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Quit your job. You’ll be fine.*

10th October 2018 · Leave a Comment

I have a cold. This means a self-imposed quarantine of long, quiet days, spent waiting for recovery. The kind of sick day that used to be alluring, when I was working, or before I had children. Now, it means solitude, until the collection of my children after school, then the normalcy of weekday life reverts in the evening hours, but with congestion, a headache, aches and sniffles.

I am left with my thoughts. When unwell, it’s hard to imagine being well again, which sounds ridiculous but is true. My body under viral attack, I trace back to when I last felt this way as if I can identify the rogue bug and eradicate the possibility of repeat. It was last winter; skiing, a dormant French hotel room. My efforts to stay healthy border on obsessive, I have little patience for this. My life is predicated on my being well; the cogs don’t turn unless the engine is running. My children look at me reproachfully when there’s no bread in the house.

I watch too much Netflix – end to end ‘Killing Eve’, that pink dress! – and documentaries about the environment. I feel so fretful about the environment I have to check myself. I am being brainwashed by the scaremongers. But the more knowledge I have, the worse it gets. It seems, in this instance, that the scare mongers might be right. I’ll tell you what. When global temperatures rise by 2 degrees, and the ice caps melt, and the planet is too hot to even go outside, I’ll see you on that last piece of remaining, un-flooded land, and we can watch the plastic containers float by, and wonder whether it was worth it. It’s a dog’s dinner, or, as my friend messaged me last week: ‘we are fucked’.

In a flurry of luck, in my sickened state, I got Glastonbury tickets on Sunday. I’m almost ashamed to admit this because they are so desirable, and so hard to come by, especially this year, that I remain incredulous. Early morning; multiple devices, an incentivised teenage son sitting next to me, rapid refresh, mouse clicking, abject frustration as the connection drops, we get booted out. The registration page, the payment page, the confirmation page, all flash up in a striptease, pressing forward, click, click, click. A bizarre technological dance which abruptly ends with ‘BOOKING COMPLETE’ and I feel adrenalin like I’ve scaled a mountain. Surfed a wave. Done something other than sat in my pyjamas. I wonder if I want them so much simply because they’re hard to get? Then I remember how much I love Glastonbury and how utterly freeing it is to stand in a field and experience music so loud it makes your organs vibrate, and to do it with hundreds of thousands of other humans.

I start listening to the audiobook of Deborah Levy’s ‘Things I Don’t Want to Know’ and find it cripplingly, awe-inspiringly good. It’s the kind of book I want to write. This has a dual effect. Half inspiring, half terrifying. Deborah’s written it already. Deborah can write the innards of my mind, as if un-spinning a knot of wool. I’m only a smidgen in, and I know I will love it already. And hate that its been done. This is how it goes with writing. No longer do I have thoughts and allow them to pass through. Now my thoughts have become a thing I must capture, I must write down, I must turn into something that is work. Quit your job. You’ll be fine.

I observe the shit show of American politics playing out on the news and feel the bile of conflict. Everything feels off. Theres’s conflict with the process, conflict with society, conflict with the commentary. I read a lot, and liberalism seems to pervade my newsfeed as I realise I have concocted a partisan following in support of feminism and an egalitarian sensibility. I read a lot of women writers who suggest in their language that all men who are accused of sexual misbehaviour are guilty, because, well, because…men. This troubles me, and I wonder whether any of those women have teenage sons who are about to navigate the treacherous water of gender politics in coming years.

I watch old family videos, trying to locate one of my daughter, aged one, laughing, giggling uncontrollably, the baby girl she was. The DVD is no longer compatible with our machine, and I wonder how I can regather those images. Later DVDs obligingly play, leaving me questioning why the one from 2002 is considered defunct? What happened in 2002? In 2003 I look young, and brown-haired, and really, really slim, despite doing zero exercise at that time.

I feel viral, weighed down, and shuffle around my house wearing a weird, old, dowdy Alpaca cardigan that reaches my knees. The postman comes. I discard the junk mail envisaging land fill; rotting catalogues for things I never wanted. I make mushrooms on toast (I went shopping) as a comfort food, like my mum used to make me, sautéed in butter, with garlic, and scattered with chopped parsley.

I message my writing group and they put me straight; ‘just write’ they say. We console each other. The virus is making me jaded. I turn to the blog because it’s the least demanding way to write. Type. Preview. Publish! Oh so easy! So here it is.

*Craig Ward typographer.

‘People who love to eat are always the best people’*

5th October 2018 · 1 Comment

I was infamous amongst my university housemates because I resolutely did not cook. I arrived with a bag of tangerines and some cheese, and proceeded to live off that until my friend Emma took pity on me and shared her sweet and sour stir fry. This continued throughout my student years, until I lived with my future husband, who then took over the mantle of cooking. He was – and is – a gifted cook, and won his way to my heart with, amongst other things, food. We married and he cooked, whilst my own repertoire was limited to pasta. This worked fine for the years we cohabited in early marriage, and until we had children, at which point (coincidentally?!) his job meant he had to work away some of the time, and my job (mother) meant I had to prepare food for my babies. Even then, I didn’t really cook, and was reluctant to do so. This seemed entirely reasonable to me and was a product of my generation, right? Just because I was the woman, why should I be the one to prepare our food? I was proud of my inability, because deep down I thought cooking represented some vestige of the past. I didn’t cook because dammit, I didn’t have to. I’d married a man who did it for me. It seemed the ultimate in gender progression. Cooking was the same category as tidy cupboards or keeping orderly admin. Dull. Dated.

