, with all the parties and drinks and cakes and BBQs and things, was remarkable less for the jolly Union Jack and prosecco-fuelled japes and more for the constant desire I felt for lying down and fully surrendering to sleep. Which makes me worried: is it that I am not so much tired as ready to die, because what is the desire for constant sleep, really? It’s just being dead. Which feels entirely premature because I am in good health, my family is nice, my joints, though cracking and stiff, tend to work fairly well. I’m not yet 45. I am still breastfeeding, even.

So. I am defeated by sleepiness and am becoming melancholy about my lost youth and former effortless ability to manage wakefulness for a decent period of time. I’m also melancholy because I went to Waitrose this afternoon for frankfurters, brioche buns and something to whiten my whites (not a euphemism) and the lady there asked me how old my eldest son was.

“He’s 17,” I said, as I packed my things into my 50p Waitrose bag, the thicker plastic-woven kind of which I have about 25 sitting at home, thickly taking up room and forever being forgotten about because I only ever pop into Waitrose for a packet of strawberries and come out surprised by the sheer volume of stuff that suddenly feels crucial.

“Oh.” She said. “He’s going to leave you soon then. When my daughter left I was sad for two months. I cried every day. It’s terrible. I had to leave work one day because I was crying so much. I’m only telling you this so you can be prepared. I’m sorry. Do you have your Waitrose card?”

I didn’t, as it happened, so I missed out on there being 20% off some weekly items. This made me a little sad, but not as sad as the whole “YOU WILL LITERALLY WANT TO CEASE LIVING WHEN YOUR BOYS LEAVE YOU” thing. Which I know will happen, because I already feel sad about them leaving one day. It’s another layer to my middle-aged melancholy. I am sad about the fact that they aren’t small, and that they don’t hug me much anymore, and that their hair smells oily rather than like yeasty magical biscuits. I’ve ruined one set of teeth (well, Noah did that himself, but still), and they have scars and curved spines and a therapist and no one needs me much anymore. Remi is starting fulltime nursery in September and from late June I will have a job that takes me away, physically (Canary Wharf, even) and mentally. I won’t really be around to cook frankfurters for them. No one will be able to scan my groceries while regaling me with terrible tales of impending motherhood-related grief as I purchase a family-sized container of Vanish and pretend not to feel like weeping alongside them.

I will miss the tiny bits of family life that I didn’t take much notice of anyway. The ones I can – and the ones I can’t – remember. The moments maybe I wished away. There aren’t enough photos or videos on my phone of them being small and now I feel regretful and panicked. I was too busy getting annoyed or thinking I should be doing something else. AND NOW WHAT? I’m about to enter a world of reverse mothering; once they kept entering the flat, needing cots and beds, taking up space, adding to crockery and cutlery needs. Pretty soon, they will leave the way they came. Out the door. Bigger though, and more sweary.

I spoke to my mum and dad about this and they were like YES IT IS TERRIBLE. They don’t even have any of their kids or grandchildren in the same country, even. They say it hurts – and I am getting it now.

Still. I have a three year old and we are trying to remember to do fun stuff before the moment/months/years pass. Here is Remi after we spent £9 on two ice creams and then he said he doesn’t like cold things:

Luckily Casper was there and he ate them both:

Here’s the divine, gentle, handsome Noah in his charity shop prom night ensemble with a needy clingy mother. Remi is making some kind of inappropriate salute:

My bruise from our family self defence classes. Luke did some defensive kicks and I didn’t take my watch off. I have been ridiculously proud of this bruise and have shown everyone:

Adorable baby and his Mirka tools freebie sunglasses from his dad on a Queensway saunter:

A little Platinum Jubilee garden marshmallow BBQ action. I was probably asleep under a table:

We went to Wales and had a marvelous time with the best family who also stretch to being oversized – seven kids at their place in all, though not everyone was at home. Our kids were housed in a massive bell tent and we bbq’ed, played piano, split apple juice on the glorious wooden floors and ate all the available pizza. It was a triumph!

