The Harridan

Nope. I wrote a little about it here:

Because I think it is best to confront your inabilities sometimes, especially at this time of year when it feels that polished, seasonally-appropriate, lovingly and beautifully decorated homes that smell of baking and mittens and washed dogs and pine, with nice mantlepieces and remote-controlled Christmas tree lights that don’t get stuck on the Pulsate Setting giving the geckos tiny little lizard seizures, should be the norm. Because that’s a MARKETING LIE! Some of us can barely manage showering, AmIRight?

[And all that preface, my virtual buddies, is a perfect metaphor for this whole parenting, adulating gig. Let’s have fun with it, but don’t be sad if you find you’re a bit rubbish in bits. Perfection is a bore, chaos is exciting, and mediocrity is entirely underrated.] 

On that note, yesterday I bravely acknowledged my crafty skill-less-ness and yet forged on like a mighty Garden Centre Warrior all the way to Richmond to a succulent wreath-making session with the kind and patient people at NotOnTheHighStreet HQ. To make, on my own (with quite a lot of help) an actual wreath with little repotted succulent plants that would embed into the sphagnum moss and start to grow, living on as a reminder of the time I made something that was good and partly Christmassy, partly New Mexican.

My wreath started out well, a tightly bound very pink sphagnum moss base which turned out to be making the other ladies *quite* jelly, because their sphagnum moss was more green and browny. Then we shoved in the succulents and it looked like this:

There was superfood hot chocolates on constant supply and tiny sphagnum moss-covered squares of brownie for us to break our fast over (I just flicked those little muddy planty bits off like nobodies’ business because I’m no slouch when it comes to free brownie) and – GET THIS – personalised presents rooted out by kind NotOnTheHighStreet staffers who had insta-stalked our accounts to find out what kind of things we liked. That level of loving and personal attention has never been applied to me, I tell ya.

Here it is, all filtered and nice-looking – I would go so far as to call it a seasonal crafting success:

But It Wasn’t All Green-Fingered Christmas Joy

No.

There was a little bit of social awkwardness when a quite famous-ish mother blogger turn up and I got a bit swoony and tried to make her be my friend by sitting next to her and dazzling her with my witty conversation but it just didn’t work at all. She looked a little bit jaded, and also a bit tired, and you could see she really probably had enough friends and she just wanted to make her wreath and then get home to brush the stray sphagnum moss strands from her jumpsuit and hair without having to chat to me, the excitable newby who didn’t quite know what the rules were. Did I stop trying to make her be my new friend at these quite clear contraventions of friendship/blogger-event etiquette signs?

No. I DID NOT.

I tried again. I went back to try to save her from her table of wreath-making blogger ladies, because I felt I was clearly a Very Interesting New Person Who Would Be So Fun To Talk To, but her polite-yet-not-really-interested small talk made me lose my nerve and then I just kind of stalled and got shy and averted her gaze and started out into middle distance and eventual silence, hovering over her in a conspiratorial hunch while she breastfed her baby and probably willed me to piss off back to my own wreath-making posse. She was kind, but I really needed to leave her alone.

I realised an urge to tell her I had five sons, as though that might impress her or interest her or even just give us something to talk about, but I later discovered that the blogger next to me also had five sons, two of which were baby twins (which clearly – if this was a competition – would beat me hands down) and so my usual USP was not even a USP in this little alternate universe of blogger eventing. It was a social fail of epic proportions. I skulked out of there quite fast but not before I hung my wreath up on this charming fake mantlepiece:

where it hung for just long enough to photograph before crashing to the ground and squashing a lot of pert succulent leaves and making a mess on the NOTHS shop reception floor.

My wreath and I thanked everyone, and took our many, many gifts, and left our broken bits for someone else to sweep up (I’ll include a little piece of my dignity in that mental imagery) and on the way home, I realised that my wreath was lying succulent-plant-face-down on the tube floor and so further nubbly bits broke off. A little like my self-respect, TBH.

So we are spring cleaning in the middle of an unseasonably cold autumn because we have no room and people who live like hoarders are a bit, well, cramped and perhaps a little ill. You may or may not know that Mark has a habit of dragging things into the flat that are, on paper, very good/new/nicer than the stuff we have, but then he is less good at getting rid of the things that we already have, and there suddenly becomes some sort of cosmic crisis because I go mental and hyperventilate at the sight of all the extra furniture and the lack of visible flooring, and he gets mad because I am ungrateful and naggy.  The children, however, are delighted because the flat becomes some sort of fantastical multi-layered soft play area, enabling them to bounce from couch to extra couch, onto various vintage marine wooden boxes, back onto and under a spare study desk, back to couch, and so on, until I have to leave the flat for fear of hitting someone. There was a brief period two weeks ago when Mark dismantled and then dragged in a massive grey couch but hadn’t yet gotten rid of (or even thought about HOW to get rid of) the OTHER extra couch, and the living room became one large bed. It was awful.