What I failed to appreciate was that my own lack of skill rendered me disadvantaged as our family grew. I could not feed my children home cooked food. I could not cater a dinner party. When I maintained my career, I made cooking out to be one of life’s pastimes that I was way too busy to participate in. But in time, as my career dwindled, and my children grew up, them having a mother who couldn’t cook became somewhat unhelpful. Plus…I love food.

So I learned to cook, as chronicled here and I now do so religiously, stopping in the past few weeks to photograph the daily offering (I’ll share the results on instagram). This is, in part, as a testimony of my own cooking capability (I am proud of how far I’ve come; I make no bones), but also in readiness to teach my daughter to cook, for a time in future when she will not have me doing it for her. The empty nest over the horizon makes mothers do all sorts of odd things; photographing food for recipes, walking through her empty bedroom when she is at school, and feeling heavy-hearted about it, being incredulous on the prospect that soon she will be driving.

I realised, like so many realisations since I turned forty, that cooking is one of life’s pleasures, and being able to cook is a gift. Cooking for friends or family is like giving yourself, your time, your goodness, to a process that nurtures. The same applies to baking, which I have entirely not mastered, but which I see has the same profound effect. I read the book ‘Heartburn’ by Nora Ephron recently, a story peppered with recipes, as it tells a tale of a cook whose marriage falls apart. The meaning she instils in food, and its significance to events in our lives, is not lost on me. My best memories are from around tables. My mother’s food is the route to all solace and contentment. My recollection of my Danish Mormor’s gooseberry tart, or her ‘frikadelle’ and gravy remains the sweetest reverie. Her gravy, its unlikely components passed down like folklore in our family (milk, and tomato ketchup) sums up how the women in my family behave. There’s a degree of nonchalance, hopefully some style, and old-fashioned, understated know-how. I see now that for years I didn’t understand the relevance of these distinctions.

In short, knowing how to cook has made me wise, not just about how food behaves when its prepared and heated, but also about feeding my own moods. Of knowing my own mind. And, I suppose, crucially, of escaping my thoughts at the end of a day. Cooking enables an emptying out of the mind. I’m an advocate of vegetables because they don’t misbehave, they rarely poison people – when they’ve gone off, you can tell, – they’re healthier and cause less waste. This is why most meals in our house are based on vegetables with meat (sometimes) and not the other way around. Again, an example of the ideological u-turn provoked by age. As with most things that I now think, but didn’t used to, I wonder if its simply because I have time? I can almost feel the trolls saying ‘yes, but, we’d all cook if we had your privilege of time,’ and maybe that’s true.

Meanwhile – and I’ll be quiet, and finish with my evangelical tone just as soon as I point this out – I discover companies like this, who are proponents of real produce, homegrown, to be cooked from scratch and without being wrapped in plastic. Bananas in plastic? Courgettes in plastic? Avocados in plastic? Everything swathed in it. Frankly, it’s freaking me out. I suppose this is what they mean by wisdom; just because we’ve always done something a certain way just because we can, doesn’t mean we should. I receive a text from my daughter; ‘what’s for dinner?’

*Julia Childs

Retrospection

28th September 2018 · Leave a Comment

I had such high hopes for September. The summer holidays over, and a stretch of uninterrupted time weaving ahead of me, a lovely long road, with all the possibility of the words I would write, and the things I’d get sorted. Getting sorted is a key preoccupation, getting ahead of every little thing. If I am ahead, then there will be time to write. If there is time to write, maybe I will make some headway with the book. During my Masters degree, when I had submission deadlines, I would take myself off to work and of course it all got done, because it had to. One of the hardest parts of post-academic life is that the deadline is one I have set myself, and it is my self-discipline which dictates the word count. All the best intentions…

My daughter and I are doing university tours. We visit on open days, speak to undergrads and talk about course structures and her suite of worries are entirely different to my suite of worries. The prospect of packing her off to university seems far-off and implausible, but of course, I know it will come. The excitement is counter-balanced with a sense of…not regret…but a bittersweet awareness that her childhood is drawing to a close. Conversely, as my son enters his teens (like a marauding rhino), I recognise the same feelings I used to have about her. The parental readjustment required to at once allow growth, but to also provide boundaries. The conversation on boundaries revisits with alarming regularity, and I find myself thinking: didn’t I explain this last week?