We also enjoyed the sheep, frogs, dogs, horses, badger tracks and bird watching:

I start my new job in a few weeks so I am planning on spending my remaining time not taking naps. I will chat to my children and take them out and read to them without one eye on my phone. I will feed them alfresco and actually try to listen to them instead of muttering a lot of inauthentic ‘mmmmm hmmmmms’ while they tell me stories I don’t understand. I will try to capture this mothering thing which is disappearing a little more each day.

How did it come to this?

At 44 and a half, I feel I have reached peak adult. Not for the money-stuff, of course – my eyes prick with panicky unspilled tears and my heart-rate quickens every time Mark suggests we ‘do a budget’ or ‘speak with the accountant’ or ‘go through the bank statements’, but for all sorts of the other things.

I remember fondly the days of battling with toddlers and dogs and pregnancies and school runs – what larks! I may have whinged about those pressures then, but they were much more fun than this new world of worry. Admittedly it did sometimes feel overwhelming when I was doing my factory-line of babies thing, and I remember longing for sleep-ins and some time off on a Saturday on my own for a bit to clear my head, but now the children are all old and distancing themselves from me and I can only barely recall those days where everyone around me had a mouthful of missing teeth, tiny clothes, unmarked skin and speech impediments. Mark cannot say ‘wasps’ properly, but that’s just not the same thing at all.

The list of grownup worries now looks like this:

1. Housing. Apparently the council would like to crack down on bad landlords who overcrowd flats with too many people. Now, you don’t have to know much about me to know that we have ourselves overcrowded our flat with too many people. We only have ourselves to blame for doubling our number of kids since we moved into our flat many years ago. To be fair, though it lacks rooms, it is still a big Victorian basement with square footage that might well make your eyes water. Probably not, but it is certainly bigger than many other flats we have thought about relocating to over the years just because they have more bedrooms than we do here. So word on the street is that, if the council follow through on its crackdown of greedy landlords, we might have to find somewhere else to live. This is not a lovely predicament because we are a part of our community here; we have a lot of square feet, we have a massive communal garden out the door, the kids all *walk (that’s code for ‘take the bus’) to their local schools, the rent is pretty cheap, and it is Home. So we wait, we panic, and we try to think of alternatives.
2. Like trying (and failing) to get a Mortgage. This has been a recurring problem because we are both self-employed. We have a house in New Zealand but that’s irrelevant when you speak to a broker here. Even though I am one interview away from getting a real job at a Proper Company with a good salary, benefits an’ all (probably, fingers crossed, who knows, yikes, wish me luck, etc etc), we look terrible on paper. But we have found a house that I cannot stop thinking about. It is in Wembley which requires some thinking, because I only know Wembley for the IKEA there and it isn’t a very pretty drive. But apparently it’s not all motorways and industrial roundabouts – there’s a whole lot of big lovely ’30s houses just waiting for me to sandwich my boys into. And affordable IF we can use the collateral from NZ. But I don’t know how, and if it is possible, or who to talk to, and so we are in a housing funk.
3. Mattress Woes. Mark decided a long time ago that our delightful warm, sinky-inny soft, cuddling memory foam mattress must go because it hurts his back. I said no, dude, it’s not the mattress! Don’t take my mattress! But he did anyway. We had to go into a showroom and lie down on a lot of what seemed like identical beds, and Mark played along, turning over and bunching up his pillows and I was like ‘this is embarrassing and they all feel the same – aka HARD like a hospital trolley’ but I had to pretend I was feeling something. Anything. So I said I like soft, but Mark said he liked hard. Meanwhile, Remi wet his trousers on the floor of the showroom from too much complimentary apple juice and I had to clean it up without making too much of a fuss. I told the salesgirls that baby pee was ‘practically water’. I had to strip him of his pants entirely and he wandered around the showroom, bottom half out on display, surrounded by soft expensive furnishings. And so whaddya know, Mark last week came home with a sharp knife and cut up our Old Faithful memory foam dreamy lovely comfortable mattress into squares and got his rubbish guy to get rid of the bits. Oh, how I hugged those mattress foam squares tight! (I didn’t, because they actually had taken on some odd discolouration and a crumbly texture near the edges which may have been years of bodily fluid which turned my stomach) but I was sorry to see them go. And now we have some sort of Terminator Mattress. Agressively organic, with too many springs (2200, apparently) and made up of layer upon layer of hemp and cashmere and something else and something else and it is high. Too high. It does not suck me into its embrace like the old mattress. It rejects me with its hard bigness. I lie on it and feel no give. No loving me back. Meanwhile, Ding Dong scrunches up his pillow like he did at the practice showroom, turns over and snores just as loudly as he ever did.

