Women over 40 - improving like strong cheese.

There was a thing going round on Facebook this week. You know...one of those quotes from someone I’ve never heard of that rang true and everyone I know ticked “Like”. It was about women over forty, but the wisdom had been espoused by a man. Though I agreed with it all, I think it should have come from a shouty woman, who is actually 42 AND HAS FUCKING PMT THAT COULD TAKE OUT HALF OF CENTRAL ASIA.

So, here are the facts, in no particular order, on behalf of women like me. I know there are lots of us out there. And if you don’t agree with us, we don’t give a flying fuck, because they’re OUR facts, not YOUR facts:

1. Most of us have shat children out of our foofs. Don’t mistake this for weakness. We gave life. We are God’s emissaries on earth. 

Think carefully before you say whether it looks big in this or not

2. If we say our arses are fat, it’s because our arses are currently fat. We do not have self esteem issues. We just like wine and crisps and sit on our arses a lot doing clever things. But please note, just because we say it, doesn’t mean you are allowed to agree with us.

3. Many of us work. Some of us have been self-employed for years. We are successful, ruling entire families like benevolent dictators. We are used to being our own bosses, so don’t think we’re hoping you’ll help/participate/let us out in traffic. We are expecting you to do our bidding. Our cars are bigger than yours. Fucking move it!

4. We don’t play mind games because we don’t have to. We ask for the things we want, praise the things we love, drop the shutters fast on people who disappoint us and God help anyone who really gets on our tits. 

5. We don’t need to be told how intelligent or impressive we are, because we have a raft of qualifications that prove how intelligent and impressive we are. That’s not to say that we don’t enjoy being told how intelligent and impressive we are, so SAY IT, MOTHERFUCKER! 

6. We don’t need to be told that we’re attractive. We’re very comfortable in our own skin. But we do enjoy being told. Follow the previous instruction.

Seriously? Fatal Attraction was not a documentary.

7. We have love, energy and enthusiasm in abundance. If you are nice, we will share them with you. See point number four. This does not mean that we are going to eat you/boil bunnies/start crying at 4am, clutching an empty bottle of gin. Although if you are not nice, we might well eat your liver with some fava beans and a nice chianti.

8. We are human. We have piles and fart and belch after meals. We like to talk about ailments. We don’t care if you find this unpleasant. We like to talk about masturbation and our enjoyment of sex, which should raise the roof if you’re doing your bit properly. We make no apologies when we forget to shave our legs and armpits. We have 1970’s lustrous pant-shrubbery. Deal with it.

If we wanna rock a Brian Blessed on the beach, we will.

9. We’re not domestic drudges. If you’ve been treating us like that, we’re angry now, so get some fucking life insurance.

10. We are not your mother. You already have a mother. Never confuse us with her. 

Karmic Dysentery

Okay, okay. I realise I haven’t blogged since the summer. I’ve suffered guilty guilt at the thought of leaving you without recreational swearing or entertaining facts about piles for months. My excuse is that I was writing a crime thriller and a series of books for small children AND doing a rewrite on a kids’ novel that went exactly nowhere. The stuff that makes money has to come first, right? Those anoraks and big knickers don’t buy themselves.

So what has been on my mind lately? I’ll tell you what...Karma. That stupid fucking idea that if you’re a good person, good things will happen to you, and if you’re a bastard, your bumhole will knit together, causing you to asphyxiate slowly on your own acrid guff. 

The optimist in me thought this might work...

Being a naive knob-cobbler, I have always thought that if I give to charity – hell, I worked for charities for about 20 years – nice things will come my way. I thought my karma account was in the black and I could expect great health, multiple book deals and thin knees to come my way. What did I get instead? Varicose veins, literary obscurity and dysentery. Yeah, you heard me right. Dysentery.

