The Harridan

Many years ago – less than ten but not more than eight, when I was four kids down and newly back to work in a part time role, I found myself at an awards ceremony for lawyers. I got sat at a table with my lovely lady boss and a bunch of people I didn’t know; among them, a New Zealander with a topknot and a signature flower in her hair which matched her very high heels and lipstick, and a man named Lawson. Lawson was handsome and funny and slightly catty and gorgeously dressed. He asked me thoughtful questions and helped me feel a little less out of place. We talked about running and families and restaurants and probably drank too much. On our way out our table passed by the photobooth and rummaged through the props and we got a few photos of us with wigs and boas and I think a fake moustache. I can’t find that photo now but I remember the impression of colour and closeups and foreheads and party clothes and big grins. It was the start.

Lawson and I began to meet up every now and then to go for weekend runs. He would get up at 7ish and run from his flat in Victoria to meet me at the Italian Fountains. We would always have a sweaty slightly gross hug and a salty cheek kiss before slowly, steadily, making our way to Holland Park, up the hill, right through to High Street Kensington and then back to the fountains again so I could go home to my hot little flat and my still pyjama’ed boys. Lawson, dressed in very serious thermals in winter, would carry on, jogging all the way back to Victoria where he would have a full weekend planned. He was always keen to go a little bit further on the runs than I wanted to, but I would go along anyway, because he was fun and we liked each other. Once he convinced me to run to Battersea and back which was a neat 10kms and I loved it (though never repeated it, which says something).

It wasn’t ever the run that I was after, but a chance to see Lawson and to tell him stuff. He was my friend. He would always ask me about the children in turn and ask after Mark, and we would do deep dives into problems at work. We talked about dating, galleries, church, yoga, and the problem of carbs, which took us to a lot of cinnamon bun conversations. (He loved a Gail’s cinnamon bun – fair enough – but even better, he said, was his weekend thing of saving up his weekly carb ration for a bun from Ole & Steen. We agreed on that.)

I kept loose ties to Lawson: Mark did up his flat (we inherited his cinema chair), that original awards ceremony table of lawyers met up at a hens’ weekend, Lawson and I surprised each other when our work overlapped, sidling up to each other to steal gossipy chats over lunch and in between breakout sessions and keynotes. Our runs were infrequent, and we mostly discussed meeting up rather than actually meeting up. Two weeks ago I asked him to come to a few work things planned but he said he couldn’t because he was abroad. I said “Next time! XX”

But then Lawson died. He died last week. I don’t know how. I don’t know where he was, or who he was with, whether he was sick, or sad. His workplace published a beautiful obituary and it was like a punch in the throat – or, maybe it was gentler than that because it felt like a stupid lie. He was also written about movingly by the gallery where he was a board member. Of course he was a board member – how thoroughly correct to have him as an arbiter and gatekeeper of taste and culture.

I keep making constant Google searches to find out more but keep coming up with nothing. I try Linkedin for posts mentioning him and there are no answers, because a few weeks ago he was still here, attending things and doing all the usual stuff that a prominent GC in London would do. So I am a bit stuck. How do you grieve for a part time friend? How do we gather appropriately and tell our stories of him? What is that weird in-between unnamed friendship place called where you love someone but the threads aren’t woven tightly enough to take a recognisable form?

I don’t know. I hope stories are enough. I was, and we were, lucky to have known you. Love you Lawson xx

I have had increasingly irksome middle-aged ailments come at me recently, but not recently in the kind of way that you actually DO anything about them. Much more slowly, lichen-like, or like the slow growth of stalactites where you start with a youngish underground cavern and the drip drip drip of mineral-rich droplets of water eventually ends up a giant misshapen erectile lump. My weird ailments have occurred over a few years I guess, rather than a millennium, but you get the drift.

What, I hear you ask, have I grown upon my person? What bodily appendage has hardened over time into some grotesque natural grotto? Do you have lumps?

Well, yes, I do, and then some. There’s the neck, which I may have written about before. It doesn’t work and hasn’t for some time. It hurts, it makes me move like a robot, and it is dangerous when I am driving or trying to cross the road because I cannot see what is coming up on the left or the right. It isn’t particularly stylish, the way my neck won’t work properly. I find my stiff neck embarrassing. 

