Life

Portfolio Career

27th March 2019 · 1 Comment

If I were to characterise my occupation right now, I’d say I was striving to make a ‘portfolio career’ work. By that I mean I do a bit of everything. I write, I clean the house. I write, I have coffee with my friends. I write, I manage the smallness and the greatness of family, both up close and extended. This is the part that sucks time like nothing else. My writing is invariably interrupted, and so as payback, it interrupts me, forming paragraphs as I try to drift off to sleep, or as I am doing a yoga class. I tell myself there will be time to properly focus, at some point in the future, when things ‘calm down’. I think of my Masters degree, and of the high hopes I had for after graduation, and as I type this, graduation was nearly two years ago. Insert shocked emoji face. Owing to my deliberate efforts not to beat myself up, I skip over this, as after all, who said the measure of success was world domination? Slow and steady? The eco book was a start…

There used to be a need to write a round-up of the week here, as a breezy, chatty bulletin. As if providing a public service. Blog being short for ‘web log’; the diarist in me would count the days between posts. Feed the appetite of your readers. But times have changed, and now we have insta stories for that. I shy away, as the need for privacy wraps around me. A highly curated front feels false, and I note that my contemporaries either post all the time, or not at all.

I am working on a project that is taking me through a creative process ranging from excitement, to fear, and back again. I muse whether it is good enough, whether I am good enough. My daughter earnestly looks back at me, and says ‘you must do your best’, and I feel like I have might have taught her well. There’s the slightest hint of spring and when I run in the mornings, the chill is gone, in favour of a tepid breeze, and there are green buds on trees. This makes me happy. I point this out to my son as we drive, and he looks up from his phone.

Meanwhile, I receive a terse, unsolicited email from a reader. The intimation being that I am narrow-minded. It strikes me that writing any sort of social commentary now is fraught with the accusation of not having a wide enough point of reference. Should I caveat every possible opinion, and state every possible viewpoint? Quite dull to do so. A bit like taking broad-spectrum antibiotics. You smother the good bugs and the bad bugs too. And maybe you never needed the meds in the first place. I can’t extrapolate the metaphor any further.

I buy a leopard print dress online, because, y’know, that’s what (narrow-minded) women like me do.

My daughter’s friends, the teenage girls, come round and sit at my table. I serve them vegetables (always) and they battle through plates of butternut squash, broccoli and avocado with a lime and tahini dressing. They silently wonder where the fish fingers have gone? We talk about society, and life, university, and whether they should cut their lustrous long hair short. I find myself cautioning against doing so, as all haircutting is, generally speaking – not wanting to derail the objectors here – a way to combat boredom. I’d apply the same logic to getting tattoos, which I become obsessed with, periodically. We discuss stress, and exams, and whether the line up at Glastonbury is going to be any good. I imagine myself this June, jumping, my middle-aged hands in the air, wellies sticking in the Somerset mud, screaming ‘Mr Brightside’ like it’s 2003.

When I speak to other women my age, they talk a lot about what they want and how they can’t have it, and I wonder if this is just the stage we are at? Experience tells me nothing comes easy, and right now, there isn’t time to get important stuff done. Everything feels like an effort, and I can think of a million reasons not to try. But there’s an ambition and a tenacity and we all soldier on with the perpetual list of things that need doing (‘I’ve got soul, but I’m not a soldier’). There’s a steeliness to this ambition, and I see as I get older, the less I need to say it out loud. Is this the midlife wisdom that they speak of? When you know, you know. It’s an inner knowledge; a confidence I suppose, that we are all playing a long game and if not now, then later. I write, I wait.

Photo by Annie Spratt on Unsplash

The World as I Know It

14th March 2019 · 1 Comment

A flurry of new followers arrive, maybe because I was kindly referred to in my friend Amanda’s blog post, or maybe because the book I wrote might have sold a copy or two, or maybe because someone was absent-mindedly scrolling #writersmind or #midlife and found an Instagram musing of mine. It’s mind-blowing to think of the ways that paths might cross. I wonder what it’s like to not have an online presence, to exist only in the real world (or should I say: ‘irl’. That’s ‘in real life’ to the uninitiated). After swearing off Instagram recently – Facebook is pretty much dead to me – I’ve looked closely at my social media use. I am more a silent observer than an active participant. So indoctrinated am I, that I find it natural to voyeuristically scan the Instagram stories of people I don’t know, in their beds and bathrooms, in their pyjamas, in a state of undress. I wouldn’t answer the door to the postman in that! How curious that online we are so embracing and accepting of the sharing mentality. We can’t get enough sharing. Or maybe that’s just me?

