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.

Flighty Birds

Nobody likes wet socks. Right? And nobody really hankers after freezing their tiddies off. Do they? And it definitely makes sense, in the event of having to walk a mile through horizontal rain, to wear an anorak and put the hood up. Or is that just me? Utilitarian Woman. Thelma from Scooby Doo.

Lately I have been feeling aggrieved at the regular sight of what my mother calls Flighty Birds – young and pert women trotting with bouncy hair through the daily downpour, wearing high heels and almost invisible skirts. I hope they’re going to work. I would feel better if I knew they were just another office drudge like me. But I strongly suspect they might be going shopping to Harvey Nicks, where they will max out Daddy’s or Hubby’s platinum card on a load of designer crap. They are like colourful birds of paradise in an urban, grey jungle with their stick legs, yellow hair and orange faces. They look sort of nice in a highly groomed, designer label-clad, conformist way.

Cowbags. How dare they? Am I the only sour old bastard that looks at these extraordinary creatures and thinks, how come your feet don’t get bloody wet in the rain? How is it that you don’t feel the 11 degrees of cold and can wear a waist-length flimsy jacket, flashing your flat stomach and gravity defying arse? And here I am, dressed up like Nanook of the North in my sensible Goretex walking shoes. I catch my reflection in windows of smart shops that contain mannequins dressed just like these show-ponies but instead of seeing hot totty, my reflection shows me Ranulph Fiennes with droopy tits, a sodden handbag and slightly more toes.

Why? Why are these women different from me, with their impeccably trowelled-on makeup and perfectly coiffed hair? I have makeup but the school run and herding children always stands in the way, leaving me with no energy to put it on or take it off. My hair is so unruly and crap that I stopped bothering forking out on a real hairdresser fifteen years ago. Instead, I have a man called Stan who comes to the house and gives me a dry trim for £6. He tells me that my crowning frizz is “like fanny hair but not as nice”. I’m in fairly good shape too because I run a lot but whereas these flighty birds look like gazelles in leggings, I manage to look like Samwise Gamgee in drag. I only ever buy skirts to hang in the wardrobe “Just in case” because, let’s face it girls, who the fuck fancies a Force 10 gale blowing up their woo woo when they could be armoured against the elements in trousers?

But this thing with the flighty birds: it was ever so. At college, twenty years ago, they had the lads queuing up to worship them. They always had tresses of long hair which they would flick with panache at the men, marking their territory like a dog peeing on a lamppost. These girls cried a lot in public and simpered. I thought they had hairspray between their ears and nothing more. But the lads were intoxicated by their ability to wear hot pants and high heels in the snow. They would walk to the ends of the earth for these girls just because their fanny was a bit visible through their leggings and they had really long hair. In later life, I see these girls as women in their late thirties, pushing expensive three-wheeler prams, still perfectly groomed, wearing Uggs and beatified grins and coaxing their fragrant, Jottum-clam offspring in gentle musical tones to the Audi Q8, whilst the rest of us drag our ketchup-stained, mouthy Borstal Bills to the cruddy finger-marked, bird-shit splattered crapwagon, where they will kick chunks out of each other all the way home because of a badly divided chocolate biscuit.

So there you have it. Women like me with strong characters and sound minds can earn our own dollar, tile a bathroom and make a good dinner from scratch. We make our own beds and notwithstanding the odd forgotten, half-eaten sandwiches, we lie in them happily. But these creatures, these 24/7 Barbies, in a box-fresh state of perfection with real plastic and space on the inside of their heads are actually the alpha females. They move through life effortlessly on a cloud of whimsy and want in their high heels and sheer tights, impervious to all weathers and with almost visible muffery. And when their arches finally collapse, they will be carried onwards by a throng of adoring men who would always rather settle for Daphne than Thelma out of Scooby Doo.