I had a long neck when I was a more youthful person and my parents would often tell me it was a good one. I thought my longish neck contributed to my pinhead look (sizeable body with small head perched quite loftily atop) but generally didn’t think anything more about it, being much more concerned with my cellulite and my bum. (I was obsessed about my bum – I would wake up early to do the Rosemary Conley Hip Butt and Thigh workout and felt extremely bad about fat consumption, drank litres of water every morning before breakfast and when I got a 50cc scooter, would rattle off slowly to the gym before school to do step classes to get the small bum of my teenage dreams (n.b. none of this worked)).

Well, I should have been concentrating on preserving neck mobility – who knew? Now my neck is my number one train of thought all the time, pretty much. 

Questions remain: 

1. Is my neck stiff because I wore too many babies in a sling? Have I been looking down at my stupid phone more than anyone else? Was it years of hauling groceries from Waitrose into the flat, or lugging the double buggy up the stairs? Perimenopause? Walking the dog and getting yanked too many times by his dumped-chickenbones-rubbish bin-lurching thing? I don’t know, and nor does the rheumatoid arthritis doctor, the GP, the physio, or the osteo. They do agree there’s some kind of muscular shortening thing that means I have neck and shoulder muscles that my gym-obsessed younger teens would die for…it’s just hidden under my middle-aged spread. The osteo has suggested hypnotherapy in case I have buried trauma. I keep wondering what terrible thing I might have squirrelled away but can think of nothing.

2. Is the stiffness related to the newish apparent lumpiness? My neck has developed uneven bands delineated by deep creases and one band hangs lower than the other. I have asked the skin doctor if some botox might help but she’s like…’nah, that’s way too hard to fix’.

3. Is the stiffness and the fatty bands related to the pigment problem which appeared a few years ago after a particularly hot summer in Turkey? Half of my neck is kind of brown and the other bit under my chin stays stubbornly white even when I try to even it out. Hyper pigmentation, probably from those pesky pregnancies again, all of which adds to the layers of bad neck feelings.

The upshot of all this neck stuff is that I think about my neck a lot. If you catch me mid stare, eyes unfocused and aimed somewhere indistinct, it’ll be because I am musing over my neck. I had for years the Nora Ephron book ‘I feel bad about my neck’ and I never read it because it lookedboring and only for old people and now, I know exactly what that Nora was on about. 

Other growth

About a year ago I noticed a large lump on my lady bits, the size of a small testicle. I googled and thought it was a Bartholin cyst. A friend suggested I pop it with a needle after a soak in the bath which I did try to do, but (thankfully) I couldn’t quite pierce the skin right. I eventually made use of the private healthcare and gathered up all of my middle-agedlady issues in one go, crying at the first appointment and telling the poor man how unstable I was feeling. He prescribed drugs for a low thyroid and then got me to see a whole other department about the lump. This was a bit awkward because the lump only becomes apparent when I stand up, and so I had to have multiple ultrasounds while standing over a poor ultrasound person who sat on the floor with his/her ultrasound wands, eye-level with my bits.

The worst was when I got referred to a handsome man doctor. A handsome man doctor who was fanciable. He had to sit on the ground with his rubber gloves and I stood akimbo above him and just winced as he tried to locate the lump. This man was a varicose vein doctor and part of this diagnosis meant he had to feel my upper thighs for any evidence of more varicose veins. He gently touched my inner thighs up and down and up and down and it was MORTIFYING. Also quite nice. But MORTIFYING.

It all ended up with me being admitted for day surgery with more of the handsome man and more of me baring my nether regions, a general anaesthetic, compression pads, dissolvable stiches, and three days of legitimate lying down. I went back to see the handsome man doctor last week and had to show him the results of his marvellous work. It was still mortifying, though I was bolder this time and made some crack about pulling veins out of chicken thighs and he told me that’s exactly why he’s a vegetarian. I now have some scar tissue, bruising, but a much neater lady garden and absolutely no small lumps. It is a mons miracle! And I really liked that manand wonder if I could in fact develop more varicose veins so I could see him again. I think they call this Munchausen Syndrome.

There’s more to tell – we went to Salzburg for Mark’s birthday and nearly got stolen by a big Austrian ski instructor. But that’s for another day. Some pics to send you off:

A sunny Sunday in the garden. We have all been trying to vitamin D our acne and eczema away:

Haircuts for the curly ones:

Still cute though increasingly sassy (aka plain rude):

A birthday for the old fella:

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!