In this constant state of human observation, the writer in me gets overloaded. There’s just so much to think about. Whilst out running by the water one morning this week, catching the glorious deep blue, high tide before 8am, I was so full of words that I considered stopping to type them into my phone. This would have messed with my Strava statistics, so I carried on, storing the words in my mind like nuggets. I wish they’d design an app that could automatically capture my thoughts for me, and convert them into text. That would be cool (and terrifying). Instead I give myself mental bullet points and run faster so I don’t forget. Then I forget. Is it possible that the brain fog associated with midlife is conspiring to keep me from getting that key piece of social commentary down on paper? If I were to characterise my writer’s mind it would have two distinct halves. The romantic notion of writing as a whimsical, pleasurable activity (writer’s shed in the garden, anyone?), and the fact that writing can be an up-at-dawn siege on the brain.

Meanwhile, I buy new spectacles, and idly wonder whether that will make sitting in front of a screen for hours easier.

I procrastinate and internet shop. Some of the clothing brands I follow have changed their models; they’re now multi-faceted, multi-racial, multi-everything, and look like model versions of the real women I might see on the street. There are larger models and ones whose bodies don’t resemble the stereotypical clothes-horse versions I am used to seeing. I notice this, and react to it, even. Sometimes, I feel the clothes look less appealing – I am ashamed to admit this – and have to check myself. A fantasy exploded. I am sufficiently ‘woke’, so why do I not embrace this shift? Real women, selling real clothes?

I consider that I was brought up on a 1990’s media diet of supermodels. As a teenager, Christy Turlington and Cindy Crawford graced my bedroom walls. One of the first things I did when I earned my own money was buy a copy of Vogue, just to see what high fashion was all about. Tatjana Patiitz, swimsuit-clad, on a black-sand beach was the exotic counterpoint to my rural, mud-splattered fourteen year old self. Back then, I bought glossy magazines and pulled out pages to collage my bedroom wall. Surely, it’s no different to what my teenage children do now when they curate their feeds? They scroll Instagram, I worry it’s going to rot their brains, yet I did the same exact thing back then, but without the technological immediacy. The issue with instagram is that it never runs out of wall space.

Models from the past were unobtainable in their beauty, they were as relatable to me, in my suburban British life, as an alien might be, from another planet. Only when Kate Moss was discovered, and it transpired she came from Croydon (a mere fifty miles from where I lived) did I acknowledge that beautiful people might exist in the real world. So what is there to make of ‘real women’ models? It’s good, necessary and about time. But it does make me question the extent to which social conditioning has affected my perceptions. The myriad ways that my generation were raised to think certain things were attractive or unattractive. I can hope that future generations of women can view beauty differently, and won’t have been so conditioned. After all, this is the whole point of change, the paradigm shift that over time takes the abnormal to normal, or back again.

I took my daughter for an offer day at the university of her choice (just the small matter now, of getting the grades to get in) and decided there is nothing more sobering that imagining your first born living on their own for the first time. Recollections of my own university life spiral back at me, Scooby-Do style, and I simply can’t articulate how recently that phase of my life seems. How can it be that I now have a child who will go instead, and I will be the sobbing, greying mother who will have to drive away and reconcile the empty house when I get home. My husband and I might look at each other, full of the knowledge that by then, years will have passed since this happy camper came bombasting into our lives. Our daughter turns eighteen this summer, and the prospect is at once surreal and awe-inspiring. We raised an adult! Look what we did! She remains the most beautiful girl I know, biased as I am. My memories of her flit back to her baby days, when the 2000’s had just started and the 90’s were a recent decade. Meanwhile, March now takes hold. It was my 45th birthday this week. What is it they say? Don’t look back, you’re not going that way.

Photo by Unsplash

Are you human?

8th February 2019 · Leave a Comment

When you haven’t logged on for a while, the software wants to check: are you human?