France

I went to France! I went to France, drank rose outside cafes in village squares, ate cheese, went on a cooking course, bought light blue faded mongrammed linen napkins, and watched the Jimmy Saville documentary on our last night. The flea markets were cheap and unbelievable – see below for a little vintage tablecloth action – the shutters pretty, the wisteria purple and fragrant. It was a Francophile’s dream:

And More

Here’s a photograph of me and my new lady love, Angelica G Lamour. A beautiful burlesque artist from Prague with a truly magnificent embonpoint who happens to be my cousin’s lady love too:

Otis hunting for easter eggs in ripped trou:

Remi on the way back from a party in the park. he peed his pants but we had no backup, and so opted for the old ‘t-shirt tied up like a part of shorts’ trick:

And lastly, a photograph of that curly-headed fluff ball Remi after falling asleep on the swing:

Something is afoot in the Waitrose self-checkout section and I am ill-equipped to know how to deal with it.

Last week, when that fake summer situation came by to bewitch us all into thinking our coats could be packed away and our legs could be revealed again, I wore a waisted shirtdress to the supermarket.

As anyone who lives here knows, after winter when the ladies bring their dresses out, everyone gets all a-flustered. Men get starey, women get worried about their unpolished horny toenails. A woman wafting around in a flowery print speaks of potential. Of holidays. Straw totes. Sunglasses and strapless bras. Sandals and cracked heels; freckles and naturally-lightened hair. Of drinking Pimms in a beer garden, of camping and wild swimming and late evenings sitting in someone’s garden.

The guy in Waitrose was no exception – helpless in the face of a warm few days and somebody’s belted torso. I was at the checkout with my reusable plastic bag shoved full of cheese and cremant, all summer-like, and he came up to let the booze sale go through. He looked at me and said this:

“Can I ask you something? You’ve got four or five kids, right?”

“I’ve got six,” I say. I love this line of questioning. It pretty much only goes to a good place. Well, a good place or someone will tell me that I’ve missed a kid in headcount and one of them is still waiting to be picked up from school or something. Anyway.

“Well.” Nods approvingly. “How come you look so good?”

BINGO! SCREAM! Someone noticed me! NOT INVISIBLE! The summery dress worked its mystery once again! I STILL GOT IT!

“Well,” I say, giving him the Lady Di eye. “I pretty much don’t eat much anymore, and the light in here is surprisingly great. Thank you!”. He politely chuckles a little, and I FLOAT out of there with my processed snacks, probably mincing a tiny bit.

This was all a most welcome little conversation. But now? Now I have begun acting really oddly when I go back in. The first thing I do, currently less alluringly dressed, wrapped in my layers to avoid the distressing cold snap, waist hidden, dirty wool coat greying at the cuffs, is look for him. I search him out among the reduced bread trolley and chilled ready-meal aisle as soon as the escalator deposits me on the grocery floor.