Today, I bought one packet less of the fresh bagels on my way back from the Portobello Sunday morning run/crawl, because this morning, we are one person down. Last night, when I once again rolled up the window blind in our middle bathroom, letting in the light and undoing the paranoid blind-unrolling habit each of the boys cling to (in case someone from another higher-up flat manages to manoeuvre themselves into some kind of impossible viewing position from their upper windows that overlook our lightwell, purely, they say, to spy on them while they pee), Barnaby’s precariously-placed electric toothbrush did not come crashing down onto the bathroom tiles like it has been doing every night for years. This is because the toothbrush, and his razor, and his shaving cream have all been relocated to a university hall in Nottingham. As has he.

The changes are small, though also massive and human-sized. He doesn’t like cheese, so every weekday meal for the last 18-ish years has been an exercise in avoiding cheese. Imagine – six kids but no cheesy pasta, no quick’n’easy pizza, no thrown-together jacket potato with grated cheese on top. No lasagne. No cheesy omelettes or cheese on toast. No parmesan chucked in for flavour, no feta for the sharp salty tang. No mozzarella for the pleasing stretch, no pasta bakes, no macaroni, no mascarpone-enhanced tomato sauces. But now? Now there’s a whole new world opened up to me, though it doesn’t exactly feel like opportunity – it feels like a loss.

There’s no one to empty the dishwasher, traditionally Barnaby’s job. There’s nothing really left of him here. One extra seat at the dinner table (which is good, because I’ve been perching on a step-ladder for years). There’s an extra sort-of-bedroom opened up in the old coal store, but that’s been taken swiftly by kid no. 2, because nature obviously abhors a vacuum, and which means there’s a vacancy for Remi opened up in the big old dorm room where the others sleep. Remi, right now, is helping Mark dismantle his cot as he prepares to move out as well.

So far, we are ok. This emptying out of our home and of my mothering load isn’t the opposite of the initial filling up. Before Barnaby, there were two. Barnaby’s arrival was over a long weekend – it was sore and shocking and bloody and unfathomable. Then there were three, and the life we once had was blown up spectacularly, delightfully, sleeplessly. It reshaped eventually, bits of us and him settling into something else entirely – a new build, one that we loved so much that we kept at it. Blowup after blowup, reconfiguring what life and tolerances and expectations and Christmas present budgets and car sizes and sleep-ins and space looked like. As we grew, all this made a kind of a sense, a chaotic, messy, noisy, overwhelming, joyful, impossible sense.

The other side of this is much tidier. Where once there was a cot is now dust, a virgin rectangle of untrodden carpet, and the ghost of all that bruised and wounded newness and hope. Where once there was my son, my first son, big and beautiful and clever and mistaken and prickly and loving and wonderful, is now a little more space in the flat, some discarded books, a few photographs on the fridge. It’s a slimming down, a quietening. I am that little old woman in ‘A Squash and a Squeeze’, but with kids, not farm animals. I am losing people as I reclaim some room, but I don’t exactly like it.

I didn’t cry when we said goodbye yesterday because he was happy and excited, and he has a whole life to begin living that isn’t with us anymore. That is good and right. And just as it took a weekend for him to arrive all those years ago, it took just a weekend for him to leave us. Just a few days. I tried to throw in some last minute advice to eat apples and get enough sleep, to know your limits when experimenting, to be kind, to look for bargains and to wear a helmet when on his bike so he doesn’t fall off and get brain damage and live as a pirate until the rest of his days. But he knows all that, because he’s many steps ahead of me. He’s been honing best practice for years, thinking about things, watching and learning and trying stuff out, all while I thought he couldn’t care less. He wants to have his turn now. He’s ready. And so are we, for better or worse.

It’s been quite the month

A few weeks ago we got told we would have to move out of our flat because the landlords want to renovate and let the flat out for higher rent. This is news we have known would come one day, but after 15 years, you kind of push the thought of impending UTTER DESTRUCTION OF OUR LIVES under the Turkish rug. I was at first numb, then sleepless, then tearful, then panicky. It seems rents are high out there in the real world, and flats are small, and it is entirely possible that no one will be delighted at the prospect of renting to a big family with a fat dog, and that even if they were, it would be very far away from our friends and schools and neighbourhood and support systems and doctors and haunts and things that make a life really sing. So we asked if there were any way we could stay, at least until we could figure out what to do, and it seems that they will consider that. We have no idea under what conditions, but we are hoping something will work.