Tick the box. Yes. Not an interloper, but the same old me. However slightly changed, as I haven’t written a single word for months, nor visited this place. The thing with writing a blog is that you have to be willing to share; that forms the basic premise. Some things happened in December and I was no longer willing to share, in so much as I went inwards, as humans do, I suppose, when they perceive threat. The threat I encountered was ordinary and everyday, but at the same time profound. I was scared and worried, and that made me vulnerable. My little life precarious; the people in it somehow at risk. It’s not right to explain here, but suffice to say some shit went down, of the personal variety, and it challenged everything I knew to be true, for a while. Christmas was ugly, but with a glittery, fake-smile wrapping to it, and new year passed in much the same way. January brought some respite, in its dark days and blustery corners, and then I welcomed February from far away, from the other side of the world, in the middle of the Indian Ocean. If you think that sounds like a cryptic explantation of the last couple of months, you’d be right.

There’s a curious contract I have made with myself when it comes to writing. And here on this blog, it’s a contract with my invisible, unknown audience. I write, you read. I share, you absorb. There’s usually a healthy tension to it – or at least there always has been for me – I share what I am comfortable with sharing, and I protect certain truths fiercely, so as not to expose my family or my friends. But as I think back to the nine years I have written this blog, of the myriad insights I have shared, I find it odd that I am compelled to do this. Taking time away from it was like enforcing a separation between two childhood friends; I only lasted so long, and I knew I’d come back.

Meanwhile, amongst my contemporaries, the debate rages on about whether Instagram has replaced blogging, or whether ‘stories’ have replaced curated photos. The term ‘influencer’ is now tinged with a toxicity, and I see fellow bloggers grapple with dull but necessary explanations of whether they have been #gifted or whether it’s an #ad. Yawn. It feels like when I used to work for the corporate, and we would get audited, and everyone had to have detailed process flows on their desks about self-explanatory things like how to switch on your computer. Are you human? The need for safeguards, for privacy, for honesty, for integrity, has rightly come to the forefront. Someone decided that there’s been an abuse, that we might have been duped, so we must now all be brutally honest about every little thing so as not to mislead anyone who happens to read what we write or post. It’s exhausting and complex, and I am not sure where it will lead. It takes away the shine, and rubs the face of things so hard, that it scours the sheen of what blogging and instagram are all about. There’s always the interplay between the truth and the veneer. It’s the construct we all create every time we have any interaction with anyone else. No one is ever quite what they seem, and that is part of how humans function. But it does pose the wider question; if everything everyone shares is vanilla and overstated, then what?

I said I’ve been away, after the tumult of the last couple of months, my husband and I booked a last minute trip to the Maldives. Place of honeymooners, rose-petal-scattered-pillows, and stilted water bungalow accommodation. White sand coral islands, which rear up out of the ocean like something in a cartoon. Impossibly – implausibly – beautiful. An Instagrammable dream. We had never, ever seen anything like it. The water so clear and perfectly, pristinely turquoise that I spent the entire week photographing it, swimming in it, wading in it, marvelling at it like the true Piscean I am. The perfect salt-water salve to everything that life had thrown at us. The privilege of being able to see a place like that weighed heavy though, and I was reluctant to share, because, well, because it just seemed self–indulgent. A self-consciousness has coloured my instincts to share online, and each word and image seems weighty.

But this self-consciousness serves little purpose, as we are bound to consume the experience of others, isn’t that what writing is all about?

Incidentally, I read ‘The Woman in The Window’ whilst I was away. A tetchy thriller that lacked plausibility. The kind of book publishers love. Cinematic from the first page; they’ll make a film of it starring a Hollywood actress who is willing to look dowdy. Lugged the hardback of Michelle Obama’s ‘Becoming’ all the way there and back again, so far untouched. Listened to the podcast ‘Love Stories’ with Dolly Alderton; the one with Emma Freud, when she describes her relationship with Richard Curtis (writer of screenplays to my twenties). It made me choke back tears and can I say: it’s hard to cry and run on a treadmill at the same time, whilst on a coral island in the Indian Ocean.

So I face the next item on the agenda now. I have a deadline for a submission competition at the end of March, giving me some time to write the essay that’s been building in my head for months.

Live. Write. Live. Write. When you know, you know.