In October, my Father-in-Law, always the keen climber of stairs in the dark, managed to climb the stairs in the dark...and fall headlong back down to the bottom, because he’s a doddery old fart – more Stannah Stair than Fred Astaire. He broke his head. Well, actually, that’s a fib. He broke 3 vertebrae in his neck and painted the walls with the inside of his head but mercifully, the head wound was superficial and the neck will mend. 

Muggins – Karma Queen, here – plus family went trekking down to the fragrant vale of Croydon to visit Stannah Stair in hospital. He was wearing his new traction ensemble, complete with a Tena pad on his head and support stockings. Notwithstanding my sock-envy, I was glad to see him alive. And I was certain I had earned 50 billion karma points for dropping everything to do a 300 mile round trip to show support  (I would have done it, even without the karma points, because I’m not a complete cow). 

Remember, Father-in-law: Stannah Stair, not Fred Astaire!

But no! What happened? We took my Mother-in-Law out for lunch to a local restaurant to cheer her up.  Within a few hours, I felt like I had been poisoned with potassium or polyester or plutonium or whatever it is that old Eastern Bloc spies spike your butties with.  Then I turned into an intestinal jet wash. 

Dysentery, to the unacquainted, is an affliction - the kind suffered by actors in Bridge on the River Kwai and Tenko - whereby everything on the inside apart from your bones makes a very fast getaway through your arse. I survived on diarolyte alone for a full week. I went through my entire range of Primark winceyette pyjamas.

This was my karmic payback for caring. And, as soon as I was up and about again, we all came down with flu. Then my child’s drum teacher got the hump and sacked me off for poor attendance. 

So now, I’ve decided that being a nice person is seriously overrated. I am going to hone my skills at being an obnoxious fat-kneed turd and we’ll see if that doesn’t turn me into an overnight success. I’ll let you know how I get on. In the meantime, I’m off to mug a student for his Children In Need collecting tin...

Warning: belief in Karma can cause terminal disappointment and bad wind.

Pets: Furry friends or a tragic snack?

I haven’t blogged for a while because I’ve been writing a long, long book with swearing and nookie and other stuff in it.  But life has been happening to me even during my internet absence.  Mainly, I have spent the last half a year being nagged rigid by my children about pet ownership.  So, it seems right that I should devote this blogpost to my curmudgeonly views on domestic animals. 

My views look a bit like this...

Animals: they bloody stink, don’t they?  And they cost a fortune to keep.  And then they die.

When I was a kid, we had two goldfish won at a fair.  I called them Fish n Chips.  Chips got eaten by Fish.  Then only Fish was left.  Fish ate his turds for about eight years and then ended up floating at the top of the tank like a dead sardine suffering from existential despair.  I later discovered that his demise was caused by my grandmother giving the hapless bumhole a tablespoon of food when we went on hols.  The fish literally ate until he burst. My mother let me bury him in the back garden. 

Several attempts at goldfish ownership later, I ended up with another fish called Fish.  That fish lasted an impressive ten years until, like Steve McQueen out of The Great Escape, he kept flipping himself out of the tank.  He ended up white, covered in mucus and listing to starboard on the bottom of the tank like Leonardo di Caprio in Titanic or that moaning bird out of Twilight.  We administered fish-euthanasia by leaving him on a saucer overnight in the hope that he would die quickly.  In the morning, amidst a waterfall of my teenaged tears, Mum said he’d gone in the night.  I don’t know where he’d gone but I doubt she’d bunged him a fiver and dropped him at the bus stop. 

The other horror of pet ownership that haunts me even now was the sad tale of Bopper Bunny.  I was eight.  Bopper was a gorgeous black and white Dutch rabbit.  We put him in a hutch that my idiot father had made from offcuts of wood.  He had a window instead of wire mesh.  This was a mistake.  When the sun shone on little Bopper, Bopper started to cook like a furry Sunday roast.  Consequently, he was confined to his airless hole of a bedroom.  He got diarrhoea and Mum couldn’t afford to take him to the vet.  Despite cleaning his hutch every week, Bopper spent six months trailing a ball of shit and fur around the size of Geoff Capes’ fist.  