Then there was a sniff, a hint, a teeny tiny possibility of a role shift at work. These are nothing new for me – I am spookily prone to role shifts, as I am bouts of psoriatic arthritis and coldsores. These things linger, benign, undetectable, me foolishly thinking that I have grown out of them, but they come at me periodically to strike me down and render me weak and sore, powerless and sad. Embarrassed. I thought that it was a case of here we go again, and floated the idea to our nanny and the kids just so they could readjust their expectations in case the shift came. Change is always horrible, but right now, with the threat of having to move, and a kid needing to be supported at university, and the tax problem still hanging around in the form of repayments until next year, and the cost of living meaning that literally stepping out of this flat causes HSBC to send a flurry of panicky notifications to my phone, was just too much. White-knuckled panic, bloodshot eyeballs, big ol’ existential discussions of what it means to live and to thrive and whether we just need to shut up shop and scuttle home to New Zealand – all this for a few days.

But LO! It seems I got the wrong end of the stick – decisions made by people above my pay grade were made and I get to stay in my role – in fact, I get to stay with a few more most excellent role changes that equal challenge and opportunity and chances to stretch like that long-desired-for mozzarella. This, on the same day that a doctor at Chelsea and Westminster told me that my psoriatic arthritis has probably ‘burned itself out’ and that I am not needing any long-term plan for rheumatoid arthritis as they had thought. The stiff neck that I sport like an unoiled Tin Man is just a mystery they are happy to put down to an anomaly which may get better by doing physio exercises diligently. That news felt good, but also odd – someone telling you your long term thing that you’ve begrudgingly learned to live with is actually…not a thing at all. Those years of blowup knee joints where movement feels like shard of broken glass replacing cartilage and bone, where getting up and around on mornings in the midst of flareups sees me hobble and grasp for support until the joints warm up and calm down…what even were they?

Lastly

Mark and I started our pottery classes. It turns out that Mark is good with his hands, I am impatient and prone to internal tantrums when I think I am not the best in show. I think the universe is trying to tell me something, and that I desperately need some HRT.

Anyway. Here’s some photos from the last few days:

Go well, my son. Thank you for everything.

I thought, when I was a younger person, with a neck that still swivelled gracefully and hair that hadn’t yet begun to thin, that having a lot of children wasn’t going to be very expensive. The rationale was that they could share clothes, they could sleep in bunkbeds, I would make simple lovely one-pot meals that everyone would eat (thus capitalising on the economics of crowd-feeding – cheaper by bulk and batches), and that we would entertain ourselves instead of needing trips to Thorpe Park and Legoland. That we would eventually save on babysitters by getting the older ones to do it. We would borrow things and share things and everyone would learn to have cheap brotherly home made fun. That we would reuse the cots and the car seats and the buggies and the sleepsuits and just get on with it.

I didn’t bank on quite a few things, in this early, sweetly naive financial assessment, such as how often those now big people break my stuff, or incur needless costs in big, dumb ways. I didn’t think much about future holidays where everyone brings friends and everyone is now adult-sized (with adult-sized luggage and adult-sized fares) and everyone has inherited their parent’s snobbish attitude to food and wine and everyone equals a minivan. Our holiday to Gozo has been over for a week but OH THE COST will be with us for a jolly long time after.

Here’s some annoying money-related things that irk me, roiling my guts with the pain of it all:

To save on costs, we all went for the early flights there and back and that meant 2am and 3am violent unnatural wakings and terrifying vomit-inducing coach and taxi rides to airports (if you are Otis, that is – the kind of kid who routinely vomits just as soon as we pull up to Gatwick’s unloading bay after looking pale for the hour long drive, or chucks up in the sea after the boat ride has well and truly concluded, or sticks his head out of the cab and spews into the wind that blows it all back into the car). These early morning trips probably ended up saving up about £10 each and we are STILL feeling the aftereffects of travelling all night last weekend to get home. Reader, this kind of economising is just not worth it.

We also went for the soft hand luggage under-the-seats-in-front-of-you option rather than cabin bags but Casper was determined to take his favourite hard cased square bag with him even though we said ‘no – take a backpack like everyone else’. Easyjet are wankers, obviously, so when we got there the Easyjet woman took one look at Casper’s boxy bag and said ‘That will be £48 for your oversized bag” and when we said “NO WAY, it is certainly not oversized because when using your VR online tool it seemed to roughly fit,” she said “Put it into the wire cage over there to see if it fits then” with a kind of sigh. It fitted into the cage perfectly except for a millimetre of plastic hard wheels poking out of the top. We pushed and we rearranged but she remained steadfast in her conviction. “Oversized”, she said, taking our payment and (the kids are adamant about this) ending with an under-the-breath throwaway burn at them: “IN YOUR FACE!”. I wasn’t so sure, as she was an actual middle-aged woman, but who really knows?