Any Other Business

30th November 2018 · Leave a Comment

WhatsApp chats are to the writer (who is also a housewife), what coffee breaks are to the working woman. The idle musing, the gossip and conjecture, the discussion and dissection of what your boss said, the niggles and the worries. When I first stopped working, the silence of the house was deafening, and I spent a good couple of years wondering how on earth I would ever get used to it. How would I find peace in the silence? The thing I missed was human contact, going to the office, seeing colleagues, being in meetings. The constant sharing of information and opinion that makes working both interesting and bearable. In the good old days, when my employer was still bouyant and super-fun, there was a morning ritual where my friend Natalie (ordained early on as my best-work-friend) and I would take the order for coffee and tea in the mornings, and queue in the canteen to get coffee tokens, to then queue for the machines, to then transfer this caffeine-infused bounty back to our peers. This was about a half mile walk in the IBM UK headquarters, wearing our suits and clip-clopping in our high heels, living the office-based dream. Oh happy days. Of course the more we progressed the career ladder, the less time there was for coffee queuing and the more time there was for fractious conference calls with irate executives, who’d missed their quarterly number.

Now, such pastimes are a distant memory and instead I plot chapters, and immerse myself in social commentary, and fret about the state of the book industry and whether I shall ever get published. I also chat to my friends on WhatsApp. My long-suffering friend Dawn, who is Godmother to our children and lives in the Netherlands, is one of the cleverest women I know. We have wide-ranging discussions on all matters and prior to speaking on the phone, I send her my agenda. This was an extract of yesterday’s:

Tonsillitis has entered the building. My boy is so ill.
Boo is lovely. She’s joined the choir.
I’m growing out my grey. Discuss.
Two jumpsuits; neither any good. I might have to get over this.
It’s so damn cold, my skin is cracking up. Oil oil oil at every application. Is this an age thing? I used to have oily skin. Now I’m like an old leather purse.
Did you watch the BBC thing on menopause? With Mariella Fostrup?
Monty’s been to the dog groomer, and I think he’s embarrassed.

On other days I send other friends random, suggestive agendas, ones which could run on an existential loop as I suspect they’ll never be truly resolved. Another extract…

I periodically lose my shit and it’s for these reasons;

Why must females do all domestic work?
Why can’t I do full time paid work and also be a functioning and lucid parent; discuss.
Teenagers behaving as if they’re ‘super rich kids with nothing but fake friends’. Name the lyrical reference.
When something spills and makes a big old mess.
Routine days where nothing fun happens.
Unkindness in any form.
The destruction of nature, and the world by human consumption.
Over commitment of my time.
The futility of wanting more and more, and it never being enough.
Finding ‘Wanderlust’ really quite disturbing. Questioning whether I have puritanical values.

Incidentally, did anyone watch ‘Wanderlust’? The TV drama with Toni Colette (whose face is mesmerising) and tells of a middle aged couple whose marriage flatlines with familiarity, and decide to pursue other, outside sexual relationships, for kicks? My reaction to it was on a level with my reaction to ‘One Husband, Three Wives’ which is on Netflix and is the kind of dross I watch when I am housebound, as I have been this week. It tells of the Fundamentalist Mormon community in Utah who favour polygamy. It blew my mind. Marriage, and all of its glorious and ugly complexities seems to me to be increasingly incompatible with modern life. I write this even though I am married and have been for nearly nineteen years. It’s a whole book chapter in its own right. Marriage, one of the single biggest constants in my life, is fraught with such frailty, but at the same time such resilience. In all cases, as with all things, it’s just about how you look at it. Which lens you look through. I observe younger women, who are in their twenties, and wonder how on earth they will navigate this realm of marriage? I look at my children who, despite the profound societal change taking place as they grow and mature, still refer to getting married and having children as the thing they will do. Of course it’s where nurture pips nature to the post. Children mimic what they see in their parents, and whilst the fundamentalist mormons may appear to have a disregard for how modern women could live, (why have one wife when you can have three?) they are simply putting into practice the family values they witnessed as children. This family rite of passage is what procreation and marriage is underpinned by, isn’t it? In a keenness to be tolerant, I watch and learn, rather than watch and judge.

See what I mean about the existential loop?

So to conclude the meeting; any other business?