Poor, tragic Bopper lived only two years and survived being let out by the local yobs on our estate and the bouncing shitball. 

One day, we came home from shopping, Bopper was stretched out in his window.  Rigor mortis had already set in.  Even in death, we failed Bopper.  My mother refused to touch the dead rabbit.  She shovelled him out on a spade, dropped him but eventually managed to put him in a shoe box.  But he had been stretched out when he died and Mum was only a size 5.  His legs couldn’t be tucked in.  So his coffin was comprised of an ill-fitting shoe box and a Kwik Save bag.  Bye bye, little Bopper, with your feet sticking out the end.  It was utterly tragic.  Worse still, I wasn’t allowed to bury him in the back garden.  So Mum slung him on some waste land and their endethed the story of my childhood experiences of pet ownership.

Tragic but true.

So when my kids ask me for pets, I simply say, “NO.  PISS OFF!” because my hurts have still not healed after all these years.  Fortunately, I have been given a second chance though, as two rabbits came to live in my garden and now there are five.  It smells of wee in the garden but they are so cute, it’s worth it.  

This post is in memory of Fish, Chips, Benson & Hedges, Fish and Bopper.

Walk Away!

Now, correct me if I’m wrong, but the point of walking is to get from one place to another without rolling or need of a tarmac-based luge.  I learned to do it 39 years ago and so far, can do it quite well.  I taught my children to do it when they were a little over a year old and they’re pretty shit hot at it too, except the bits where they trip and fall on their heads.  So, given that we’ve pretty much got walking sorted, why does my Mother-in-law insist we do walking whenever we see her?

          

“Let’s go for a walk.  They’re such city children.  They never walk,” she says.

But of course, here’s the lack of logic in her statement.  They do walk.  They don’t roll around on a giant ball like a Dyson hoover made of meat and hair.  And yes, they are city children but living in a city doesn’t preclude ambulatory activity using real feet and knee joints.  We’re not all so chi chi and sophis in Manchester that even nine year olds can boast their own pimped up mobility scooters.

.

Then she says, “We’re on the edge of the countryside here.”

And this is what really made me choke, before I’d even snagged my Pringle jumper on a bramble in the “woods”.  My in-laws live in Croydon.  My Mother-in-law must be wearing cow shit spectacles if she thinks she’s been living on the edge of the countryside in Croydon for over twenty years.  Streatham has some grass but it doesn’t make it the Cotswolds.  There’s a Lido in Tooting but those things floating in the water are balls of snot, chunks of polystyrene and hair, not the Maldives.  Perhaps all these years she has been mistaking the teenagers in the Whitgift Centre for comely Friesian cows.  Maybe she thinks the tram is some Trans-Alpine Express through the bucolic Swiss slopes instead of a piss-flavoured public-carrying slow death bullet, taking in the smells and sounds of New Addington, like a scene out of Deliverance with tattooed white men driving souped-up H-Reg Fiats instead of banjos, coz dey iz well fly, innit, bruv?

           

So we went for a walk.

                

Now, I hate to break it to you, city dwellers, but they have mud instead of tarmac in the twenty square metres of Croydon countryside.  You can’t wear platforms or stilettos or white trainers or brand new school shoes.  And this sadism runs in the family...

My Sister-in-law lives in proper rural Kent and I can report that she is also a keen lover of walkies and they have real mud there.  And cow shit.  Lots of cow and horse and chicken and sheep shit and rabbits that are not stylish jackets but which sit around with myxomatosis, giving you the evil eye.  There’s not a single human turd in sight.  And she likes.  Walking.  In.  The.  Shit.  Not because she’s getting from her house to, say, the shop or the pub, which would be a sensible use of legs.  But because it’s “bracing” and “fun”.  Warning: These are euphemisms for “fucking freezing” and “pointless”.

