Unflushed toilets

Is it really all those months since I last blogged? Hardly a decent blogger, am I? I've been neglecting your need for schadenfreude. I think it's high time I remedied the situation and with my 40th birthday only round the corner, never has there been a better time to put fat fingers to small keyboard and write a load of mildly diverting bollocks about the onset of middle age. Warning: the following ramble is suitable only for adult consumption and contains strongish swearing and references to bowel movements and piles.

Well, August was a shit month. Literally. I've had the kids at home. I love them to bits. They're very sweet and sparkly eyed and squeaky and that but will they flush the bloody toilet? Will they buggery! If I'd photographed every unflushed child turd, camouflaged by loo roll and lurking halfway down the pan in a state of harpic-resistant semi-decomposition, I could open an art installation at the Tate Modern and give Tracey Emin a run for her money. I spent a week in a Kentish seaside town with the family in my in-laws' flat. That was a mistake too. It rained. And it blew. And I had to clean the flat through before we'd even unpacked because the toilets contained...more art installations. Cleaning up after other people: story of my life. But there is something slightly glamorous about those long, yellow rubber marigolds. Amongst the eau de cacka lurks the ghost of 1950's Audrey Hepburn in long gloves...

Then there was July. Don't get me started about July! I wrote a novel. I polished a novel. Then I got some "close but no cigar" feedback and I polished the novel again. And again. It was like a bad literary groundhog day and I'm still not finished. In the meantime, the ironing stacked up on my "Dad" winged armchair - the kind that looks like it should really be upholstered in vinyl and placed in an old people's home. The ironing lurked for weeks like an unwelcome visitor and now that the ironing has gone, the chair smells inexplicably and strongly of wee. There's definitely a theme here. Then a child bullied my child and I moaned bitterly about it on Facebook and a man who took himself to be the bully's father wot I was referring to threatened me with libel action. That was the pinnacle of July, I think. So by this point, I had the position of mute, censored Chair of the Excretion Excavators' Union of Workers (EEUW) all boxed off.

And June was cack. What happened in June? Haven't got a sodding clue. I think I wrote a lot of stuff for TV and it went precisely nowhere. And May? May was crapola too. More writing, more striving to get my career on track. More hopes, at that point, not yet dashed. I went to a BBC event and had to pull out for the second half due to a vomiting child. So, yet again, my pursuit of happiness and balance was disrupted by other people's bodily functions. My mother complained that I was a heartless cow because I moaned about having to mop up barf from the cream wilton carpet at 2am but last time I checked the yummy mummy's inner circle manual, enjoying mopping up puke was not an entry requirement.

And April? Oh, I went to Mexico in April. That bit was good. But you don't want to hear about the good bits here, do you? I ate a lot of salsa and drank a lot of gin and didn't clean up anyone's poo. But I did end up babysitting a load of semi-abandoned kids who strangely appeared tacked on the end of our family party of four. I don't know whose kids they were but I didn't wipe them down or water them at all, so if you've lost your child and you come across a very soiled, shrivelled small person, it's probably yours.

So...the Spring and Summer have passed in a whirl of school, work, dreams in aspic and splatter patterns in harpic. I turn 40 at the end of October and still have no sense of getting anywhere with anything. And yes, my piles are giving me jip because gravity and age seem to be winning the war on muscle control, skin tone and bodily functions generally. Chaos abounds. If I flap my bingo wings in Manchester, there's a hurricane in Queensland, Australia. And every time I click my fingers, an unflushed turd appears in a toilet somewhere in the UK. This was the summer of the Horrormoanal Woman.