Then we freecycled the first extra couch and suddenly the flat felt HUGE again. Here I am, post-cleaner-visit, marvelling at all the floor I can see:

Do you see why I get very scratchy around the neck when more stuff gets shoved in? A bit sweaty and full of the blind rage? It’s a fine balancing act housing five children, me, Mark, the dog, the geckos, the office, totally unused guitars (three), a keyboard (?), more vintage brass marine equipment than an actual naval base might have, recipe books, lego, and my lipsticks in a two-bedroomed flat.

So I am getting rid of more stuff, mostly on eBay. Today, the first auction of six things came to an end, and only one thing sold. Now I am battling hurt feelings. The eBay community, apparently, has viewed my clothes, some have even *watched* my clothes, but then they haven’t bought them, and now I feel inherent rejection from the virtual world for my taste in Erdem silk dresses and Mary Katrantzou lilac sheer cardigans. DOES EVERYONE THINK I DRESS FUNNY? It is humbling, I tell you. Also, it is not a very efficient way to make money. I’ve made 60 quid and used a LOT of my emotional energy writing exciting clothing descriptions, ironing things and assembling cot furniture. I could make more money not buying stuff in the first place – but I suspect everyone knows this already.

A Seemingly Reasonable Idea That Turned Out To Be Very Wounding For The Spirit

So the other thing about having not a lot of space here in this flat is the fact that we should really somehow grow another bedroom for the burgeoning young-man-ness of our biggest kid (soon to be followed by his brothers like hairy pubescent testosterone-rich dominos). But you can’t grow it, or carve up the living room or burrow deep down under the road or extend the loft when you live in a rented basement flat, and so Mark and I had a tiny, tiny, joyful, exciting little moment last week where we thought we could – just – afford to buy a house here, because there are some savings in the bank for once.

Not ‘here’ here, but up the A40 behind the Hoover Building  in a little place called Perivale, near the Central Line station so that the bigger boys could still get to their school in about 18 minutes, Mark could still get to work and to his suppliers, I could still do whatever it is that I do (I realise that no one is entirely clear on this point, least of all me). And Mark could do up a house and put in an extension and we could have some space and extra bedrooms with a little garden and a shed to put his guitars and arm weights into. It seemed like it would be the same monthly repayments as our rent, pretty much. So I scheduled in a few viewings on Tuesday and I had visions of staying here a little longer, with Mark involved in his own project after years of doing it for everyone else, using his knowledge and contacts and some of the stuff he has squirrelled away over the years (massive shower head, anyone?) and the kids having a little space to themselves. But as we drove there, Mark spoke quickly to a mortgage broker who said there is no way anyone would give us a mortgage.

Is this too depressing? I am depressed just writing it.

It’s because we are self-employed, and Mark is getting a little bit old, and we have SO MANY KIDS and I have no proper job and we don’t have a borrowing history. Our house in New Zealand doesn’t count and our 15 years of renting also doesn’t count. So we are a terrible risk. THANKS BANKERS FOR CREATING THAT GLOBAL BLOODY CRISIS WHERE YOU RUINED EVERYTHING FOR NORMAL PEOPLE.

In Other News

Mark was in Wales on the weekend and I was in the shower on Saturday morning and the children thought it would be a marvellous idea to set fire to a wad of paper towels. They went outside in the freezing cold with some tiny plastic cups filled with water in case things got messy, lit the wad, whooped like little unsupervised savages, got sprung by the postman who told them off, chucked on the water and then ran away and hid. I *was* in the shower but then got waylaid very briefly by The Outnet clearance sale, so missed all the drama. I noticed a bit of a kerfuffle and a smokey smell, and ran out in my towel to meet the postman who brought me up to speed and told me to put some clothes on.

I really hope your November has been kinder.

I am not sure if I will get summarily divorced if I say anything about the marriage counselling sessions we just had, but I would like to, and Mark doesn’t read anything I write, so just don’t tell him, ok? No sneaky little whatsapp messages or little texts on his phone to dob me in, because I always check his phone so I will know, and you will be a bit dead to me. Anyway, I don’t really know why it feels weirdly shameful to go to counselling – after all, you send your 25 year old Landrover in for a service with a mechanic at least once every year, and he fiddles with it and fixes up the rusted parts and gets it all nice and safe again, so really, what’s the difference?

So. We had six sessions with a volunteer counsellor at Marriage Care, which, importantly, costs whatever you can afford to pay. It was down the road in Notting Hill Gate, next to a bank and through some rickety wooden Doors Of Shame (as Mark liked to call them). We turned up the first time and went into a shabby but nice-smelling room with chairs and a tiny pencil print on the wall which I studied quite a lot and a big box of tissues. We told the lady right off that while we love each other and actually, crucially, still like each other, we had a big problem because we can’t agree on where to live. In fact, we told her, we couldn’t even mention the words ‘New Zealand’ without one of us getting constricted airwaves, red hivey skin and usually a nasty fight that might well send one of us running out into the night or into a silence that could last for days and days, one that left a kind of residual distance that makes it hard to trust each other. We said it was becoming hard to find the kindness, tolerance, patience, humour and companionship between us. Without those things, she said, you don’t really have a marriage that works anymore.