Ziggy Played Guitar

16th November 2018 · 1 Comment

Of all daily preoccupations, wearing clothes is an obvious and persistent one. I have whittled down my dissatisfaction with the British winter to include the following issues: mud, rain, darkness and the inability to wear most of one’s wardrobe due to the limitations of all of the above. I have a theory that city-dwellers escape these limitations as they have asphalt and heated buildings. The dash from road to pavement (possibly slick with rain, but not mud-strewn), to office (heated and suitably cosmopolitan) to hip restaurant or bar, and home again. Sex and the City but with coats on. Admittedly, I’m imagining a girl-about-town agenda but the fact remains that rural life in Sussex does not lend itself to interesting clothes. Summer provides a brief respite, as it did this year, and we were relieved from the confines of jeans and jumpers to wear prints, floaty fabrics, sandals (exposed toes!), our shoulders out, our skin tanned, oh the heady recollection of maxi dresses and the whoosh of linen or cotton. Now, it’s the relegation to wool. This smacks to me, every year, of a sad state of affairs.

My equivalent commute from house to car to various errands to house again does not call for sartorial variety and this is what saddens me the most. I revert to my previous career, which necessitated meetings dressed in suits and heels, and whilst I don’t miss it, I lament it. I am not even sure that the ‘office dress’ of the 2000’s exists anymore? Is dress down Friday still a thing? I recall its advent in my workplace; it provoked a subtle shift from heels to flats and that was about it. So indoctrinated were we in the need to look businesslike. What is businesslike now?

Meanwhile, I went to Marrakesh last week, with friends, and experienced the sensory onslaught of a new culture. So incongruous after the buttoned-up reality of my home country. I was fascinated to see how others interpreted the requirement to be respectful of the culture there and so cover shoulders, knees, ankles and hair. We found a middle ground, but in the same breath witnessed Brits (because they could only have been) in buttock-skimming miniskirts and cropped tops. Wtf? It was in the same vein as my trip to the races, documented here, I felt a flush of shame for what some chose to wear. Then I admonished myself as after all, tolerance is key. Wear what you want, right?

I get preoccupied with jumpsuits – as they somehow have come to represent something to me – and waste hours looking at pictures from the 1970’s. There’s a nostalgic calling buried deep, a recollection of my Mum I think, in tan Jordache velvet cords which have now taken on legendary status in my imagination, and are lost to the mists of time. No photo exists; where are they now? But back to jumpsuits; I mean the ones that are like fitted overalls, possibly worn by Farrah Fawcett in Charlie’s Angels, or by grid girls at a Grand Prix, where someone like James Hunt raced. I scour the web. I run across Bianca Jagger, marrying Mick. I secretly wish I had been married in the seventies or eighties and had one of those milk-maid dresses with puffed sleeves and broderie-anglaise detailing. I was married in 1999, and my dress, which I thought was classic, was not. Despite every intention and even stating in the bridal shop ‘it will never date!’, it was a ‘Four Weddings and a Funeral’ meringue. Fashion is a fickle friend.

Maybe it’s because we become used to looking at a regurgitated past in current fashions, maybe that is why I now covet pieces that are from another era. This retrospection is going hand in hand with the fact that I am halfway through my forties come Spring. That’s one to think about; see previous post on greying hair.

There’s a particular challenge to wearing clothes in your forties, which I attribute to the yawning hinterland between young and old. Middle-aged by both name and nature. Prior to forty there was an ironic insouciance to clothes. Young enough not to care. I imagine, by sixty, there will be – for me at least – a ‘don’t care’ mentality which will probably herald me wearing lurid pattens (palm tree kaftan anyone?) and oversized glasses. Iris Apfel is my idol. But right now, it’s neither here nor there. An unspoken manifesto has been embroidered into the consciousness of middle-aged women that they should look appropriate. Isn’t appropriate dressing just the worse thing?

No wonder I am despondent!

So I order the jumpsuit. I’m fairly sure it will not be fitting my rural sensibilities; it’s being sent to me from America and features David Bowie styling. Heaven help my kids.

Grey Rebellion

4th November 2018 · Leave a Comment

One thing I notice about being a writer is that ideas which cross my mind no longer just drift through, they stay, mulch in like compost, and in time become a blog post or an essay or a concept in my book. This is good, in essence, because I’ve always been a thinker, I consider it an extrapolation. The concepts vary from lofty and high brow, to everyday and banal, and this one falls somewhere between the two.