Snogging with tongues

Just over ten years ago, I was a committed smoker. I loved a fag. One for each lung, 20 a day, chimney on my head. That was me. Rock and Roll. I knew that smoking was bad for you. After all, I awoke every morning feeling that I had a breeze-block on my chest and of course, I used to get black snot. I blamed this on the pollution in London, where I lived at the time. But it wasn’t diesel fumes. It was just fag muck. So when my best mate’s Mum died prematurely, after having held off breast cancer for 5 years, I thought, “What the hell. I’ll do a standing order to Cancer Research in her memory. I might be glad of it one day because I’m a smoker and my Mum’s a smoker too. It will be like an insurance policy.”

My mum was the worst out of us both. She’d been on the Bennies for fifty years, rattling through about fifteen a day and smoking the dimps, even when there was hardly anything left. Her breath always smelled of dog fart but she was trim and looked fit on the outside at the age of 60. She had markedly less bingo-wings than me. But I wasn’t daft. Despite her protestations that she knew people who smoked all their lives but still lived to be 200, I knew the ciggies were doing me in. I gave up. Frequently. But I could never stay stopped. Problem was, whenever I tried to give up, Mum would wave a brand new packet in front of my face and say, “Go on. You know you want one. You’re a pain in the arse to live with so why suffer?” I guess she didn’t want to be alone and I did love them.

I didn’t smoke during my pregnancy with my first child but I restarted soon after she was born because the other mothers in my post-natal group also smoked and liked a drink. We felt we were members of some smug, invincible rock n’ roll mums’ band. My husband has never smoked but also never complained. I just didn’t do it indoors and it had been years since we snogged with tongues. I never questioned it.

Then my Mum had an unshiftable chest infection. They x-rayed her and found a shadow on her lung. It was a stage 1 tumour. She was lucky. The specialist had caught it soon after the onset and the surgeon at Wythenshawe hospital just chopped half of one lobe of her lung away and that was that. I gave up smoking forever the day they spotted the shadow. Even Mum gave up. That was it. We’d had it with fags. She survived and has been clear for about 7 years now, thankfully. But I’ll never forget the sight of the others on her ward who had also had major surgery for lung cancer. I think all of them, apart from my lucky lucky mother, had left it too late. They didn’t look so cool or rock n roll, shuffling around the ward, carrying a pot full of their own lung fluid as it drained off their rotten chests. They were dying. Because of fags and because of Cancer. The Big C.

So, I’d been into running since I was 17. Almost losing my Mum and seeing the photographs of my son’s first birthday party, where I looked like a happy heffalump, gave me the impetus to lose my wobbly jawline and get fit. Really fit. And to start running further with my newly cleansed, fag free lungs. I wanted to raise money for Cancer Research so that other people like me didn’t have to say goodbye too early to their loved ones because of The Big C. I had been right from the outset. Starting my standing order to Cancer Research really was like an insurance policy against grief and loss. And now, of course, I had kids – all the more reason to look after my health.

I stared with a 10K and soon progressed to a half marathon in aid of Cancer Research. The pain of running 13+ miles on stumpy, varicose veined, Kevin Keegan legs – I’m no gazelle – was worth it when I poured almost £1000 in the charity’s coffers. I felt like I was putting my karma account in the pink. After that first half marathon, I swore never again to do such a long distance but when I couldn’t shift two homemade Christmas cakes from my haunches last Winter, I thought sod it, I’m going to sign up to the Great North Run. I can get rid of all those glace cherries and raise money at the same time.

So today, post race, I feel like shit. I’m walking like a crippled penguin and my cheeks are so burned from the salt that remained plastered to my face until 8.30pm, that I look like a German farmer. I have chaffing just about everywhere from ill-fitting underwear – even on my underboobs - and my foot is utterly knackered. A wise friend said I was a bit of a moron to be running on an injured foot but do you know what? He was only 50% right because I made it to the end in a reasonable time for one of my hobbit-like stature (you should see the hair on my feet) and I can feel that my karma account is in credit. That feels bloody great. Better still, as I ran past a bunch of Geordies who were watching the runners with pallid, expressionless faces whilst having a fag, I thought to myself, “These bastards are going to thank me one of these days and they’ll only realise that when it’s too late.”