Last week my son was injured playing rugby. All my years of being poker-faced on the sideline came to an unceremonious end as I stood, striken and peering through the rain, waiting to see if he was going to get up from the mangled pile he had been at the bottom of. It’s a curious thing to see your child injured and to see others administer to him, and after some time, when he did get up and was clapped off by the opposition – keen to get on with the game – I felt grateful he was OK. Later, sitting in ‘Accident and Emergency’ in hospital waiting for X-ray results, the feeling persisted. Acute worry, and the love, and the incredulity of how danger and threat can come for you, unannounced. And always in the knowledge that there are other families, other mothers, whose children are more injured or more sick, and a swathe of gratefulness floods over me again, rendering me quiet and vacant. A few days later and we see a surgeon, after the swelling subsided. He’s fractured his cheek bone in three places, and I find myself wondering whether it was my fault that he was raised to love a game that is so fraught with injury. We are a rugby family and I married a rugby player, and I’ve never known any different. To us; the merits of the game far outweigh the risk.

There’s a reluctant medicalisation. Ironically, I had been reading ‘This is Going to Hurt‘ by Adam Kay, the memoir of a junior doctor, which describes the ailing NHS and what it’s like to work within it. I sit opposite medics, on the receiving end, and wonder how long they’ve been on their shift. I have an urge to be kind and polite to them, as we sit and read posters on the wall that say: ‘physical abuse against our staff will not be tolerated’ and I wonder who on earth resorts to physically abusing staff, those whose job it is to help? We observe the other punters and how everyone tries, surreptitiously, to deduce everyone else’s symptoms. It’s not always obvious.

It struck me as we waited (another waiting room, another part of the hospital) that it’s these sorts of events that inform my writing. Writing itself doesn’t happen in a vacuum, but instead is – for me at least – an after-affect of life. It was Anaïs Nin who noted: ‘we write to taste life twice.’ My children, and my observation of them has always been a source; there’s an event, a feeling, the witnessing of a moment. Then there’s my musing afterwards.

Meanwhile, there are breezy, brisk Autumn days. Crane flies cling to the outside of the windows, their spooky legs stretched wide, in contorted squats. Everything seems to be drawing inwards, homewards, ready for the winter months. Maybe I am a winter writer? Maybe the introspection of cold and darkness is what is needed? Or maybe, life just gets in the way of my words? Maybe I make too many excuses? Whichever way, I am good only for dog walks and quietness this week.

A Book in a Book

13th September 2018 · Leave a Comment

I reluctantly enjoy this time of year, despite the fact it heralds a slide into the interminable British winter. The short days and short tempers of my compatriots don’t stop it feeling like a fresh start; out with summer, in with autumn. There are still hints at lushness; green grass, ripe blackberries, crops ready to be harvested. I walk with the dog around my familiar fields, and note the soft crust of the mud, which in a few short months will be frozen. Or worse; dank, sodden and rain-soaked. It was at this time of year that I started my Masters degree three years ago, and I sat amongst other wannabe writers, wearing writerly clothes and clutching writerly notebooks, in which we intended to pen our masterpieces. I felt I blagged my way onto the course, my evidential body of work was this blog, and a stilted short story about a school girl called Cressida, who wanted to rebel against her parents. My tutor, during a Skype application interview, asked me what I did when I got really stuck with my writing. I floundered over my answer to that question, she might have seen through me, she might have known I was a novice, and ‘my writing’ consisted of blog posts that were haphazard at times, and focused too much on clothes shopping rather than searing life commentary. I’d never been really stuck with my writing, because I only ever wrote when I felt like it, about frippery. I knew more about brand development and search engine optimisation than about how to unstick a stuck paragraph.

So when I got the place, we sat, day one, in our studio and went round the table in a sweat-inducing introductory session where we were asked to outline the plot for our novels. There was some invisible peddling, resulting in various iterations of ‘I might focus on…’ and ‘I’ve always wanted to write about…’ and such like. I said I was going to write about a school setting, mothers specifically, in the privileged environment of private education. Prep school. They nodded. Moving on. I had no more a clue of what my plot was then, than I did after a year of the degree! A plot stubbornly alluded me, and any measures I took to secure it, despite intensive workshopping with my peers, left me with a flimsy structure, a plot with the strength of a wet biscuit. I knew it. My tutor knew it. But my writing was good. Thank God, my writing was good. I chased ghosts of plots, and developed questionable preoccupations with themes; women, teenagers, competitive mothers, wealth, marriage, disillusionment, until I felt I could cobble a novel together. And so I did. I wove in concepts like a houseboat location, and set the novel by the water so that when I took daily walks by the shore, I could note tree types and tidal nuances, and that felt like book research. I asked my teenage daughter’s unsuspecting new boyfriend, on his first visit to our house, how he might behave if he were attacked by a swan, all in the name of reasearch. I contacted a swan sanctuary, and became an expert of the monogamy of the birds. And although this lent depth to my work, it did not give me a plot.

