It’s 6am and I have been awake for an hour getting excited about flying off on a holiday today. By ‘getting excited’ I really mean anxious about the jobs left to do. There’s the dog, and the food compost bin to be emptied out, the food to eat up (venison hamburgers and leftover chicken thighs for breakfast, anyone?) and mess to clean, timesheets to fill in, a work password to change, a venue to hire, my last night wasp sting to put ice on/fret over, packing crises to work through, sick pills to take, low thyroid pills to order and pick up from Boots (will it open in time? what will happen if I don’t take my low thyroid pills?), contact lenses to track down (after Mark left three months’ supply in a bag somewhere in Queensway yesterday), the boys’ packing to check (you never know if they’ve decided to pack a knight’s helmet and aerosol cans in lieu of swimming togs and a pair of shoes), those last minute toiletries and earrings (for my various summer outfit plans) to shove into the hold luggage, hip flexor stretches to do, keys sorted, chargers found. That kind of thing.

So excited.

I finished work on Friday afternoon and expected to feel the rush of relief by the absence of my usual daily motherly workerly wifely obligations that sit always somewhere on my person, nagging and nibbling away and quite probably contributing to my constant psoriasis flareup, but that feeling is still there. Maybe even worse than usual. There’s a lot to do before you can get eight people (plus a girlfriend) from a small darkish overheated flat in London to a farmhouse on the Turkish coast. It’ll be a long day.

I used my summer Friday-finishing-at-1pm work perk to wander down to Portbello Road to buy saucisson and olives from the French stall, and visited the Golborne Road salon to get my usual pre-holiday treatments: an eyebrow and eyelash tint and a big old Brazilian wax. Why the full wax, I hear you ask? Surely just a tidyup of the downstairs quarters will do? And this is exactly the same thing I ask myself, every year, but as the lady says ‘what shall we do for you today?’ and I say ‘let’s have everything off – just take it all!’ I am overcome with a kind of bravado that is based purely on forgetting how painful it all is (and deeply deeply undignified) to lie, legs akimbo, hot wax spread all over these not-so-young-anymore bits, hip flexors screaming, with hair being pulled out in violent yanks. I am also a bit of an all-or-nothing person, plus I have an inflated idea of my pain threshold. I just tell myself, as she spreads the hot wax on again and again, and yanks big clumps of hair and then goes back for the stubborn strays, that childbirth was worse. And of course it was, but then you did end up with a darling little baby rather than a pale and shocked-looking pudenda that resembles the trussed chicken from the last episode of season three of The Bear. Without the complicated string perhaps, but you get my drift.

Anyway, with that done, eyes all very sultry, eyebrows threaded, I celebrated the beginning of the holiday in our garden with the neighbours with a very nice bottle of Nyetimber and a lot of cheesy snacks. And yesterday, completing the pre-holiday ritual, Mark and the kids got their hair cut at the barbers and then he and I got our heels razored. We look STUNNING now and our feet are lookin’ FINE.

Non-holiday-related updates

We looked at some houses on Saturday, because our house in New Zealand is about a week away from going onto the market. That’s a whole other story of bank loans and invoices and HMRC and more invoices, and now it is untenanted and ready for a buyer. Really, really, ready for a buyer because one cannot pay one’s overseas mortgage on positive thoughts alone. I will send a link when I get it, but just imagine a delightful, large, six bedroom villa close to the hospital and the Catholic school, with a garden and a tree and a swing and a terracotta terrace, with a small cottage onsite, and a watertank (yes…?), a greenhouse, and a porch.

What might one get if/when such a vision sells? Not a lot, once one pays the mortgage back and pays the bills and then loses half in bringing the money over through currency exchange. It has been grim, looking at what we might be able to afford, but the houses we saw on the weekend were actually pretty lovely and only about three and half miles away from where we live now. It won’t be ‘home’ but they are in the hood – we could still keep the big boys at their secondary school and only the littlest would have to move to a closer primary school. We could still get to Portobello Road on a Saturday to eat our Afghan wrap/Peruvina arepa/Korean chicken/baby margarita pizza/crepe food market spoils by the bins, as is our custom. We could still meet friends and get to the Selfridges sale and go see a movie at the Electric Cinema without rethinking things too fundamentally. It just might work.

The kids meanwhile have all grown to become very old – the eldest has been working as a runner at The Princess Royal and will soon go back to university to continue learning Russian and art history and socialising, the second eldest has finished his A levels perfectly well and will be finding a job in September, and the third gets his GCSE results while we are away (and finds out his future, kind of – either back to school for A levels or will start an apprenticeship). The other three are still sufficiently school-age for me not to worry too much about next steps. They are all very big though and I miss them from when they were small. I worry I have not taken enough photos or videos and that we will never remember their voices or the cute things they said or the way their bodies felt soft and warm and like they were mine.

Here is my lovely huge long-legged darling Casper not getting a mullet, but more a soft reshape of his glorious curly bonce:

And Ned, uncharacteristically obscuring his huge guns:

Barnaby taking his parents out to dinner:

Noah and his mum:

And our occasionally winning pub quiz team:

That’s it! I have to go do everything in paragraph one! See you on the flip side x