My Sister-in-law once made me do walking during the Summer because she lives in an “area of outstanding natural beauty”.  Yes, well, there are fields and I can see them from her garden and from the car.  I was wearing white linen trousers and brand new canvas Pumas, for God’s sake!  We got stung by nettles, the linen ended up hemmed in horseshit and my husband fell down a pothole and broke his anus.  This is torture, not hospitality.  We didn’t even take a flask of gin for emergencies.  All wrong.

Having begun this horror story, I’m going to stop here before some of you die of flange-failure.  My point is that walking as a pastime is wrong.  Just utterly fucking pointless.  You get mud all over perfectly good shoes and snag your favourite clothes.  There’s nowhere to go for a wee.  Face it, there’s nowhere to go.  Running is different.  That’s exhilarating and good exercise.  But walking...just save it for the bloody shops, all right?  I iz a city kid, ja’getme?

           

Horrormoanal Twelve Days of Christmas Humbug

On the first day of Christmas, my true love sent to me,

Some bobbly long johns from Marks and wynciette pyjamas from Primark wot have faded in the wash and lost a button.

On the second day of Christmas, my true love sent to me,

Some Nectar points for paying the gas bill, a new pack of anusol for the piles and a bic razor for the thorny Kevin Keegan legs.

On the third day of Christmas, my true love sent to me,

Iboprufen for the back that I pulled out whilst removing a shoe and corsodyl to gargle away a furry tongue.

On the fourth day of Christmas, my true love sent to me,

A bottle of Jolt so I can stay awake for ten minutes past water-shed: long enough for a festive fumble.

On the fifth day of Christmas, my true love sent to me,

Six mystery dented tins from Asda, a pile of yellow stickered veg and a tub of on-the-cusp-of-going-fizzy yoghurt, hold the fois gras.

On the sixth day of Christmas, my true love sent to me,

A fifteen year old Christmas tree from Woolworths and a load of plastic baubles from Asda that are too shit to fit on the tree properly and spend a fortnight falling off and rolling round the back of the radiator.

On the seventh day of Christmas, my true love sent to me,

A failing metabolism that deposits five tonnes of lard on my inner thighs just from looking at Morrisons’ mince pies and a load of ensuing wind that makes me smell of forgotten sprouts.

On the eighth day of Christmas, my true love sent to me,

An argument with my mother about how snotty the veg should be on Christmas Day and how the in-laws’ presents for the kids are WAY shitter than hers.  Aren’t they?  AREN’T THEY?  And when I don’t answer because I wish to be diplomatic, I’m a disloyal bastard, naturally.

On the ninth day of Christmas, my true love sent to me,

Some slightly undercooked meat at my in-laws that gives me the trots, some crap Swedish card games that make my brains pickle themselves in their own despair, monster back ache from sleeping in a bed that hasn’t had a new mattress since 1964 and hayfever from sleeping in a room with carpet that has never ever been replaced, since the time when carpets were first woven out of man nasal hair.

On the tenth day of Christmas, my true love sent to me,

A pile of Christmas presents that demonstrate clearly that despite my being a tight arse, everyone else has actually spent a lot less on me, three non-matching pillow cases and four hours of competitive old person Scrabble.

On the eleventh day of Christmas, my true love sent to me,

Two bickering children, pretending they’re actually wild cats in the back of the car during a five hour journey back up north, scratching each other, dropping crumbs from bad bendy peanut butter sandwiches that have started to smell of plastic bag and a bladder that can’t decide if it does or doesn’t want a wee.

On the twelfth day of Christmas, my true love sent to me,

A load of shitty repeats on telly, no Uncle Buck with John Candy, yet another New Year’s Eve spent in the company of that dorky tit, Jools Holland n pals, the sense that there’s nothing to look forward to until the cherry blossom is out and the spectre of yet another January spent water-skiing through horizontal rain to work in a basement office where people regularly and mysteriously leave perfect arse-shaped prints on the toilet seat.