So we went into it all a bit, and she told us after the first session that one of us was holding all the nostalgia and the other was in a vacuum, and that our stubborn, desperate opposing stances were really a fight for our own mental health. She said we did have a good marriage, but a very serious problem, and so by looking into why the both of us held our positions so tightly she might be able to loosen them a bit so we could talk properly and fairly about it. Over the next five weeks she poked into our childhoods and looked at death, faith and the different kinds of love that you experience over a lifetime. She challenged us about the compromises we might each be able to make and forced Mark to weigh up the longing for extended family over the one that is right here, now.

There were some deeply awkward moments when she looked at why and how we were together in the first place and our age gap – I said I thought it had never really been a problem, but she said that actually, lady, it is now. She said that our roles have been of parent and adolescent and that if we couldn’t change that dynamic, the marriage wasn’t going to stand a chance. It was exposing and brutal, and she helped us see things in very different ways. She told us how to talk to each other better, and to recognise the patterns we keep slipping into, and she gave me ideas of how to start becoming an autonomous equal. She also kind of told me to grow up.

As for the New Zealand problem? Well, I would have liked her to sit us down and tell us what to do, but she didn’t. She said we had to consider everything, and think about who had what to lose, and how much of a sacrifice we could both stand. I like a clean ending, so I said we could go and I would give up my fight, but only if Mark would stop trying to drag me by the hair and instead start having a sensible conversation with me like I was an intelligent 40 year old woman with opinions that need to be considered fairly rather than someone who is a complete idiot with grandiose delusions of herself. Or, you know, I would happily decamp to Dollis Hill, but he wasn’t having any of that.

So it helped, it really did. I think the counsellor was brave and brilliant and even Mark said she was good, even though when she asked him scary questions he just got louder and laughed at the end of every sentence even though it wasn’t funny and he stuck his hands over his mouth as though he really just wanted to die. Awkward? Yes, but maybe you need that, you know? Poking under the bonnet, ripping out the spark plugs and changing the oil?

IN OTHER FAMILY NEWS

I went to Noah’s first parent teacher interview, and it was dire. That kid has somehow hoodwinked the school into thinking he is sickly, because he runs off to the sick bay as often as he can, citing ‘nausea’ and ‘stomach aches’. This means he misses schoolwork, and sometimes, for a few weeks there, he convinced them to send him home so he could show me his pained look for about seven minutes before declaring that a round of Minecraft would do his headache the world of good. This propensity to feign illness I was aware of and I told the school not to be swayed by his convincing and dramatic monologues of symptomless aches and pains, but I wasn’t aware that additionally he simply hasn’t been doing any work. So, I was getting more and more hatchet-faced as the interviews went on, with the same message (Lovely boy, bright, but won’t focus, is very slow, likes to spin his ruler around for the entire lesson, etc etc) until I was finally taken into the black-suited Head of Behaviour’s office with Noah, sat down, and was told the tale of that mornings’ Shoe Incident.

The Head addressed Noah and told him not to bother trying to explain to me what had happened, because when asked earlier that day to explain to the Senior Leadership Team he had apparently just lied. The Head said he wouldn’t want Noah lying again to his mother, so instead, he said, let’s just watch the CCTV footage, shall we?

So I was dying. Just dying. And we all had to endure the crystal-clear footage of Noah doing some clumsy mock-ninja fighting with another messy little chap at the top of the glass-interiored-very-seriously-architectured expensive school with Noah responding to a slow cartoon kick with his own balletic spin, which sent his untied shoe over the glass bannister and down four flights of stairs into the central atrium, narrowly missing the 70 year old SENCO teacher.

This kind of incident, the Head explained, was forbidden, even though it was clear that Noah hadn’t intended to hurt anyone or to cause an accident. Had he had his uniform on correctly, had he refrained from moronic Karate-Kidding, it wouldn’t have happened. So Noah was excluded for a day, and we took him home and went over his missed work and write a very solemn letter to the Senior Leadership Team which took seven drafts to get right, and he was allowed back a day later with promises that no longer would Noah be King Of Dangerously Flung Shoes And Under The Radar Shit Work Ethics And Fake Illnesses.

It has been tough. Here is me drinking my lunch on a Friday with Vicky while we both ran away for a day. Whatever gets you through, right?

Oh October, you little fast-moving, autumnal minx! I haven’t written here for the whole month, mostly because I’ve been writing for other things, which of course is good because

1. I will get paid
2. It keeps me away from sample sales*
3. It looks to the objective person that I sort-of kind-of have a freelance-y job.

*It doesn’t entirely keep me away from sample sales, though, because I did manage to go to the Mary Katrantzou one, the Mulberry one, the Bella Freud one and tomorrow I will go to the Erdem one, so let’s just scrap point 2, eh?