I remember it fondly now, with a wry smile, and see that the Masters was the ultimate learning exercise; of course it was. The academics twinned with the realisation that although I’d written a book, there were issues with it. I spent a lot of time then (and now) pondering whether I was good enough. Why couldn’t I find a plot? Who knew plots were so damn elusive? I came to the conclusion I needed a brain the size of a planet to manage one; I had enough trouble keeping track of my real life, let alone the fictional one I might create. Thankfully, I graduated, the first draft of my novel nestled safely and mutely in a folder entitled ‘book’ on my laptop, and thought; ‘well that was that’ all the while weathering the probes of friends and enemies alike. ‘Have you finished your book yet?’ To a writer, that’s the equivalent of a mother asking at a coffee morning why your toddler isn’t walking yet.

My writer friends and I used to talk about when we would become writers. Would it be when we finished a draft? When someone else read it? When we got an agent? When we got published? When a box full of pre-sale proofs arrived? When we saw our book on the shelf in a bookshop, or on Amazon in the best seller list? When we won a literary prize? Oh, the mind boggles. When we overheard two people discussing our book? When our book was the subject of a book club evening? When we started the second book (you’re surely a keeper at this wretched pursuit if you can do it twice)? All of the above? None of the above? The ribbon unspools. I guess the point is there is no defined or accepted time. You learn how to do it, then you reflect, then you write a bit more, then you stop. Then you start. Now, I see that it was all part of the process. Or at least part of my process. There are a million writers following a million different paths, like any creative in any profession, there are highs and lows; you move forward, you move back. It’s a game of snakes and ladders with more snakes than ladders, for sure. But that’s OK. There is time. It’s the season of fresh starts, and mine will be finding the book in the book.

Is Instagrammable a Word?

7th September 2018 · Leave a Comment

Possibly, I’ve spent too much time on Instagram, scrolling like I am demented, looking for something to entertain me. I’ve caught myself, over the course of this summer, (which has been an awesome summer, with some certifiably Instagram-worthy moments to it), becoming immersed in the social media lure. I tell my teenagers to get offline, then I try to do the same, because, y’know, practice what you preach, and I fail. I read articles entitled ‘break up with your phone’ and I wonder: how? My phone is the method through which my day, my kids, my husband, my friends and my work functions. Within my family, it’s how we communicate, plan, evolve, argue, apologise, share. So instrumental in the day to day, the hour to hour, that I wonder: can a mother of teenagers ever really break up with her phone? My mind telescopes back to my own teenagehood, aged 16, evenings spent on the landline, not even cordless, but tethered by the phone cable to the wall, in the room downstairs, by the kitchen. Now, I challenge myself to stop scrolling, but this summer was spent, when not away on holiday, in a kind of maternal half-life of waiting to take on whatever plans had been made, and who needed a lift where. My phone becomes someone to chat to whilst I wait.

Note to self: never, ever chose a rurally located house when you have small children. No matter how charming you think it will be to hang a piñata on the tree in the garden, and have frolicking children gambol beneath. You can’t possibly imagine a time when they are grown up teenagers, and said rural house is not on a bus route, is miles from town, and every step from the front door (virtually) is along a treacherous, blind-cornered, country road.

I drove a lot of miles in July and August.

So, my status quo has been in place for a few years. I am a housewife, who is also a writer. I can cook and clean to a standard beyond Apprentice Level. I am an Advanced Level housewife, and in recent months that has taken centre-stage, and the writer in me has had to wait, hold back, knowing it’s not her time. I get panicked thinking: when will it ever be my time?! I bet Beyonce doesn’t have this problem.

I read my contemporaries as they discuss their own ambition, and I nod in agreement. But where does social media fit in the landscape of ambition? What is Facebook and Instagram to the middle aged woman? Why do some have a natural compulsion to post pictures, like the teens, whereas others will have no part to if? Do we compete to be seen? Is it a way for us to remain ‘current’, to say, ‘I’m still here! Look at me!’ I observe women much younger than I, who are newly married, childless, or building their own empires, and they discuss how they manage their time, and share hints and tips for how to ask for a salary increase, or how to manage a freelance work schedule, or how they arrange their shelves. I find myself thinking, yes, but are there fewer requirements of you at that time in life, other than to be 25, and fabulous, and to have Instagrammable shelves? They perhaps don’t have the self-consciousness my generation has.

I’ve heard it said that a woman’s ambition can make her ugly, especially when it is played out, vicariously, through the lives of her children. This is why competitive school mothers are such a recognisable cohort. This week, an extravaganza of ‘back to school’ pictures flood my feed. I wonder if in years to come, our children will feel duped that their photos were posted without their consent? It’s the equivalent of your mum getting a family album out when your boyfriend visits, but it’s there for the entire world to see, forever. Even with privacy settings.

Whilst scrolling, I happen across the work of a photographer, and she’s selling her photos as prints. I want one instantly, it’s called ‘Breath’. This is the side effect, the other power of Instagram. We direct message (DM, to the uninitiated); it’s done, I’ve bought one, and she’s putting it in the post. I tell her I want the image as it shows, in a glance, what a relationship should look like; see above (and note the air bubbles). What love can look like, if you’re young and free. I want to hang it in my house.

Meanwhile, the pictures persist on Instagram; things to covet, things to consider, concepts to absorb, stories to post.