Casper also left his phone in the transfer van at the end of the holiday and by the time he realised, the van had sped off. I emailed the transfer hire company to send it back to us once they had found it and it has so far cost us £125 for couriering and ‘admin’. We might also be stung at customs.

There were ten of us on holiday and that meant we couldn’t all fit into the biggest minivan on the island, a 9-seater. So we had to resort to buses and eventually cabs for the older kids. The older kids also got quite keen on a refreshing glass or two of Maltese wine at every meal which, though cheap per bottle, quickly added up. One night the little buggers ordered cocktails each and I nearly exploded with euro-related rage.

They broke two lampshades at the villa. The first was because one teenager got skittish and outraged about a fly being in his room and he chased it around while trying to swat it dead with his tshirt, and the tshirt caught the glass lampshade and it shattered all over his bed. The second lampshade got broken because the other teenagers decided to throw hard balls around in their room and misfired, hitting the glass lampshade and shattering it all over the beds. I mean, FFS.

The breaking of things continued today because another teenager of mine throw a pillow at another brother but it missed the kid and hit a vintage mid century ceramic vase which smashed all over the kitchen. At this point I was a bit sick of hearing the unnecessary and unbudgeted for costs incurring by my large and unwieldy thoughtless oafs, and have today constituted a policy whereby the suckers have to pay for breakages (and oversized luggage and lost phone courier charges) themselves. This has caused a lot of tears and handwringing and outrage but how else will they understand this stuff?

The other thing the children do now is that they eat all the things. But not the things I would like them to eat. On Gozo, the watermelon was left to go drippy and soft, the thoughtfully quartered plums and peaches turned brown. My tomato salad got optimistically rejigged until the heat and the juices combined, turning it into a kind of terrifying prison hooch. The massive tub of locally-made gelato, asked for repeatedly, got ignored once bought and transferred from the little bakery down the road into our villa freezer, inexplicably losing its appeal on the walk home. The cherry croissants were rejected as being ‘too sugary’. Mark, who ALWAYS buys a chunk of smoked processed cheese whenever we go anywhere, despite my protests that no one else likes it, ghosted the little cheesy stump until it grew a smoke-infused fur all over its surface. He also bought sad mushrooms that sat in a bag getting funky and damp.

But then we went out and the children’s appetites returned once in Gozo’s main tourist square, trying to order steaks and pork ribs and chips and two drinks each at least and I was DYING – the cost! I said. Why don’t you eat the watermelon? I said. Keep your costs down! I said. The budget is FINISHED! You’ve spent it all, you little hungry pests! But it was no good. I was outnumbered and overspent.

Here’s some photos though because actually, who cares? I can always sell a vehicle.

Gelato. Eaten at the bakery, but no where else:

A beach with red sand, rocks, waves, and a taverna with expensive things to order from:

A little bit of Catholic awesomeness:

More of the above:

The bluest sea:

Beloved and a big boat:

For the Bishop of Gozo:

Beheaded:

Me contemplating the money running out and deciding to smile anyway:

The inland sea in Dwerja Bay:

Spending money:

Remi has become frightened of the toilet. He says that while he was at nursery, someone flushed the toilet that was filled with way too much toilet paper (every parent of a small child recognises this scenario) and the water began to rise. He now will only do a wee outside or if you come into the toilet with him. He won’t flush the loo unless you are in there with him, and he asks you to watch the water while he turns his back and washes his hands. He’s like, KEEP WATCHING. Don’t look at me. Watch the water!

Obviously this is not a sustainable situation. It makes me wonder if he has seen more overflowing toilets than I actually realise. There’s that incredible act two in the Triangle of Sadness where everyone in the superyacht gets vomity and the toilets overflow with the most revolting and slippery wastewater, and there’s an overflowing toilet in Rose Byrne’s bathroom in Platonic. How much does this kid see? I used to have a good handle on these kinds of things but the whole cadence and tone of this family has shifted now that the teenagers have gained in power and number. They watch things and listen to things and say things that I cannot do much about, and the culture and morals of the family have shifted in response. Mostly I accept this. We are, in any case, overrun. There is usually a teenager somewhere in my eyeline. They tend to lie down quite a lot. Ned constructs Esher-like cushion-to-couch stairways and other soft furnishing platforms to splay his newly-hairy body over, along, and in, while the others are often plugged into a device and just sit for hours. They come and go, to school, out with friends, babysitting, walking the dog. I never quite know who will be home for dinner. Dinner might be for four, and might easily swell to 12. No one bothers much to articulate any of this in advance, and as such, my powers in the kitchen are simply unparalleled. I whip up meals like magic and always manage to pad the table out regardless of the unexpected extras. I keep telling the children that one day they will marvel at my skills, but right now they think everyone gets served three Ottolenghi salads plus a traybaked chicken and warmed sourdough of an otherwise unremarkable Tuesday evening. One day they will understand.