Funny Rollercoaster

Like many writers, I observe people very closely and take inspiration for my writing from what I find.  Occasionally, I find beauty and greatness.  Sometimes, I find shallowness, conformity, bigotry, one-upmanship, ignorance, chippiness, lack of charity and absence of humility.  Mostly, I find a combination of good and bad.  Sometimes, what I see disappoints me but I do see the humour in the layer of bullshit at the bottom of life.

Personally, I don’t like to boast publicly about the good things in my life because there will always be someone out there who’s got a shittier deal than me to cope with.  So I moan and generally try to take the piss, make people laugh, expose the ridiculousness of everyday life and some of the flaws in the people I see.  This is the writer’s way and having seen Ed Byrne perform last night, this is the comedian’s way too.  

I have been a fan of good quality stand-up comedy for decades.  When I lived in London, me and the husband used to go to The Monday Club at the Tattershall Castle.  This is a big old boat moored on the Thames.  There, they host a comedy showcase night, where up and coming as well as established talent cut their teeth and new material on an experienced audience.  Over the years, I saw Ross Noble, Shappi Khorsandi (she was bloody terrible twelve years ago but has greatly improved since), Stephen K Amos and many others who have since become household names and there were also some comic greats like Andrew Maxwell, Daniel Kitson, Jeff Innocent and Ian Stone who unfortunately haven’t.  Think Ed Byrne looks fresh-faced?  We went to see him do a gig in Reading about twelve years ago and then I saw him again last night.  He’s a consummate performer.  I’ll also never forget (although I try) the time Jimmy Carr was a new name, supporting Daniel Kitson at an Edinburgh Festival warm-up gig in Clerkenwell’s Comedy Cafe.  Carr was bloody terrible and although I think he’s great as a TV show host and ad-libs very well, I still can’t stand his 1970’s style Bob Monkhouse-esque one-liners.  So stiff and formal!

In any case, I feed off comedy intellectually and I try to make my own writing for children as funny as possible.  Making people laugh is such a tricky and skilful art.  It requires great discipline and most importantly, requires a truly miserable bastard to do it properly.  Only the brutally honest, anti-social arsehole can sit as an outsider and find the funny in everyday things, the woefully crap and irritatingly ghastly.  You have to have the troughs of the emotional rollercoaster to see the negative and turn it into comedy gold and then you have to have the heady peaks to perform or write it with enthusiasm and energy.  I’m not talking about the rollercoaster of the bi-polar here.  I’m talking about the full range – both highs and lows - of normal adult emotion. 

At the weekend, I had a debate with someone about writing critically about life.  And my thoughts are this: nobody wants to hear streams of tambourine smacking, flag waving, evangelical bullshit about your life.  If all you do is boast: how brilliant you are, how fucking genius your children are, how immensely gymnastic and fulfilling your sex life is, how firm and fragrant your turds come out, how fast and quality your car is, how well paid your job is, how lucky you are to be God’s chosen Alpha Male or Female and how gorgeous you are, inside and out, then people are going to want to punch you.  You’re lying.  Plain and simple.  And nobody wants to hear that shit.  Life just isn’t like that.  Optimism should always be tempered by healthy cynicism.  And for those people who do only see the anodyne, the bouncy and the fluffy in life, perhaps you are emotionally crippled or on valium.  

For me, it boils down to this: Should I report to you in this blog that my car is sparkling clean and howls like a rabid beast down the road, inspiring envy in all?  Would that be entertaining?  Would it be truthful?  NO!  The truth is, my car is OK, but the interesting aspect of it is the litter all over the carpets.  I call it kid compost.  The fact that the interior smells of farts is also more interesting because as a family, we are prodigious farters.  Should I boast about my 9 year old daughter coming top in science and having great bone structure?  NO!  The truth is that she can lay claim to both of those things but it’s more interesting to report that she is an untidy little fecker, whose bedroom is carpeted wall to wall with dirty tights and knickers.  I expect her to start her own Dale Farm community in the back garden any day now.