It’s possible I have become a cliché, or a foregone conclusion. A version of myself I might have lamented, dare I say, ridiculed, in the past? This, especially when I was building my corporate career, and had little time for the contemplation that is now my daily activity. Have I lost my way? In the past, at times where I lost my way, I was unable to see how and where, and it was only with the passing of time that I could recognise what had happened. Now – and by that I mean nowadays, as my status quo has been static for some time, – there is awareness. A personal surety that I can attribute to life experience. This is what it feels like to be the other side of 40, and liking it.

I’ve become one of those women who knows her own mind.

And breathe.

Photograph by Nirrimi, her work found here.

Musings about Palm Trees

22nd August 2018 · Leave a Comment

So that was a trip.

I have returned from two weeks holiday; we went to my beloved Florida, and then my newly beloved St Lucia, in a veritable tour of palm trees and of wearing tropical kaftans. Like swigging a restorative tonic down in one, summer holidays are a salve, a balm, a tincture, and all other lightly medicinal things which make your soul feel better. So many thoughts occurred to me there that I want to share here, but I kept them stored up, not wanting to be inside, at a laptop typing (wishing there was an app that could literally record your thoughts, as you have them? Terrifying, but also oh so useful). So I am left with many impressions I want to record, observations, assertions and such like. Taking time away from home is, for me, as the ‘homemaker’, doubly thought-provoking, as the release from the daily work of caring for others creates space in my mind, and it’s liberating.

I learned that I still love palm trees and spent a good portion of time pondering why they represent such happiness to me. I think, like all things, it’s rooted in childhood, when we used to decamp to Florida for extended periods, as my parents ran a holiday home rental business there. We would touch down and my brother and I would race through the airport, through the air-conditioned casing of the place, vying to reach an external door which would allow us a deep breath of humid, hot air (no matter what time of day or night), with the sound of cicadas, and tiny brown lizards scuttling across concrete, and borders of palm trees. It represented safety to me. And amongst the tumult of divorce, there was contrast to home. A whole other empire.

Now, I see my children do the same thing, but for them, it is a satisfying inhalation of family time, where the rigours of home, work and school are suspended. There’s nothing like it. Even more bittersweet with teenagers as there’s the knowledge that the days of this kind of purist family time, all together, may be numbered. Soon they won’t want to come with us, will they?!

In St Lucia, we made lovely friends and spent the week chatting and drinking, and sunning ourselves. We went to Caribbean restaurants perched in rainforest canopies and ate lobster burgers. We fell asleep to the sound of tree frogs. We spent hours in the sea, sometimes flat like a pond, turquoise crystalline-clear, and saw striped neon fish dart around our legs. We spent an idyllic day on a boat, skimming the coastline of sheer black rock, edged with impossible green-blue. Every scene an instagram-worthy feast. Decisions involved which bikini to wear or which drink to have; Mango (rum) Crush or Piton Beer? But there were also airport delays. Travel sickness and a dodgy cod fillet. We got sunburnt and were profoundly jet lagged for the first few days. We argued over where to eat dinner and during playing cards. I forgot to bring enough books. I lamented the blatant and obscene over-use of plastic packaging in both American and the Caribbean (even more sacrilegious for being a small island, somehow). There was that curious phase after the mid-point where you kinda want to stay, but you also know you have to go home. There was the packing and unpacking and all over again.

The good with the bad. The rough with the smooth. But most of all, family, tradition, indulgence and time were ours. We dissected the pros and the cons and wondered how, as a standard we have become people who work all year to escape the lives we should be loving. What’s the saying: cultivate a life that you don’t need to take a holiday from? I needed a holiday. But, I have to say, I have returned fresh and excited and poised for what’s next. So whilst post-holiday blues pinch and pull, and every time I look at social media someone, somewhere is still away, doing what we did, and that grates, I see that it performed its function. And that is to give perspective. To free up the mind. To release. To allow me to take stock. To a writer, what more could I want as I approach September, and the bouquet of sharpened pencils* that it represents?

*in the words of Nora Ephron from the film ‘You’ve Got Mail’.

Summer is for salad

1st August 2018 · Leave a Comment

When writing, I don’t pen a word for days, weeks even, and then I get stuck in, shoulders aching in protest as I sit at the keyboard, in awkward, hunched positions, trying to keep my back straight, limiting my punctuation because I just want to get it down. If the mood to write comes, I musn’t ignore it. In the summer time though, this is near on impossible. Instead, I make endless notes and carry stuff around in my head with the plan to write it when the sun goes down. The grass outside is burnt, tinder-dry, ochre and it looks so odd compared to the usual green lushness of the British summer. This spell of weather brings with it a new way of living; one which feels surreal, and as if we are on borrowed time. It takes three weeks of doing something regularly before it becomes a habit, right? So with this summer comes the habit of throwing open the doors each morning, opening up the back of the house, as the wall is all glass, and allowing a four metres scheme of fresh air in, after a night of being closed up. Checking the garden. Feeling the warmth, choosing clothes that are cool, protective from sun. Incongruously, winter coats hang on pegs and in cupboards and it’s hard to imagine we’ll ever need them again. Oh, but we will, come October! It feels endless, this summer, like an intermission during a long show. Time to get an ice cream and watch the world go by. The summer brings with it an extension of time, of days, one that differs to the dark drawer of winter.

It’s so unusual to have such a spell of sun, it defies all normal convention in this country. We, as a nation, are so starved of this weather, we have instead a ubiquitous blanket of cloud that hangs low in our skies through most of the year. We went to Portugal and on the flight back (above the clouds) I made lists of things I need to do. My reminders list stands presently at 59. What will be lucky 60? School holidays are a hiatus that I both love and deplore. A time of flux for us before September returns, and sharpens us all up again. My list spans from essay ideas (social media and teenagers/procrastination methods when it comes to writing/why I want to befriend people who make podcasts), to items I need to source (car wash sponges/’Bitter Orange‘ by Claire Fuller/beaded necklaces perfect for tanned skin). I think of the future and the traction I will need to get from where I am now, to where I really ought to be, and I shudder. Make a fresh list. Write the book.

Writing is not for summer. Summer is for salad.

We’ve had family staying and a houseful of kids. We’ve had a makeshift pool in the garden that’s needed daily coaxing to stay clear-watered. We’ve had builders planning the next phase of renovation. We’ve had the dog groomed and hedges cut. I’ve scoured the summer sales for impractical dresses in retro patterns. A steady stream of stop, start. We’ve watched a season of ‘Ozark‘ and felt the lingering sense of ‘what next?’ when it ended. Season two is out now, I believe. The floor is littered with flip-flops and tennis rackets and half-unpacked suitcases and as ever, there’s more laundry that there ought to be. All this to the soundtrack of comings and goings. I’m aware these summers will pass me by soon; this cornucopia of family life that I am the epicentre of. What’s for dinner? At some point, in the not too distant future, term time and school holidays will be something that affects others, a distant memory to me, like night feeding a newborn, or pushing a pram.

But for now, it is where I am at. Wholeheartedly.

On Endings and Beginnings

18th July 2018 · Leave a Comment

And so, the term ended, and with it, my son’s tenure at his school of the last six years. The school that has been instrumental in shaping my view of ‘the school mother’. They (we) are a breed, a type, a demographically-defined group. As the culmination of the academic year neared, a dizzying run down of leaving events took place; plays, trips, excursions, a sentimentally-charged Prize Giving service, speeches, parties and farewells. I recall this phase with my daughter’s schooling, but back then, with the first born child, there was a deeper seam of childhood nostalgia to mine, and the future that lay ahead was unknown. Little could I have imagined that, like everything in parenthood, the future would bring new challenges and new excitements, and the past would fade into the background, rightly so. With a second child, I know what to expect, and am reassured that this rite of passage from junior to senior is necessary, and correct.

I have been a school mother to young children for over twelve years, dropping off and picking up from the school with the daily regularity of the tide. I commented to another mother, that come the time children attend a senior school, it is possible to drop them at the bus in one’s pyjamas, as there is no need to exit the car. There is no lingering at school, there is no mother’s gossip, there is no influence, meetings with teachers are rare, email communication, if any, is king. She looked horrified. The transition from one domain to the next is a brutal one to navigate. No longer defined by one’s children. The shock!

All of this plays on my mind, because it is this midlife transition that interests me the most and which, despite my best endeavours to diversify my writing, I come back to. I met with my publisher friend last week and described my enduring preoccupation with midlife mothers and she nodded sagely, and said; ‘yes, I see what you mean.’

Meanwhile, whilst not defined by my children, I remain enamoured, and exasperated with them. The love, which spills over as they mature, is constant. But now, my teenage son, who has been swimming in a small and safe pond, pushes against the every boundary. Thirteen and nearly taller than me; and I am tall. Puberty for the male gender is a long and drawn out affair, full of daily updates; voice drop, height (7 inches in 9 months), shoulders, biceps, a testosterone peak. It’s an uncanny process where the sweet, soft, gentle boy of old has gone, and instead there is a lean, young man in his place. I recall it differently with my daughter, as an understated and short-lived process from girl to woman. Childhood draining away in a trickle, rather than a torrent.

My novel meanwhile, remains in an editing file on my laptop and my feelings about it shift over time. I used to consider it a shiny new gem, whereas now it feels older; in my darker moments I consider it hackneyed, even. This is the writer’s fear, I know. The problem with spending years writing your first book is that time doesn’t wait for you, and the world shifts on to its next encounter, and your writing remains frozen in time. I note that maybe this is why writers favour historical fiction rather than the present day? The present day doesn’t stay present for long, and all too soon, references become clichéd. I learnt on my MA to avoid clichés at all costs, so this troubles me.

In parenting, and perhaps in writing, there are few project closures, no ‘lessons learned’ meetings. Instead there’s a subtle creep, almost imperceptible, and that alone marks a milestone. It’s usually when I look backwards, promoted by a photo or a memory, do I realise what’s passed. This feels like a new era, and one that comes with good feelings. Here’s to endings and beginnings…

Friends For Dinner

29th June 2018 · Leave a Comment

I cook every evening, it’s an eclectic mix, as I believe in the power of the side dish. I will prepare three of four kinds of vegetables, ostensibly to accompany something more substantial, but really the vegetables are the meal. The substantial thing might be an egg. Or lentil dahl. This would horrify my husband who thinks a meal does not qualify unless it contains meat, carbs and the addition of a garnish for colour. My way of cooking is simpler; it’s more or less impossible to mess vegetables up; they don’t go off as quickly, there’s less waste, and there’s never the feeling of overdoing it. I planted a herb garden a week or so ago. I appreciate this is the kind of bollocks I used to read in blogs or articles when I was working, and I would think: yea, right (ffs). It’s all very ‘Good Life’, and it’s not lost on me that this whole extravaganza of home-making is down to the fact that I don’t do paid work that often, and I am at home a lot. There’s a bittersweetness to this fact. Housewifery run amok.

My children and their friends have come to expect this bizarre range of dishes; baked aubergine with yoghurt and pomegranate, roasted peppers with finely chopped red onion, fresh basil pesto, raw broccoli and apple salad, tomatoes, butternut squash with chilli, broad beans, feta. Wedges of crisp, iceberg lettuce with creamy drizzle of caesars, and sea salt. God bless the chick pea. Turmeric dressings with honey. I no longer apologise for it; if they don’t like it, there’s always something else on the table that they might like.

When we were newly together, my husband and I befriended a local couple who, every Sunday, offered us a place at their table. They lived modestly, but the food was exquisite, and prepared with love, as an event, really. It was an open house, an open table. This kind couple, who were probably in their early 40’s – the age I am now, and we were twenty years younger – shared food and wine. It enabled us to punctuate our week with a feeling of calm and of home, at a time when we gave little importance to the need for such things.

In reality now, this is hard to recreate. Friendships appear to no longer be predicated on impromptu dining. My friends and I schedule weeks, sometimes months in advance for a dinner, which invariably falls at a time when the host is stressed, or has something else they need to be doing. Availability and time has become the enemy of the friendly meal. It’s something I lament; why don’t people just pop round for dinner? And why does cooking food have to be so challenging? Why must complex ingredients be sourced? I like it when there’s enough for everyone and a meal can stretch because ultimately, there’s always another side dish that can bridge the gap. I used to not even like cooking, but I see that something that is a necessity (eating), can become a pleasure, and an expression.

I’ve written before about how eating evening meals with teenagers is the single best piece of advice I’d give any parent about to embark on that particular phase of parenting. There’s nothing like eyeballing them each night, and extending the process of eating, of having seconds, and thirds, waiting for the meal rather than rushing it, a conspiracy to help chill the mood and glean the issues of the day. In fact, I regret the years I cooked ‘kiddy tea’ for them, served quick and early, as I maintain now that children who eat with adults gain more than they lose. In a frenetic day, it slows the pace.

And as for the vegetables, for all that the ‘clean eating’ movement has been maligned – and it’s not hard to see that veganism and clean eating have, for some, become synonymous with an unhealthy preoccupation with food or a propensity to eat disorderly – it has provided a way to see vegetables as something other than an afterthought. A good friend of mine recently became vegan after a lifetime of vegetarianism, and said to me that it was deplorable that we, as humans, presume that the eating of meat every day is normal, expected, understandable. Even if we all ate less meat per week, carbon footprints would of course, notably reduce. I suppose the point is, like so many elements of our society, we do it because we can. Because meat is supplied in the most innocuous way, as slabs of something to add when cooking, even though we have participated a sum total of zero in its procurement (how many times do we consider the abattoir when cooking a steak, for example?) In a counter to the argument though, another friend said to me; ‘we are carnivores, we have canines, we can digest meat with enzymes in the gut; we are meant to eat meat!’

I wonder whether the way I languish in the preparation of food is because I don’t have a job. Cooking is a bit like writing, and I spend my days thinking about writing, and doing it, and then fretting about whether its any good. Cooking is the same but the results are better, more reliable. The preparation and the repetition is meditative, and the transition from uncooked to cooked satisfying, like a makeover montage in a film; there’s a before, and then you enjoy the after.

I use this blog for inspiration (Tania is vegan, and cooks the simplest meals which always just work, are not over engineered, and she is so passionate about the topic, it’s contagious!). There are the usual suspects; those celebrities who’ve infiltrated the culinary canon of this country; the monolithic works of Jamie Oliver but also Deliciously Ella, whose recipes are ridiculously easy. This book by Jane Clarke has featured on my kitchen shelf for years, and Tonia Buxton is also a good staple. I also cook a lot from The Scandinavian Cookbook which is broken down into seasons. It’s all good.

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Right here, with me…

22nd June 2018 · Leave a Comment

So sometimes an essay on generational feminism, sometimes a rambling list of things, people, books and clothes that are on my mind.