Recently, my friend Amanda said she was going to stop colouring her hair in favour of natural grey. She ‘said’ this; what I really mean is she posted it on I nstagram stories and as I scrolled through one day, in amongst a million other things, I initially didn’t think too much of it. Then my mum – who also follows Amanda – mentioned it to me. I went back over the story again, and thought: yes, going grey, there’s actually a thing called ‘Gronde’ (grey-blonde), and who knew? I googled ‘going grey’ and found out this is a huge preoccupation with women my age, and older.

I have been dying my hair since my twenties, owing to it being a mid-brown, mousy colour. I longed for those Rachel-esque streaks in the nineties. I once went a vivid, plum red, a colour that would never occur naturally. My hair was bleached platinum blonde right after university, at a hairdresser appointment where I didn’t pay attention to what the stylist was proposing. In more recent times, I’ve inadvertently succumbed to the mucky, khaki hair that happens when you over do it, and try to edge your way back to something more befitting your skin tone.

Not long after I was thirty, I started noticing grey hairs. One or two; four or five, no more than fifteen, thirty maybe? One hundred. A whole crop. Hair colouring turned from an idle dalliance to something I did to simply preserve the status quo. This continued until now, where I adhere to a regular five-weekly trip to the salon for a root cover up, and then endure a couple of days of itching scalp, two to three delightful weeks of no roots, before needing the process to start again. There is an inconsistency in the results, after all, I am pursuing what is a chemical treatment. Maybe the colour is too light or too dark, or afterwards has lightened in the sun, until I become an unenviable brassy blonde. It’s never a static, reliable outcome. I look around; everyone looks the same. All of my contemporaries have coloured hair, bar a rare few who are true brunettes, and who seemed not be greying at the rate I am. In conversation with a friend, we tried to think of one peer amongst the school mothers who had never dyed her grey hair, who was ‘naturally’ grey. We could find none. I accept these may be the circles I mix in. Women of a certain type (my type?) do not take to the signifiers of ageing readily. They cavort with artificial enhancers, hair dye being the least of it.

But the fact remains, could I be so bold as to state that no one seems to want to be grey haired? Grey hair meant old, and old meant a whole raft of other stereotypes that I couldn’t begin to unpick, they are so ingrained in our collective consciousness. It was as if to me, naturally grey hair was the flag denoting having reached a point of no return. The point after which everything important, current and vital about me would leach away. Of course I can see that this is irrational. But nevertheless…the feeling persisted.

Men go grey – my husband is going grey – and I don’t think he and I have ever even acknowledged it. The distinguished salt and pepper at the temples is accepted with an entirely different judgement to when a woman has not coloured her roots. Grey roots on a woman – especially against dark, contrasting hair – can be considered shocking, and not in an outlandish, cool way, but in a deep-seated ‘she’s let herself go’ way. It is a crowning manifestation of age (literally) that can’t be downplayed or ignored.

Is this another unspoken principle which women are required to observe, but never agreed to? An example of inequality to endure?

I start to look for positive grey hair stories, and find they abound. There are whole rafts of women who have abandoned the grey #greyhairdontcare, and the liberation they gain from a dyeing regime that is punishing, expensive and if I am honest, fairly soul-destroying heartens me. What used to be your natural state, your take-it-for-granted-hair, is something that can only be obtained with diligence, time, effort and money. That is how Cindy Crawford, aged 52 still has her infamous, lustrous chestnut mane. I no longer have a chestnut mane. Who are we kidding? The women who live in the squares of my Instagram feed are well in to their fifties, they are women I grew up with. I think we can safely assume they see a colourist most weeks.

With all of this churning away in my mind, I went to the hairdresser and in an act that I can only describe as insurgency, I told her not to colour my roots. We chose a different approach, one which might – let’s see – mean I can have less dye and more me. I endured all over ash blonde highlights, and in the moment of reveal in front of the mirror I was virtually palpitating. Seeing my grey blonde hair with exposed roots (!) caused a physical panic, a moment of fear and exposure I hadn’t anticipated. Closely followed by relief. I messaged Amanda. Solidarity sister!

It’s hardly a true revolutionary act, and I might find in a few months I revert to my old ways. But in the meantime, it’s a subtle grey-toned experiment in rebellion.