And in between all that literary output, I’ve been fasting. Yes, I’ve cut breakfast out so that there’s a 16-hour period from after dinner until lunch the next day where my temple of a body will starve and my insides will eat themselves up and I will do the scrambling, sweaty school run alternating between feeling a bit vomity and then becoming all sharply-minded, like the dying probably do just before some celestial lifts them into the tunnel of everlasting light. My stomach makes loud embarrassing noises of protest and shock and I think I probably stink.  You know that thing when people miss breakfast and they talk to you in a breathy way and you nearly pass out from the gut-rotting stinkiness? That person is now me. I am doing a lot of extra brushing to combat this, concentrating on the lesser-considered areas like the tongue, and drinking water and masses of tea, and talking in a low way so that no one gets a wash of the inside air conditioning, but still. It’s a little worrying.

And why am I fasting, I hear you ask? Well, it’s mostly because even though I get up at 5:40am twice a week (and once on the weekend) to run around half of Hyde Park, and I do a bit of yoga, and I walk for two hours every day to school and back, and even though I recognise carbs for the devil that they are and only eat them if the bread is crusty and expensive enough, and though my portion sizes are now no longer the same amount as a youthful farm worker who has been up since dawn herding sheep would have,  I can’t fit about a third of my clothes. It’s an upper arms/spilling stomach/girthy thighs kind of thing. Where once I thought my tight jeans once made me look a bit Kardashian – curvy and, yes, jutting out at weird angles but in a way that seemed to work, now they take five wearying minutes to get the button done up and then they leave me with red slashes across my midriff for hours and hours. And in those jeans I have to kind of ‘perch’ on a seat, rather than actually ‘sit’. So I figure that fasting will fix everything, although I do wonder about the milk in coffee and what about minty gum to fix the Undigested Food Breath? And eating my fingernails – will all this make the effort null and void?

I was mulling all this over on Saturday when I was at the Soho Hotel for a press screening of Paddington 2 (see how I just casually chucked that in there? Thanks, The London Mother) while I ate all the biscuits in sight and drank all the tea and coffee and then moved on to the marmalade sandwiches in the shape of a 2 (see below) even though I don’t like marmalade:

And then Mark and I found the chocolate croissants and we laid into them. It *was* breakfast, but my fasting thing is only for the weekdays, because that seems to be perfectly scientific and fair. So I was hoovering the children’s food up, and then a whole posse of tidy, groomed women who write style blogs about being a mother AND being stylish AND about buying red jumpers AND about coming along to these things with their two kids AND with their husbands who dress well with elegant beards AND with hair that kind of sits, all blondly, all tonged, with lovely skin and lipstick that didn’t make their noses look even redder around the nostrils, well, they came in and they weren’t at all tubby and they were about ten years younger than me (I know, because I got all stalkery later). And so one of them had two kids and they were being annoying, as mine were, actually being annoying together, and she didn’t seem to notice, and nor did her silver foxy husband. I was very glad that someone else had obnoxious sons who were also sprawling over the Kit Kemp-sourced ‘eclectic’ sofas and smashing the brownie into the ‘edgy’ rugs. But I did also notice that she was wearing a nonchalant t-shirt that her arms and torso didn’t fill up – the t-shirt hung on her and I thought I WANT THAT. I was moaning about this to my running buddy Sarah and she said (and I massively paraphrase to the point of total inaccuracy here:)

‘Yes, we all know those women but groomed t-shirt-wearing and tidiness with the tonging and the correctly-toned lipstick and clean trainers just aren’t your thing. Your thing is different. It is fine and, well, you.’ And I really liked that. What a bloody relief to be me. In fact, here’s me being me in an Uber, photographed by Rebecca, an actual photographer who also takes portraits of models and people like Edward Enninful:

Here are the children at Portobello after massive burgers and chips:

And mid-term break, with the leaves and the nearly-teen, who miraculously doesn’t have his big headphones on so he can pretend we are all dead – instead, he’s playing with his brother and that, my friends, makes me forgive him for being a total hormonal pest:

Pumpkin gathering and hay bale sliding at Crockford Bridge Farm:

And a triumphant photo of the return of Magic after he got out and went missing for a night. We searched and searched and put up posters and fretted and told the world to look out for him, and we missed him and we worried and the next day, we got a call from a vet in Hendon 12 miles away to say they had him. It turns out his penchant for sneaking out the front gate when the kids are otherwise engaged (putting cobwebs up on our front door and displaying their pumpkins) got him all the way around the block, to the rubbish bins, out onto the road, and then into the van of someone who didn’t want to see him squashed.

He was a little bit off with us when he got home. Perhaps he had tasted the freedom of the open road and preferred it to a life on the couch? Perhaps the guy in Hendon was nicer with bigger portion sizes? Anyway, he’s back and things are back to normal – no one wants to walk him and the kids still cry if I ask them to pick up his poo.