Best of all, though, as a writer I have trained my mind to endure the marathon as well as my body – always a plus when you’re writing a novel. And I’ve set my children a great example of what it is to be a good person. Sometimes there is great reward to be had in living through shit for the betterment of others.

Oh, and I now regularly snog my husband with tongues.

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.

Wotcha, all 3 mates who are subscribed to this feed. Happy 2011! I can't believe I haven't blogged since October but better late than never, eh?

Well, last time I posted, I was feeling pretty bloody miserable. And guess what, I'm drowning in a tide of chest pains and Woody Allen style paranoia, ergo...get blogging! There's something about being slightly fecked off that makes you want to write a journal-style moan, isn't there? Cathartic. I think that's the word.

Oddly, however, I'm not really fed up at all. Since I last moaned publicly, I've been signed to a leading literary agency to write a detective series. How fannytastic is that? And my agent is just wonderful. She's posh, she swears, she's funny and she loves shoes. Brilliant. I've also written a pilot for a TV drama series. It couldn't get better... apart from getting a commission AND an advance and suddenly finding myself in possession of a nice lump sum - minus 15% of course. I could spend 80% of my time staring into the fridge and 20% writing best-selling this, that and the other, instead of sitting in a darkened subterranean office, picking my nose and getting double vision as I complete fundraising applications that I feel certain will fail.

The kids are well (touch wood), the husband's hair is still thinning but I've come to terms with it. He's still a looker and I can always superglue some cotton wool to his head when he's asleep. My mother is behaving reasonably well. I haven't had to throw her out of the house during dinner for...ooh, about three weeks. So why have I got chest pains? Why is the hypochondria taking hold? Is it hypochondria? Maybe I'm genuinely ill. I have a furry tongue. Is that a sign of heart disease? The doctor felt my boobs and said they were fine but the pain's still there.

This is the test of time: I'm training for the Great North Run in September. My agent, who is also a keen long distance runner, reminded me that people die on the Great North Run. So I'm thinking, if I don't kark it in the next six months whilst I'm training, it was probably happiness-induced paranoia - the fear that good times will be snatched away from me and replaced with death and decay - and not heart disease or a tumour. I'm getting anxious just thinking about Brian Cox's observations in "Wonders of the Universe" that the cosmos is dying...

OK, on that pointless whingeing note, I'm taking my kids to a disco in aid of a charity to fund research into Duchenne Muscular Dystrophy. Perhaps next time I blog, I will have solved the riddle of the chest pains or else I'll be dead and blogging from the other side. Happy times!

Is it really the end of October?

I want my money back. The year has raced by in a blur of kiddycare, work, writing and Mancunian rain and all of a sudden, I find myself sat in my car doing the school run in a billion layers of waterproof clothing and with the demisters on. Where did the Summer go? Where has 2010 gone? This was meant to be my big year: the year where I had my midlife crisis, decided what I wanted to do instead of fundraising, made it happen and then immediately started to rake in more money, grow thicker hair and have more nookie. I'm still waiting.

I realise there are only three of you following this including my husband. You won't be crying into your soup at the fact that I haven't written since July, will you? Nothing lost there. No. I feel like the invisible woman, so I don't expect anything different. Let me explain...

On Tuesday, I turned 39. It's my last year of being a thirty something and being the kind of moaning bastard that I am, I can't help wondering if my health and energy are going to take a steep nosedive from now onwards. I feel like shit. I look like shit. I had a brief sunrise between the ages of 35 and 38 where I lost enormous amounts of weight and did amazingly energetic things and now, suddenly and without warning, the sun has started to set on my thirties and I can only see menopause, continuing professional frustration and thinning hair on the horizon. And do you know what the worst thing is? I annoy myself. I have a voice in my head that says "stop moaning and grow a pair. You've got it good. You're just horrormoanal and tired."

So...perhaps next time I post I'll be all happy and celebratory. Perhaps something amazing will happen and I will get a novel published or win some money or a long lost relative will die and leave me all their money or I will hurt myself a bit at work and claim ludicrous amounts on the public liability insurance. But money's a quick buzz and not a long-term fix. I don't know about YOU miserable bastards but I'm looking for the sense of self-satisfaction too. I know my personal life is all I could ever want it to be but now the kids are getting a bit bigger, finally, what I do for a living is connected to my self-esteem and well-being. Having a humdrum job just to pay the bills just isn't enough any more. Getting older seems to make the realisation that I've settled for less in my career all these years even sharper and more painful.

Now I'm going to go and make a coffee and grow a pair...

But Charlemagne is well cool, innit?

Since I last wrote, I have endured a week of pre-, mid- and post-menstrual tension. This has necessarily involved cocking up and then thumping or throwing things (not people) when I think people are not looking and having a good howl at work. Road rage has been a particularly dangerous side-effect.

My children's report night at school took place last week. I set off late, having had a clean bra crisis and then found, much to my chagrin, that I was caught behind an old gimmer in a deerstalker, driving a Nissan crapwagon at 20 miles per hour. A deerstalker! At 20 miles per hour! Clearly, the gadge didn't realise that he was weaving, drunk on elderliness, in the path of a late mother on a mission. I wanted to kill him. There, I've said it. It's not kind and the karma is surely bad but I did want to ram his fecking deerstalker right down his geriatric throat. Only fear of losing my no claims bonus stopped me from ramming into him to make him move. Am I a bad person?

Luckily, the behatted gimmer survived, I made it to school on time and the kids are seemingly remarkably well-balanced and clever. I don't know where they get it from but I am not asking too many questions. I am proud. I self-flagellated to make up from being an arrogant, hormonal cow by sitting through a report from the religious studies teacher. Was there ever a more pointless appointment on parents' evening?
"Yes, your daughter is so good in class, Mrs. Angry Cow. She will surely qualify for a scholarship to heaven and have a fulfilling and well-paying career in bible-deciphering and the naming of characters from the Old Testament."
"Gee thanks, Mrs. Religious Nutcase. I'm so glad you think that of my seven year old. This was so worthwhile. And my five year old son?"
"Well, he won't sit still in class. I think he might burn in hell."

The next major irritation this week has been the hunt for lost bras. Only two weeks ago, I bought two Monsoon bras in the sale at John Lewis, to hoik up the fallen boobies of early middle-age. They had been £40 each and I bought them for an average of £10 each, so a bargain, as you can appreciate. Imagine my horror when both pure silk bras (with magic padding that Calista Flockart would give her fourth rib for) strangely disappeared. I was suddenly faced with a situation where I would have to do an emergency wash of the grey, saggy numbers with the bust elastic. Everyone knows that once you've bought new, you cannot go back to the revolting raggy baggy ones that make your boobs look as lacklustre as they really are. Not good. Even worse though, was the discovery five days later that my daughter had hidden them at the back of her doll's house! If I hadn't been looking for stray hair bobbles, my bras would never have seen the light of day again and my poor nipples would be having a conversation with my feet. That's kids for you.

Finally, in this moanfest, which only my mate Audrey is reading, as far as I'm aware, I have started what I hope is the final rewrite of my teen historical novel on Charlemagne the Great. If I had a fiver for every agent and publisher that has said that Charlemagne might be a bit too obscure a character for a teen audience, I'd have ten pounds by now. In the writing world, where every rejection hurts like childbirth, this is a body-blow worthy of an emotional epidural. As an ex-goth, I can only point out the obvious appeal of a seventeen year old fella, living two hundred years after the alleged adventures of King Arthur, with the largest Empire in the world at his feet, long hair and a big sword. What more could teen readers want? It remains to be seen if anyone buys my big idea, but for now, I'm going to continue with my medieval legendary long-haired lovely. So there!