What do those kids do when they are not littering the couch with akimbo limbs? Last night one kid was at a party, another had one babysitting job which segued into another babysitting job as a neighbour went into labour and off to the hospital, another kid was at a WWF wrestling match with friends somewhere, another was babysitting another lot of neighbours kids. Two kids were with us, one asleep, one trying on my high summer heels. It’s like The Babysitters Club series here right now, but in real life and with absolutely no girls. The Square in which we live is awash with neighbours needing ad hoc and regular babysitting, and what better people to know than the family with lots of kids who have been looking after each other for years? They’ve nearly all had experience looking after kids from all ages, from tiny babies onwards…and there’s usually one kid here who hasn’t gone out to a party/isn’t in the middle of GCSEs or A levels/unwilling to each a tidy £10 per house for sitting down at someone else’s place for a few hours. It’s a goldmine, I tell ya.

Clothes update

The Tax Situation has curbed many, many old spending habits, and forced new ways of meeting my new dress needs. Two weeks ago I got all het up and panicky and sold a Chanel jacket which felt very much like ripping a baby from my arms. It wasn’t a jacket I had ever really worn, so not really like a baby at all, but it felt like I was making one of those rash decisions you rue, for years later. Like I do the Alexander McQueen jacket with the 40’s shoulders and slimmest of lines that I let go on a whim one day stupidly, rashly, mindlessly. Anyway, the Chanel jacket sold for £510, along with some Charlotte Olympia heels (£71) and two Roksanda blouses at £60 each. The money was quickly deposited into my account where it burned and ached and screamed at me…SPEND ME BEFORE I GET USED UP ON HAIRCUTS AND PE SHOES AND HYDROCORTISONE CREAM AND MOBILE PHONE BILLS! And so I spent a good week obsessing about finding a new Chanel jacket to ‘reinvest’ into. The only good one was on a US site but there are horribly expensive customs and duty taxes these days. So I came up with a plan to get the jacket via a complex system of friends and friends of friends and other people’s sisters and new accounts and shipping addresses and various countries and I may well have lost a week of my life and tried many good people’s patience. And it probably won’t fit because of the upper arms situation which shows no signs of resolving.

I also went to an Erdem sample sale after work this week and found dresses reduced from £1500 to £150 and so now I have more dresses to sell to ensure I adhere to the ‘one on, one out’ policy. Which I have to do three times. I also think I have a bit of upper-arm-induced body dysmorphia because one dress I bought is a size 16 and another is a size 18. I was like ‘ohhhh I shall belt it in and look all swishy and a bit like Audrey Hepburn in ‘Roman Holiday’ with all this fabric’ but Mark said WHY IS THAT DRESS SO BIG AT THE BACK? IT LOOKS LIKE YOU ARE STORING A TAIL.

On Mark

He has been struck by a mysterious swollen set of feet/lower legs. They have been hurting him so much that he can’t walk without crutches and he has to put them up on cushions and moan a lot. I was my usual brittle self about it because I kept telling him that if he didn’t do something about his generous tum then his sciatica would get worse and he would turn…immobile. Which he has been, all week. I said I will not prematurely become your carer. It’s all a bit tense. So he has had xrays and blood tests and emergency visits to the blood test clinic to check for clots and it turns out his current cocktail of (not fun) drugs may have exacerbated latent gout.

Talk about sexy times in Cleveland Square.

He also had a wonderful birthday party before the gout attack where everyone told him he was a most excellent and loved man, and they gifted him pottery lessons which he shall get to once he can walk again unaided. (Roll my eyes).

Anyway. here we are at the party:

Here’s his cake which the dog got to first:

And Barnaby, Ava and I at his Year 13 Leaver’s service in a chapel in Westminster Abbey. Oh yes, that’s how we roll here in Londontown:

And more party photos from last weekend on a penthouse apartment balcony with lovely, lovely friends. Mark had to go lie down with his legs up in the air in the living room so missed out on *quite* a bit:

Lastly, the baby, Barnaby, Otis, and Mark: