We are two men down and everything is quiet, so quiet. Barnaby is having a most excellent time at university, enchanted by learning Russian and being introduced to art history and Wagner, although less enamoured by the liberal arts part of his degree which seems to be mired in self-congratulatory existential twaddle. I love a bit of self-congratulatory twaddle myself but there needs to be a balance and I suspect this hasn’t been struck. But it’s early days and the sweet young man has to bed himself down and figure out a whole lot of stuff around his new life and what looks good and what doesn’t, and what matters and what doesn’t. A massive part of this will be getting a job which seems to have fallen quite far down (or off) the to-do list. Money is always very handy when you have to fend largely for yourself, so I shall be reminding him that being broke sucks more than going to your fun student job where you learn things you will benefit from forever. Ahem.

The other fella to have jumped ship is the husband who has flown to New Zealand to be with his family and to see his mother. He has had a rough few weeks – waking me at 3am three weekends ago after we had been at a party, lights on, moaning and mooing and sounding very much like a woman in labour/a man with kidney stones. This was all a bit familiar as he has had them once before, so I called for an ambulance in a jaded sleepy kind of way and asked him if I really needed to come along too. Unfortunately he said yes, gasping it out before another wave of pain hit.

I am a terrible, terrible nurse. Let’s just get that out of the way sharply.

So the ambulance came and I just sat there in my trainers and my jeans, little bag packed with newspapers and phones and chargers, face all old and puffy, hair horrible, watching the men give Mark morphine and making really shit jokes. We were taken to St Mary’s and basically both fell asleep on a wheely bed and a hard plastic chair respectively in between blood tests and more morphine. At some point someone came in to tell us there was an obstruction in the kidney and then all of my peri-menopausal anxious tearful, fearful unhinged emotions came out and I spent the next many hours just crying like a massive baby, convinced that it if were ‘just’ kidney stones’ then that’s what they would have said, and that it was no doubt some terrible kidney cancer and he would die and we hadn’t really sorted out affairs yet and he never ever did hang all my artwork onto the walls like I’ve been asking for for years and he still hasn’t sold the truck and OH NO I am not really up for being a widow and my children are too young and why haven’t you looked after yourself properly and this sucks and I’M SO TIRED.

But it turns out he had a small 2mm kidney stone which took five days to pass and one ultrasound to check it had passed before he boarded the plane because who wants a kidney stone attack while you are flying over the Middle East? No one, that’s who.

Mark was horrified to hear from his specialist a day before he flew away that he needs to become a vegetarian for three months to fix his body up a bit. I mean – we have SOOOOO much venison in the freezer. Ironically, venison is the WORST for kidney stones and Mark is a meat man from way back and this news was like telling a voracious reader that they have become allergic to paper and kindles. Devastating. But I said go with it – it’s a simple rule and for a finite time, and it may keep you alive and certainly it should help you avoid five days of racking pain. He seemed unconvinced, particularly as he would be staying with family in New Zealand and who wants a guest who doesn’t eat meat, he asked me. I’m like, that’s actually not really a thing – you just swerve the sausage. But he thought it might simply be too much to ask of people to pop the chicken to the side and so….er, let’s just say the Great Vegetarian Experiment is limping along rather than a gallop. Or a jog, or a feeble ramble.

Sample dialogue:

How’s the diet going darling? I ask.

Good, he says. I’ve only had one steak and cheese pie.

SHAKE MY HEAD AND SIGH HEAVILY.

Anyway. Since my last post I have turned 46, travelled to Porto without children but with a meat-hoovering husband ignorant of the small sharp crystal making its way down his bits, finished the pottery course making us the proud owners of disproportionately large handled mugs and unpleasantly textured bowls and sculptures of people who are not at all reflective of what people actually look like, and probably had nits. Annoyingly for me, Mark ended up being a bit of a pottery maverick star and each project of his emerged so full of character and spirit and joy that I have been forced to examine why I think I was going to be so much better than him at it. This stuff is so humbling! So awkward! So irritating!

And half term came and went and I have barely looked at the children who have spent the week playing Minecraft together, racing out to Tescos for forbidden snacks, watching terrible TV, fighting each other when I am on Teams calls, and singing loudly. We are trying to make the most of Dad not being here and so are hitting the meat/cheese hard, and watching movies that Mark would refuse to see. Remi is sleeping with me which feels rather nice as he doesn’t snore and only takes up a tiny part of the bed but he does tend to wake at 6am on weekends asking me if it is time to get up. It isn’t, but we do it anyway.

In the Culture section of this post, I can report I have been to see the Marina Abramovich exhibition at the RA (wonderful but I missed the naked people as they had clocked off), saw Bafta screenings of The Holdovers (great, sweet, a little forgettable) and Past Lives (overrated but who am I to say?), and I became a member of the V&A so I can go see the Chanel exhibition whenever I want. I will go, once I stop being very busy with mid-life crises and upheavals and feeling so tired all of the time.

Thanks to our private healthcare at work I went to see a gynecologist about my hormones and when I arrived and sat down and he asked me how I could help, I burst into tears and told him snottily that “I am 46 and I just don’t think I am very well!” and the way he calmly pushed the tissues over to my side of the desk showed me he has seen it all before. So there were bloods done and an examination that showed indeed I am somewhat worse for wear after all those babies (prolapse, hernia, etc) – the poor old undercarriage is a little ramshackle in places. Anyway, just give me the drugs.

Here’s a fleshy cheese hand I made for Halloween:

And a nice photo of Mylie and me out on Friday night for her birthday:

Some ceramics for your visual feasting pleasure:

Noah and Otis crocheting together:

Tuesday night winning pub quiz vibes:

That’s it – that’s all I have. Happiest of Halloweens and Guy Fawkes and the return to school and the Christmas runway, y’all!