I am reading a lot of non-fiction, and realising that with this medium, writers divulge so much of themselves, but now in a narrative style that mimics fiction. The underlying lesson; anything in life can be a story. Fiction is story-telling, but so is a memoir. When asked last summer at a book event, why I wanted to write, my contemporaries on the panel said the compulsion to write was so strong, that doing so formed a type of cathartic therapy. I answered that I felt I had something to say. Therein lies the rub. This bumps and echoes around the chambers of my creative mind, over and over. If I didn’t have something to say, I wouldn’t keep writing this blog. But if you have something to say, then writing fiction can feel like a straight-jacket, as there is a need to weave your truth – your manifesto – around a purely fictional world. I’ve realised I might not be up to tolerating this limitation, so have started writing non-fiction in earnest, as an experiment. The novel remains in draft form, but I draw from it daily, in an iterative, cumulative process. Morphing from fiction to non-fiction feels less disingenuous. May as well write real life.

I have a heel injury from running up a hill. This strikes me as sad, given that running up a hill is something which didn’t historically result in injury. I receive a litany of tips from any one I mention it to. It’s possibly – although not conclusively – plantar fasciitis, which is the scourge of the runner. I am meant to wear trainers at all times, and yesterday, when sporting a badass denim jumpsuit that makes me look like I stepped out of the the film ‘Tootsie’ from the early 80’s, I had my gait analysed in a Triathlon shop. This was all very technical, and involved me running on a treadmill in my bad trainers and then trying out their good trainers. After much discussion about ‘heel strike’ and hip flexors, I came away with new running shoes which cost a fortune, and the colour of which I did not choose. No other shoe shopping experience like it; a decision based entirely on feel, and not look.

I am still obsessed with podcasts which, on a par with Audible, have altered my days. I am someone who rarely sits still, and I loop from thing to thing; driving, writing, tidying, walking, running, scrolling, googling, organising etc but with minimal time to read. Listening is a different discipline and one that allows me to plunder all sorts of new fascinations. I listened to ‘Everything I Know About Love‘ by Dolly Alderton, and found it compelling, relatable, but also somewhat alien to my 40-something construct. The ‘London Career Girl’ stage is one I missed out entirely, as I moved, as did most of my generation, straight into co-habiting with my future spouse. London remains an amorphous presence in my life; a place I go to but never feel at home in. The book is a powerhouse of writing though, in a journalistic style that I really liked. It’s stayed with me days afterwards and her podcast ‘The High Low‘ (with another girl-about-town Pandora Sykes) is brilliant.

I took my daughter to my old university town, Bristol, for an Open Day, at which we toured prospective accommodation and listened to a lecture from a startlingly clever woman with a PhD, who has designed a super-modern degree course in which students innovate in modern industry. Blew my mind. She talked about ‘disruptive thinking’ and how our children needed it, and I felt like she’d described exactly what defines their generation. Ours was the generation to observe the status quo, berate it maybe, but I don’t feel we disrupted it as my daughter’s generation might. So much of current discussion is around dissecting the way things have always been done and asking why? Is there a better way? It’s not an act of rebellion so much as a collaborative shake-up of everything we’ve ever known. There’s a stealth to it though, it’s subversive and surprising. Which is why everyone must watch, aborb, be shocked by, and understand the song and video for Childish Gambino’s ‘This is America‘. Then to have an opinion on plastic use (David Attenborough’s legacy), sexism (#metoo), corporate ethics (Facebook & Cambridge Analytica), Veganism (why eat meat when you don’t have to?) gender fluidity (identifying as ‘they’ not ‘he’ or ‘she’). It is all about disruptive thinking. It’s all about knowing what your opinion is.

I shop for clothes in the sales and am released from the winter of boots and wool in favour of linen and cotton. I buy with a discerning eye – no longer accepting of polyester or viscose or fabrics that will never decompose. I consider vintage. I feel nostalgic for my youth; the 70’s and what my mum wore, the 80’s and what I wore, and the 90’s when I had money for the first time, and all I wanted was to look like Winona Ryder in ‘Reality Bites’. I think about everything I buy and wonder: where will it be in ten years time? Twenty?

My son is about to end his time at Prep school and so these final weeks of term consist of various events which prick the heart with sentimentality for his childhood. In truth, his childhood is seeping away by the day as he grows, broadening, getting taller, voice changing, becoming a young man. As he enters his teenage-hood, my daughter matures and prepares to leave hers. I feel like a veteran, and note the greener school mothers discussing senior school as if it’s something they will be able to control, whereas I know that the contrary is true. Parenting a teen is to find their behaviour endemic; they will do what they do, and whilst panic ensues amongst the mothers at this prospect, I have learnt that it is a necessary phase. Letting them go is all part of the process, but nonetheless I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t rueful of the change.

So I go to yoga, and plant a herb garden, and write 1000 words a day, and meet my friend for coffee. She says the torrent of words in me is coming, she can feel it. I chatter on. I walk the dog around a field where sweetcorn is growing, and deer bask in the long grass. Look how far I’ve come since those silly corporate days…

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