Last week I had a birthday – the big one, the big ol’ lady one, the one that features patches of coarse grey hair and frankly startling lines between the eyebrows that make you endlessly retake photographs in a fruitless effort to erase them, trying out new angles and working those forehead muscles again and again, when you should really just be enjoying yourself – kind of like this:

And now I am trying to make peace with the fact that I have left my thirties behind. I am metaphorically setting sail into the dank, murky waters of Middle Age and waving to Mark who is firmly out on that sea, having a good old time, catching fish with some red-faced bald mates and drinking beer. I’m still on the shore ATM, and the water isn’t deep yet, just kind of pooling around my dry, cracked feet and horny toenails (one of which actually came off a few weeks ago in that way that signals to you that your body is breaking down – crumbling into dust). It feels ok, certainly better than dead, though I fear imminent, whispery things like The Mysterious Peri-Menopause, becoming invisible to all men, skin tags and wiry hairs coming out of the side of your face that you don’t notice until the Important Social Event was over. Here are my top tips for getting over yourself when you turn 40:

Go On Holidays 

This is a brilliant tip, because you cannot have a bad time going on holidays. You don’t have to do your usual domestic shit and you can drink daytime cocktails and read a lot. As Faithful Readers will know, in August we were in Puglia (see above forehead-concern photos), in September I had that little Alpine Yoga situation, and this weekend, Mark took me to Portugal for my birthday present.

STOP THE PRESS

It was all kept a secret, kind of, which suited me fine, because I am usually the one researching the flights, scouring for the best villa at the cheapest price, agonising over car rental as opposed to local taxis, wondering if the photos of the pool are fake, etc etc. This time, I was told to keep the weekend free, and that we would go somewhere, and that the kids were going to be farmed out. What a bloody dream it all was – although upon a bit of quizzing, there were gaps in the schedule which meant that no one was going to be looking after the dog or picking up the kids from school, so I had to pull rank and do a bit of last minute mama-control-freakery to plug those gaps which may have involved the Social Services/RSPCA. But mostly I just tagged along and hoped for sunshine.

So on Friday morning we got to Gatwick and I averted my eyes from the boarding passes – it wasn’t until we were actually boarding the plane that someone said

“something something something FARO something something” and then I knew we were off to the Algarve. It might have also been a surprise for Mark – he’d been telling everyone that we were going to the Amalfi Coast – so who knows *quite* what was going on there. Amalfi, Algarve – it’s all a bit ‘letter A’, isn’t it? Anyway, it all comes highly recommended for feeling better about becoming old.

Where to? Where could we possibly be going to? There are many places that start with ‘A’:

This is the marina at Vilamoura. Mark is battling a Screaming Orgasm. I am not:

So Portugal is quite full of seafood. This isn’t great for someone seafood phobic:

Thank the Portuguese saints for these then! Pastels de nada! Properly cinnamony and about 1 euro:

This is us after we discovered you could flee the Hilton complex;

And little half-sized bottle of vinho verde – what a gift to give to the world, Portugal!

Have more than one celebration

In early summer, as I was moaning to a friend about becoming 40, she told me that there was a surefire way to overcome the anguish – in her case, it was to throw THREE PARTIES. She said that by the third, you are so bored by it all, and used to the idea, that you don’t really care any more. This, I think, is very smart. I had one party, but with the mystery weekend away, it felt like three parties. My party was on a Tuesday night, and the invite email was a bit off-hand, like:

‘If you want to, please come over for some food and drinks for my birthday. But you don’t have to come, you really don’t. It’s a Tuesday, everyone’s probably busy. I understand. Don’t worry, really.’

Now, this works as a kind of reverse psychology. Everyone thinks – yeah, ok, maybe – we will see how we go. Then, at 6pm on a Tuesday, they think, ah well, it won’t hurt to pop in, will it? And 56 people turn up to eat salted beef/ham/lamb with warm ciabatta, kale salad, aubergines with tahini, tomato and pomegranate salad, cheeses, chocolate mousse and a cake made by Honey & Co, bought by your wee mate Amanda. I wore a golden frock that was said to be the most beautiful altar curtain anyone had ever seen:

Also, my arms look very pumped in that first photo, and I would like to say that this is how they look, but it was just a marvellous (birthday presenty) trick of the light.

Collagen

Collagen would be the best present for a newly 40 year old, because it leaves your face and neck, slowly but surely, to sink down, down, down into the earth from whence we all came. It is why my face and shrivel neck is beginning to look so droopy:

Droopy like a well-made-but-seen-better-days weather-beaten house from the late 70’s that has been in the rain and the wind and the sun a little too much, and things are bulging and sagging because no one bothers with maintenance and repair. The kind of house that has rusted stuff on the front lawn and no real garden. Come back, cheeks! Neck, please stop that crepey thing you do!