So really, in the yin and yang of life’s experience, should I write only about the happy, sunshiny bits that are intensely personal and that might make some other fucker, worse off than me, feel like a piece of shit?  Or should I write the stuff that everybody recognises?  The spots, the flab, the bald patches, the embarrassing smells, the irritation, the angry outbursts, the mortifying faux pas?  Should comedians just come onto the stage and talk for two hours about how great life is?  Would that be funny?  Would it air on channel Dave for the next ten years, if they appeared on Mock the Week, praising the positive aspects of the current Governments’s fiscal policy?  You, the reader, can decide...

Head Lice Suck

OK, so what did I say the other week?  I said my fragrant offspring don’t have nits, didn’t I?  I BOASTED this.  In my blog.  In public.  Like the stupid, smug cow that I am.  And all the while, in a bid to make mummy look a numptee and a liar, my boy child was hatching an army of head lice from infinitesimally small eggs in secret.  The DIRTY...LITTLE...BUGGER.  Suddenly I find I am hostess to new family pets that I am inadvertently feeding and housing using my child’s and my own head.  Eeuw.  

Small boy-child cultivated a lot of these bastards.  He has a very hairy head.  Plenty of room at the inn.  Then, because children are loving and giving, he donated three of the crawly little fuckers exclusively to me.  Thanks, Nitty Norman.  Your Horrormoanal 40 year old mother has inadvertently taken three head lice on a free holiday to the other side of the world.  I don’t know if I should be angry that I have been infested or pleased that I got three extra passengers to go on an all inclusive holiday for nowt.  Mind you, they didn’t eat or drink much apart from my blood but they did get to go swimming every day and dance to Kool n The Gang at the hotel disco.

Perhaps some of you reading this will have been through Nit-gate yourselves, but I’ll guess you’ve never had to cope with this affliction while simultaneously having a rampaging kidney infection.  It was my weekus horribilis.  I, ill person with failing vital organs and alcohol withdrawal symptoms, had to bend over (ouch) to delouse an unwilling six year old, who HATES having his barnet interfered with at the best of times.  For an hour and a half I tried to sort through his long and lustrous locks and pick the eggs out by hand because the tines on my nit comb were too far apart to pick up the grotty appendages with combing alone.  He cried and struggled.  I gave him the finger when he wasn’t looking because I felt bad about telling him to fuck off and sit still but I still really wanted to.  I was ANGRY.  Mainly at the lice for infesting my furry baby child.  How DARE they?  But also at the boy for bringing this shit into my nice clean house when I’d warned him not to rub heads with other children at school.  Why does being a boy have to be a contact sport?

We bought Hedrin and did the greasy overnight thing.  I nitcombed the rest of us with the rubbish comb.  Where the comb failed, my eyes, which work with the help of strong spectacles, told me who was OK and who wasn’t.  Fortunately, my daughter, who is like cousin It from the Addams Family, and my husband, who nowadays has only slightly more hair on his head than on his knackers, were both nit free.  I trusted my judgement.  Dismayed, I knew the small boy still had eggs that I couldn’t get to with my fat fingers and I knew, having had 3 live lice, that I probably still had nits.  But I had to rely on my husband to nit comb my very curly, lacklustre locks.  He is not a very fastidious man.  When he said I was in the clear, I knew he was talking shit - like when I ask him, “have you emptied the kitchen bin?” and he says, “It doesn’t need it,” and all he has done is squash the contents of the very overloaded bin right down so there’s a free inch left on top.

It'd better bloody work for a tenner!

Just when I thought we were all doomed to permanent infestation like a cheap B&B in Blackpool, a friend recommended the Nitty Gritty Nit Free comb.  Now, let’s get one thing straight.  This isn’t a sponsored blogpost.  If I say something’s good, it’s because I think it is good.  The Nitty Gritty was the only thing to pick the tiny eggs out of our hair.  It cost over a tenner at Boots but it was worth it because now I think I can get on top of this embarrassing affliction, which is surely worse than the time I got scabies from falling down a pothole in East Anglia.