I search him out because how can we NOT acknowledge each other now that he has professed his feelings? My eyes dart eagerly around for him (also scanning the weekly specials wall) and when I see him, we say “hi”. It is so awkward. My near-daily shop is becoming dominated by our wordless dance. Led entirely by me. It’s my eyes that greedily seek him out. My hair that I hastily rearrange once I see the back of his Waitrose green uniform and his jauntily placed headset. I wonder now, post-fake-summer, post-surprise Zara frock, if he still thinks I look good. What can I do to get that floaty feeling back? How can I find the sweet spot of being many-childrened and heavily-burdened by such things as whether I have remembered to bring enough reusable bags but also, hot enough to have the checkout guy come up to me and tell me a kind thing?

This is simply an exquisite pain; one I am very happy to have to endure. I hope my Waitrose man feels the same and is not kicking himself he got a middle-aged lady all over-excited.

In Other News

I fear I am becoming menopausal because I cannot sleep anymore. For the past three nights I have lain in bed, ever-so-slightly itchy, with my hip feeling all arthritic on my right-hand side. The hours have ticked by slowly, and I have been in and out of sleep but mostly out. Is it time yet for HRT? Will HRT make my hair thicken up? Will my neck bloom out in a puffy youthful way to hide the crepeing? Will HRT let me sleep once more – snore-compromised, sure, but still. This new middle-age is a myriad of fresh horror, and I fear it has only just begun.

I went to the hairdressers on Saturday and asked for ‘something to cover the greys and some kind of cut that might help get rid of the afghan hound effect’ and the colourist asked me very confusing questions about tints and ashiness and whether I wanted a warm brown or an ashy blonde. It was tied up with what would happen when the regrowth came through and it was just one of those times when you wished the expert would just do the thing, whatever that thing was. So then she suggested I drink a bellini, which I did, and things felt quite cosy and comfortable and when she found out I had so many children she said I really deserved a second, which turned into a third, and ended with a forth. When they were finishing up (by this time I had white hair which has since settled into a peachy orange white) I asked how many people took advantage of the free cocktails and drank too much, and they said hardly anyone. I tried to look sober and made a quick exit. Lessons? Grownups don’t think getting a haircut is actually a party thrown just for them.

I’ve made a new friend. Like when Anne of Green Gables met Diana, and they both knew they had found their bosom buddy, I think I have found my new bosom. It’s really fun, a little like being in love all over again. There are texts and laffs and visits. It’s actually rather wonderful to know that that part of you, even when you are crepey and you thought you had completed your tribe, is just as ready to find and adore a new person as it ever was. As I have oft said before, the joy of female friendship is a wonderful, expansive, deeply satisfying thing. One day I shall grow old in a women’s only commune like Holly Hunter in that Jane Campion show Top of the Lake, with long grey hair (thick, prob through the HRT) and everyone sharing cooking duties and doing crafting and drinking as many bellinis as they like without feeling weird about it after.

Here’s Casper turning 13. This was a staged photo because the first lot had shadows that did not show my aged face to its best advantage. See how enthused everyone is to have to do it all over again. We didn’t bother relighting the candles, either:

This is Friday night at a Spring Ceilidh (barn dancing for Celts) to celebrate the birth of the adorable Chris. See here the adorable local Hot Priest also:

The baby eating a sausage roll on a freezing picnic situation he insisted we pursue:

Me, the dog, and a bunch of other parents in our new roles as Campaigners Against Multi-Academy Trusts. (‘Twas in the Evening Standard and all.) Note distinct lack of waist:

And to nearly end things, it’s your Annual Reminder I Was Once In An Ad for Mother’s Day. Never forget. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6RFsCzBX3kg

I’m all for normalising things – bringing things out into the open. Longtime readers may remember when we went to marriage counselling and I wrote about it? And no lightning struck me down. In fact, Marriage Care got in touch to ask me to be their literal poster girl for newsletter fundraising efforts. Quite the proud moment as my Linkedin profile photo went out into households to ask for donations. I hope it worked.

In that spirit then, I can say that one of the kids is now seeing a therapist. I fought against this for so long, thinking if I asked for proper help, I would have failed. I would be admitting I was a bit of a shit parent. I really hate showing any sign of weakness, and this has felt a little like one. I like to be bold and brave and insist on things being under control. But we had a small incident, after many other small incidents, and these add up to one little kid being not very happy, but not really knowing how to say so, in this small flat of relentless noise and people and stuff.