So I invested in a derma roller – one of those tiny things that look like Decorator Barbie would use to roll paint onto her DreamHouse – but with added needles. I had a conversation with one of my yoga buddies who said she goes to a lady to get it done, where the skin gets pierced a bit, bleeds a bit, then the skin repairs itself by flooding with collagen. Though it sounded a bit gross, I ordered one on Amazon because I am a little bit cheap. After intensive use, I now look like this:

I also discovered that Otis was using it to make tiny holes in the bathroom wall, which annoyed me greatly. So my poor little pock-marked skin now has tiny flecks of paint embedded in it. But…collagen! I’ll take a bit of accidental Dulux for the soft pillowy-ness of a frightening baby!

So anyway, it’s all over and I won’t go on about being 40 any more. I’ll find something else to whinge about. But not about my lovely friends, or my most excellent husband who listened and who planned and who cooked and who tried his best to make me happy on my birthday. And that, frankly, is present enough in itself (although Portugal *was* a good call).

I just got back from four days in the Swiss Alps on a yoga retreat. That’s a sentence I didn’t think I would ever write because, you know, who does that kind of thing? Who leaves their family (two wounded members*, one absent, the other three kids normal, just a bit annoying) on a Thursday morning to do sun salutations on a mountain?

Me, as it turns out. And what can I tell you about my first yoga retreat? If I were to coach you into what to expect, I would say this:

Yoga Retreats Are Not Parties

They are really, definitely not parties. They aren’t Girls’ Weekends Away with too much prosecco and trips to the village bar where you might flirt with staff/locals and dance on the table and then sleep in half the day. They are more about yoga.

The Food Will Be Quite Healthy

Bacon sandwiches, steaks, mid-afternoon crisps and beer won’t be on the menu. It will be a plant-based diet, with talk of juicing, Deliciously Ella’s recipes and an actual lentil salad. There will be cheese and charcuterie, but not everyone will eat as much of that as you. You will wonder if you are especially greedy, and whether that’s the reason that even though you are roughly ten years younger than everyone else, you are also ten kilograms chunkier.

The Drinks Will Be Herbal, But Not In An Aperol Kind Of Way

You will reacquaint yourself with camomile tea and you will look at cow’s milk with narrowed eyes, trying to remember why it was on the dirty list. A pause in proceedings will not be an acceptable reason to crack open another bottle of Cote Du Rhone because it’ll be herbal tea time. You will get to like it, although not as much as sauvignon blanc.

The Vegetables Will Cause Some Gassy Discomfort

All the lovely salads and avocado and almonds and granola will result in a distended belly and an overwhelming urge to fart long and loud at various times during the day or night, but most often while you are in your yoga class. You will learn to clench internal muscles you didn’t know you had. Try not to laugh when you hear other people’s stomachs making outrageous squeaky violent protestations because it will also happen to you. Time your trips to the loo to when everyone else is out of the apartment, or use the men’s toilets in the Spa & Wellness Centre. Turn the shower on and blow your nose loudly to cover the bowel orchestra.

If You Share A Room, Be Honest About Your Gas

It’s a great leveller.

Let me take you through pictorially.

This is the view of Anzere from Jane’s apartment – a little purpose-built 70’s village with the most excellent mid-century details. It was too much. Insanely lovely:

This is the mountain where we did the first morning’s two hour yoga session inside the restaurant, and after, we ate a very healthy yoga breakfast. Heavy on the muesli and dried fruit, good for the detoxing, bad for the gas:

Here is the indoor/outdoor heated bubbling pool situation. It’s also a great place to deal with your gas:

Post-swim. Pretty much free of gas at that point:

The cows coming down the mountain for the winter in a village festival. Dressed in head gear and cow bells. Probably gassy also:

Raclette. We didn’t eat any of it, but I REALLY WANTED TO:

So. What a bloody fantastic few days I had. I am much better at yoga now and it turns out that I am pretty good at iPhone games where you have to guess the film while everyone shouts at you. I am also the best at drinking the wine and a bit shit at folding yoga blankets.

I Nearly Didn’t Go Though*

A day before I left, Ned did a bit of jumping around the bedroom in a happy, deeply-entrenced-in-some-nutty-game which took him from the office chair, through the air and onto the bed. It all turned to blood-curdling screams though as Otis turned off the light at the wrong moment and Ned didn’t make it onto the bed – instead, he mashed his top teeth into the corner of a hardwood blanket box and he fractured his jaw and opened the upper gum to reveal his pearly, premature, secret little adult teeth. That is a sight you don’t ever want to see – I got a little sweaty around the gills and tried to push through the nausea when he finally agreed to let us see the damage. So he has stitches and a bit of a pale face, and has wafted about with a swollen mouth and pinprick irises for a few days.