So if you find yourself scratching like a stag party in Amsterdam, you know what to do now, don’t you?   Don’t say the Horrormoanal Woman doesn’t do you any favours!

Buckling under the guilt

This week saw me punching the air triumphantly in a style normally only seen in schmaltzy 1980’s films like Top Gun.  No, in fact, I didn’t just punch the air.  I whooped like Julia Roberts in Pretty Woman (except in that film, Julia Roberts said her legs were 44inches long and I look more like a celebrating hobbit.  Also, I’m not a prozzy unless you count the time I gave my husband a Popozogolou to get him to fix the shower door).  

I was celebrating because my agent decided that my manuscript, Zeeba Marple, which is for children aged 9+, was finally ready to go off into the blue yonder into publisher land.  I have been working on that bloody novel since last November, so it’s almost a year’s labour.  It has been lovingly crafted with as much fun and imagination as possible.  It has been written and rewritten and rewritten until it’s so polished, you can see your chins in it.  It has had feedback from the savviest minds you can imagine and I’m proud of it.  I’m proud that I managed to pull my ravaged mind through the dark pureed-Weetabix years of drooling with my children in front of Teletubbies and Mr. Fucking Tumble back into the sunlit lands of intelligible adult conversation and hummus.  I am a creator.  I am an author.  I am more than my empty holdall of a belly and bingo wings.  More than just Mummy.

 

But there lies the rub.  I am WRACKED with guilt.  I am CONVINCED I am a slightly shit mother.  Why?  Well, I think there’s some kind of evolutionary burden of guilt for women who try to juggle quality parenting with professional success and without the luxury of hired childcare.  If you’ve tried to burn this candle at both ends, you’ll know that I’m telling the truth.  This is how it happened to me:

 

Four years ago, my writing passion was reignited, after more than a decade on the shelf.  I had been renovating two houses – a great career if you’ve got kids who see the fun in playing in building sand at Jewsons - but work had finished.  The housing market had collapsed and so had my intentions of being Sarah Beeny Mk II with more disappointing boobs and a rubbish accent.   Feeling at a loose end and not yet ready to go back to working in an office, I wrote a simple fairy story for my daughter.  She loved it and so did I.  I became quickly addicted to the creative fix that writing offered.  It was like hobnobs in crack cocaine form.  Better than that.  My brain was thawing out and it had survived its cryogenic-hibernation-through-having-babies intact.  Cue Julia Roberts whooping.

 

But I was skint.  So I went back into an office part-time, reluctantly resurrecting my fundraising career, which I thought I had successfully killed dead and replaced with power tools and the ability to talk Plasterer fluently.  Suddenly, I was balancing a three year old, a five year old, a part time job WHICH I LOATHED and my new obsession.  I was DEFINITELY going to be a published children’s writer.  This was it.  Definitely me.  I was going to show my children that with hard work, you can achieve anything.

 

But gradually, the more into writing novels I got, the less I could pay attention to my children as they clambered all over me, talking gibberish and smearing marmite on my dreams.  I was in the room physically  – perhaps more “there” than most parents but my mind was travelling through the Frankish Empire and flying with big bat wings through fantasy landscapes.  I was in the tunnel.  If Sid on CBeebies wanted me to pay attention, he was going to have to get his man-meat out on national TV for me to notice.

 

And so it has continued, this sub-standard parenting.  I must be doing something right, of course, because my children haven’t got nits.  They’re loved and can walk and eat vegetables.  But they still talk shit at me at high velocity and volume.  Now, more than ever, as my writing career really steps up by several notches, I am forced to triple-glaze over when they try to zap through to my tunnel with their laser-attack of spoken bollocks bullets.  And the guilt: it’s getting far worse.  Soon there will be book tours and possibly trips all over the world.  I will have to leave them to eat Daddy’s poisonous cooking overnight or longer.   He may not check that they’ve wiped their bums properly.  But it’s kind of...tough shit.  I have to relinquish control just for a while and the very fact that I think that kills me too.