I can see I haven’t been very good about accepting feelings that don’t fit with my overarching view of stoicism and optimism. I thought you were supposed to give no airtime to bad behaviour and I think I’ve extended that to giving no airtime to anything that is a bit hard. I am the Queen of Ignoring. Of the Middle Distance Stare, of Disengagement. Ugh, I must be a cold, cold mother to kids who need reassurance. Kids who are needier than I would like them to be. Ugh.

Anyway, it’s early days but it seems that giving this one kid a space to talk, without us in the actual or psychological room, is at least a start. It shows this wee kid that his parents might learn to listen better, and that we acknowledge there are other ways of feeling about things, and that that’s ok. And he gets someone to himself who has some space for him, finally.

To cheer me out of my regret-induced melancholy, here’s a kid I haven’t yet shut down, although arguably it looks like it:

The job-front has been great from a freelance point of view – there hasn’t been a week where I haven’t had something due, and quite a bit of it has been properly well-paid. As for the other jobs that might or might not happen – the full-timey ones – well, I am waiting and waiting and waiting and trying to stay enthused. The world of full-timey work, working for proper corporate places, seems to move at a glacial pace. I am hoping that’s what’s going on, anyway. It’s either that, or I am just too rubbish to bother replying back to. Argh – job hunting is a true test of character, is it not? Putting yourself out there, hoping to attract some talent acquisition person/algorthim with the right set of words in your CV? Thinking of ways to make your bitsy nichey ‘portfolio’ career look like you planned it that way. It’s enough to turn a person into a 4pm negroni-swizzling lush. Erm….

So my days have been partly working, partly hanging out with the smallest baby Remi who is actually not a baby anymore. He is a big three year old who likes hummus, chips and apple juice. He doesn’t meed me for anything really, although he is still having breastmilk of an evening and a morning. Bit weird I know, and the nipples are well and truely shredded, but he’s the last baby, etc etc. I cannot let go of the last baby thing. Though I may well very soon(ish) if these nips don’t heal up. It strikes me that even if you keep having baby after baby, they still grow up and away. It cannot last.

Here’s Remi at Comptoir Libanais this week on a drizzling day out with his mother. We scootered through Kensington Gardens, stopped to look intently at worms, puddles and rubbish bins, and ate lunch. He very much likes pickles, so that’s how I got him to agree to Comptoir Libanais. It was the pickles. He calls them ‘pinecones’ and that’s reason enough to take him out to eat them.

Then we went to the Natural History Museum to get thrillingly scared by the T-Rex. It was a magnificent day, topped off by pancakes for dinner. I mean – what is not to like?

I also attended my first poker game night on Sunday. There was an actual croupier there who was excellent at shuffling, dealing, following conversations while watching the game, working out the bets and helping me not make a total dick of myself. I had some Larazus moments, she said, and was the second person out of the game. Could have been worse, all told. I also misread the vibe a little – one of the players had made stem ginger and chili brownie and I just munched through three pieces of it, one after the other. It turns out some of the other players may have liked a piece too.

I think that’s one of the many things about living with and in a big family. You have these rules, ill-defined maybe – and they relate to managing yourself in a group of people. With food, you have to at least call everyone to the table, but once that’s done, you better get in quick. So I see a plate of really great gooey-but-crunchy brownies and it’s been about half an hour and no one is polishing them off, so I do. It seems obvious to me. But the other players may have wanted to stagger their culinary experiences. They may have wanted to wait. Anyway, it was a sharp reminder not to be greedy and to read the room. READ THE ROOM, LADY!

Here we are, admiring a very nicely-executed card sweep. A proper card table and everything. Everyone concentrating on the game and behaving like restrained grownups. Me with chocolately fingers and shamed eyes.

For the record, I’m intending on becoming a better poker player and a better guest. Perhaps a better mother too. Baby steps.