BUT I went to Switzerland anyway, because those little teeth would still be exposed and that jaw would still be fractured whether I was here or there, right? And that’s what two parent families are for – the other one does the parenting sometimes while the main one buggers off to the Alpine village of Anzere to improve his or her downward dog. Here is the little duck face on day two:

The other wounded family member is Mark*, who has an unexplained swollen knee. He is hobbling around and suitably cross, and this morning he turned to me and told me that there was a large, brown, poo-like thing under Casper’s bed. It seemed that, owing to the knee situation, I was the one who was supposed to do something about it. I wondered how long the poo-like thing had lain there, and whether everyone had simply waited for me so it would become my problem. I suspect I was spot-on.

It could have made me mad, but having been so recently entrenched in nine hours worth of yoga practice, whereby one of the lessons is to push through unpleasant things until you emerge out the other end, I reached under the bed and wiped furiously with antibacterial wipes. It turned out it was a rotting, hairy peach. A relief, really.

I wrote this about my impending 40th birthday (*edvardmunchscreamface*) and yesterday pitched it to a digital site, and they got back to me really quickly and said it wasn’t quite right for them. Which means I am feeling all a bit unemployed and sorry for myself – clearly I am not cut out for the life of a hard-nosed freelancer who takes rejection on the chin.

And then, again yesterday, a man beeped at me twice when I was driving to school in the Landrover and then he pulled up and told me that my truck was ‘too big for me’ and I shouldn’t be driving it, and I yelled back and said ‘EXCUSE ME MISTER I HAVE FIVE KIDS AND A HUSBAND AND A DOG SO DON’T YOU TELL ME HOW BIG MY CAR NEEDS TO BE BECAUSE ACTUALLY IT’S THE CORRECT SIZE ESPECIALLY WHEN WE GO CAMPING’ and then he told me to shut up and I said I would call the police because he was harassing me and then he drove off and I was too mad and shaky to write his registration number down but I tried to run after him and I couldn’t keep up. Totally humiliating.

Underneath this queer little photo of three/fifths of my offspring is my rejected piece, though I changed the swear words and some of the confessionals:

“I’m a few months away from turning mothertrucking 40. Which is fine for a lot of reasons beginning with the irrefutable fact that I am still alive and functioning – no mean feat and quite enough reason for celebration in this day and age of terrorists and breast cancers and diesel pollution and Trump. I am also safely housed, my kids are wonderfully average and perfectly well, my husband and I are still married and occasionally have enough energy for sexy time, and my knees work as they are meant to, except for cold mornings and if I’ve been sitting too long.

But it’s unnerving to finally get here, this hackneyed eve of middle-aged-ness. It looms over you as an age you might remember your parents having been, something not too far away, yet distant enough to be only the concern of other, older people. It is spoken of in misinformed half-truths concerning potential early menopause, or maybe hyper-fertility, of the onset of sprouting mysterious wiry hairs and skin tags, of cougars and fluctuating hormones and upper arms that have given up.

I know in the olden days, before 40 became the new 30, that a woman in her 40’s might well have an ageing perm or some sort of blowsy Diana cut (remember, she was only 36 when she died, and I am sure I still look younger now than she did then), maybe with a grandchild, perhaps even shifting to non-fashiony wide-legged slacks and comfortable shoes way before Phoebe Philo said it was ok. And I know that women now don’t necessarily become invisible and irrelevant as soon as 39 ebbs away; instead finding excellent looks from Zara alongside the taut-skinned teens, reinventing themselves as first-time mothers or going back to work with multi-tasking skills and a hunger to get back into paid employment with a fervour they never had in their 20’s. They go out! They are partners in law firms on massive wages! They drink negronis with their cackling best friends! Some of them direct films! They can negotiate heels relatively well and they are happier in their emerging lines and stretch marks than they’ve ever been! So it’s exciting and freeing to be at the cusp of this other stage of my life, and I am thankful for it.

But oh, how 39 makes you examine what isn’t working, and what never did. It forces you to look at all those fork-in-the-road times when you bloody well took the left when you should have taken the right – all those tiny, insignificant moments that led to bigger things that equal who you really are – the patchwork of choices and accidents that lead you to where you live, who with, what you do, what you didn’t end up doing. I see now that law school was utterly wrong for me, and at a huge expense that would have been much better spent on travel, or buying a first flat somewhere. I see that I should have pashed more people, and worried about the size of my bum much less. I should’ve learnt how to manage money. I should have chased a media job, started running earlier, worn sunscreen and left my eyebrows alone. I have never really lived in a home that I have owned, and so my kids’ childhoods have nearly passed me by without any thought to decorating their rooms nicely – they have just had to fit into whichever spare corner of the various flats we have lived in. I also forgot to go live in New York.