 

I have no solution to this common problem of juggling.  I am going to keep writing as well as I can.  It’s who I’ve become.  And of course, I’m going to keep trying my best at mothering.  My children are still at the centre of my world, even if I do wish they’d shut it when I’m editing.  I would rather shoulder this burden of guilt and be an excellent writer with mildly neglected children than be an excellent mother with neglected dreams and a heart full of regret.

Sh*tting gold bricks

Normally, I avoid news. I have a tendency to overreact to it. When a chicken farmer got bird flu in Thailand, I banned poultry in our house for two years. During the swine flu epidemic, I went to Asda and stockpiled beans and dried chickpeas in the hope that my family would fart its way through Armageddon and come out the other side unscathed, if a bit soiled. You can see the theme here already. I’m a hypochondriac with an overactive imagination.

But news does fight its way through the cake-thoughts into my brain thus: My husband has a dadly Sunday routine. First, he leaves his undercrackers on the floor NEXT to the washing basket. Then he goes for a poo, which involves leaving the toilet door open so we can all enjoy the aroma. And like all men, he sits on his throne, reading the Sunday papers. It took me a good ten years to work out that reading the paper in this way is a form of silent protest for him because when he’s obsessing over the sport section, I am usually stood in his wake, holding my hand over my nose, shouting “CLEAN THE FUCKING WINDOWS!” repeatedly. I’m guessing he thinks that having a large paper barrier between us means that he is immune to my domestic demands. So that is how I absorb news. From a safe distance and vicariously through my crapping husband.

Now, financial meltdown has been in the news a lot this week and I made the mistake of watching this smug turd on YouTube. If you are of a paranoid disposition, look away now: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lqN3amj6AcE&feature=share

For those of you who can’t be bothered watching his utterly compelling, two minute doom-fest, this independent trader looks like a contemporary Gordon the Gecko and talks about the collapse of the Eurozone and how we should all be investing in treasury bonds and gold and frankincense and a lifetime’s supply of incontinence knickers. I thought to myself, That’s all very nice, Gordon, but what the hell is a treasury bond and apart from stealing and melting down my family’s Elizabeth Duke jewellery, which is possibly only about 0.3% precious metal, where can I get my hands on gold?
 

I’m already thrifty you see. Everything in my house is second hand crap, ex-display or salvaged from junk yards. I buy food out of the going-off cabinet in Asda. I rugby tackle old ladies to get to the dented tins first. I even buy the really mashed up shitty bananas that they bag separately and sell for -30p a tonne. They make great banana loaf. I would call this thrift rather than greed. Don’t get me wrong: I do admit to having a BMW but I grew up on a council estate and have chav needs. It is also ageing and second hand. By dint of the fact that it contains a fine layer of kid compost, a plastic bag of mystery, rotted thing in the glove box and the obligatory birdshit paint job, this officially relegates the car to the status of a 1986 Lada Riva. And I still don’t have enough spare to invest in gold, even from Argos.

I worried about this for some days. I was literally shitting a brick about my family’s future. I was eyeing up local pets as emergency food sources. Then some existential maths occurred to me: In the event of fiscal meltdown, tinned pulses=hard currency and ensuing farts=renewable energy. Good. I was thinking outside the box. Then I realised that maybe I’m being thrifty in the wrong way. Maybe I should speculate to accumulate; upgrade and aspire to more. And then I had the perfect equation and I’m going to share it with you: Waitrose free range sirloin lobster + organic diamond dusted bran flakes + fair trade saffron infused prunes = shitting gold bricks. Eat posh: get rich. Da daaaaa! Problem solved. And you can take that advice to the bank.