Image of the late Mimi Weddell (aged 90 in this photo).

Rage

26th October 2018 · Leave a Comment

During a discussion (although he called it a debate) about Brexit, my Dad and I skirted around the edges of rage. I felt it well up in me and tried to swallow it down, as if it were gristle, unable to spit it out and leave it on the side of my plate. The gap of generational divide exposed. My family have never been particularly argumentative but instead specialise in a kind of quiet respect that could, at a push, be described as passive.

I wondered afterwards if I am too outspoken. I wonder how it comes across when I write here, how I feature here in these posts, and whether it is a supplicated version, mindful of the tremors that can be caused by placing one’s opinions on the internet. The compulsion to write is balanced with a fear of sharing too much, or of misjudging what is appropriate. I am ‘woke’, in the urban dictionary definition of the word, a new concept which I explained to a mother friend recently. But meanwhile, I don’t like to disagree with people, I don’t want to be a person who forces their views on others. I’d rather state my views and see if anyone agrees. Live and let live.

I finished Deborah Levy’s book ‘Things I Did Not Want to Know‘. It’s a book which captures the inner monologue of your forties. A backward glance to childhood and teenage hood, to growing up in the 1970’s, at a time when mothers and fathers aren’t like they are now. She describes the strange hinterland of midlife; of crying (or wanting to) on escalators, not knowing why. From that post-book void, I ploughed in with another, and listened to Lily Allen’s ‘My Thoughts Exactly‘ which lays her childhood bare and tells of the heartbreaking lack of attention she experienced. It seemed sacrilegious for her to expose her parents in this way, when assessing them by today’s standards, but as she alludes to in the narrative, she presents the facts. Whatever my feelings, the book is exceptional. The judgement is ours, as readers. Her honesty blew my mind. I think to myself; her parents did not see it as their role to form and nurture the humans they made.

Levy notes in her book that women mustn’t write in rage, because rage will discolour meaning. We must write in calm, or else we won’t be taken seriously. But what do we do with the rage in the meantime? I get a flashback to passing a country house retreat in Devon where ‘Women’s Screaming Therapy’ was advertised on an innocuous roadside sign. Screaming seems futile and more often than not, any rage I feel dampens down eventually and I continue on without it. Women are intrepid. Acceptance is key; rage is not. Rage comes from a place that does not move forward, but is stuck in an unending cycle of red.

The generational divide remains a fascination to me, though, and I excuse all manner of behaviours from the past because that’s just how society was then. I find myself referring to this in conversations with my husband, my Mum, my friends, to those who can see that society has lumbered along since, lets say, Y2K, and there has been a seismic shift. Do you reminder Y2K?! The end of the world. Binary code and computers without instructions. It didn’t amount to much. Instead, there have been a series of lesser known quakes taking place under my feet. The tectonic plates of family, work, marriage and parenthood have all formed new continents.

My husband calls. The dog sits at my feet. Waiting.

I think of the rage of other women. Ones I know and ones I am only acquaintances with. Rage about failed marriages, divorce and having children who rebel. Rage at promises broken. Rage at not having enough money or not having the lifestyle she might have envisaged for herself. Rage at the deal she might have made with herself to accept that which is unacceptable. Is this rage about loss? I think of those times when I’ve seen women lose their shit on Facebook, late at night, after they’ve had their wine. It’s that witching hour, when women email unsuspecting recipients and spill their vitriol; at the teacher, the volunteer sport coach, the retail outlet where she bought something that wasn’t to her expectations, and lambast the page, as unfair and unnecessary as a hurricane. I do it myself when everything gets too much, like this week, in the supermarket, where the plastic that everything was wrapped in tipped my balance and I became one of those awful huffy, shouty women whose children look at the ground and are embarrassed by. This particular kind of rage – the middle aged kind- seems to come from a deep source which is more often than not covered up. No one likes an angry middle aged woman. Younger women might have more leniency in this regard, but beyond the age of forty, forget it!

This is what Levy alludes to in her book. The secret inside which stokes the flames. So the irony is that we read about mindfulness, meditation, self care, taking a nightly bath and eating vegetables and trying so damn hard to quell the feelings. As if calm is the panacea to everything that life throws, from plastic, to politics, to wrinkles, to parenthood and onwards. Take a deep breath. But is it?

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.