And what works? Well, we remembered to get a dog before the children grew up and left home and had to moan about a pet-free existence to their future therapists, and so they have had that, instead of IKEA coordinated rugs and lamps. I didn’t change my name when I got married, and I regard that early show of strength against the pressure to do so as a sort of enduring triumph. I have learned to cook well but also to outsource or frankly ignore all those rubbish bits of domestic life that I don’t like – and as such, ironing boards in my family are spoken of as urban myths. I have discovered that my love affairs with books and my female friends are the things that sustain you and feed you and help make you a whole person. I have travelled and written things and had as many children as I fancied and am at peace with my mothering body which wears its scars well. I never brush my hair but also never leave the house without a slash of bright lipstick that I believe fools the world into thinking I am groomed and therefore together. I wear leggings to yoga and don’t take them off all day because I am no longer ashamed of what the back of my thighs might reveal about my worth. I let myself have fun.

So it’s nearly here – the October birthday that feels like the ending of something and the beginning of another. I intend to drink and to eat cake and surround myself with people who also limp a bit when they get up from a chair. I’ll let you know what it all looks like from the other side.”

So, anyway. Here’s a photo of Otis who fashioned his pancake into the shape of a lady-part. I didn’t suggest it, honestly:

I leave you with the dog, who has taken to hiding under the new curtains and peeping out a tiny bit, in the manner of a Vermeer:

We have reached a literary graduation point here in our two-bedroomed-over-furnished-and slightly-hoardy-flat that we call home – the age of Young Adult fiction has arrived! Literally! Via Amazon! (rather than an actual bookshop because my ethics get hazy when it involves venturing out too far). And what a joy. The bigger boys have been reading proper books, all I Capture the Castle and Lord of the Flies and David Walliams books and Judy Blume, as well as The Secret Diaries of Adrian Mole, The Outsiders and books like Wonder by R J Palacio – the kind of books that just might move them in some way, might permeate the solid wall of pre-teen ego, tempestuous hormones and general non-empathy and help turn them into kinder people. And I am making my way through them so we can talk about them and have some sort of family bookclub where we all sit around the table and eat crisps and drink age-appropriate beverages and laugh and tell each other our thoughts and cry and get closer. That’s my plan anyway (other plans include: giving them a nice room one day, teaching them things like who Cindy Sherman is so they can get the pop culture references in The Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt, baking with them and not shouting). So, Wonder – about an 11 year old boy who has been born with a terrible facial abnormality and who bravely starts middle school after being homeschooled – has kindness and unkindness at its core.  There’s a bit at the end when the headmaster gives the graduation address and tells the kids that the best thing to do is to be kind, and more than that, to be kinder than is necessary. Which, if I learn nothing else for the rest of my declining years, might be enough. All the best people are kind.

Not Otis so much though, who apparently has been bothering the babies at nursery with a few sneaky shoves and a bit of heavy-handed forehead-tampering and shouting a bit too loudly near their ears. He’s too young to read Wonder, so I guess it is up to the rest of us to model better behaviour. Hands by your sides, inside voices, gentle touches, GET AWAY FROM THAT CUTE TODDLER.

He did make a very delicate and highly decorated salt dough thing for Father’s Day, which was baked and painted and glittered and tied with ribbon with a very nice laminated generic poem attached. He came home from nursery, gave it to both me and Mark, then took it back and started eating it. Perhaps he’s been spending too much time with Magic – the both of them are fairly unfussy when it comes to foodstuffs. Here it is, after it had been sampled and then rescued:

There’s nothing like a half-eaten turd-shaped salty lump of glittery baked flour to say “I Love You”.

So, mid-week last week, Neradah and I took off from our jobs and homes and children and yoga classes and drove to the New Forest to a poshy hotel to get massages, lie in a hammock, eat dinner and many items of carbs, have a sleep, have a massive breakfast and then drive home past the wild ponies and horses. This was me in the hammock. I instagrammed it, then deleted it because of my unsettling generous thighs. Deleting a perfectly lovely photograph of your hammock, shoes and legs is bad form, so here it is.

This is us later, after really great bread, salty butter, and deep-fried broad beans. Later though I got the meat sweats from the pork and Neradah got the bad tarragon dressing. There were words with the rictus-grinning waiter, and he ignored it, and we felt a bit cranky, which made the sorbet taste a little of discontent:

But look at The Pig’s library! So much more tonal than my place:

Then on Saturday we camped out for a night in the communal gardens across the road with the neighbours. Ours was the biggest tent – a three-bedroomed monster that only smelt a little of damp and degradation – out of shot because it took up a quarter of the garden. We had a barbecue and made s’mores, which I know of only through lots of American The Babysitter’s Club-type fiction of my youth. They tasted of sugar and comfort and smoke. There was an altercation between Mark and some Scandi-type people who kept bringing their husky into the garden (dogs are NOT ALLOWED and Mark is *quite* the unofficial warden) and then there were tears about paddling pools and the banning thereof. Local politics are a drag. And the best thing? Otis decided that tenting wasn’t for him, and so he and I snuck back into the flat and slept like kings, I tell you. KINGS.

If camping is all about going over the road for a bit, hanging out with your friends, eating marshmallows and drinking somebody else’s prosecco, then sleeping in your bed with no need for earplugs because your husband is in a tent a few meters away, well – I’m ALL IN.