From the Front Desk of Publishing

3 February 2010

Bystanding

Despite all subsequent activity, since new man and I went our separate ways (and yes, hair gel did play its sticky part) the weekend that I didn't spend in The Halkin passed idly at home in the void that is the life of the recently single.

It goes like this:

You've let your friends slip a little bit to accommodate romance, and so, on Friday, though you've arranged for your daughter to stay out in anticipation of a torrid evening, it now looks like consisting of you, cheese on toast and the boxed set of Grey's Anatomy. In the afternoon, you're sitting in the kitchen in the last wash of sunlight fighting its way through the grime of the window. The table, for once, is so clean it looks like it has been licked, the dishwasher is empty, the washing machine is empty, the dryer is empty, the whole house is empty and it's just you, laptop open, the click of the keys measuring the seconds, and work - trying to make a sceptre flit across the webpage instead of a cursor - isn't working so that the only hotspot in your life is the one you've created in Flash.

Did you hear a loud, thundering boom?

You can't remember. You may be torturing yourself, but you just can't remember, and yet - later it haunts you - that fleeing feeling that there was a tumultous crash and that maybe, idly, you listened, wondering what it was, and heard nothing further, and so went on - click, click, clicking, reloading the page, refreshing the image, click, click, click.

In fact, in the evening, you did go out. You wandered round to the local Tapas bar with friends, forgiving enough of your neglect, to take pity on you, where you ate Serrano ham and tortilla and lamb chops and washed it down with a couple of glasses of the red wine that you haven't been drinking for the last 21 days, but which, tonight, damn it, you think you need.

You flirt with a short Spanish man who comes up to your armpits, even when you're not towering above him on a bar-stool, who talks as though he's had his jaw wired shut, and whose gentle lithping lulls and comforts you into pleasure, in spite of yourself. And later, you walk home in the frost and let yourself in to the dark, gloomy house that seems to mock you with the unexplored possibilities of its emptiness. You double lock the door.

Next day you rise early, just to spite yourself, and carry on click, clicking until you decide you should to go to the supermarket for food that you're not going to eat, cook, or need, but nevertheless buy, store in the fridge in which everything is at right angles, and will probably throw out untouched before the end of the week. The afternoon turns to evening, broken only by a visit to the National Gallery to see The Sacred Made Real where you marvel at homoeroticism through the ages, before you while the evening away watching people pretend to be even more miserable that you, but with better figures and medical degrees.

At eleven o'clock, you're are still sitting there. The hotspots are no longer hot and the laptop has crashed. You've written emails you haven't sent (because who wants to advertise that they are sitting at home on a Saturday night) and forlornly called your youngest daughter who never goes across the threshold when there's the hint of squeaking bed springs, but has now just announced she is spending her second night out and may be back some time tomorrow, but only for a change of clothes.

The house is as quiet as a grave.

Your phone hasn't rung once.

You lock all the internal doors before you go to sleep, which you do fitfully, but for once, the floorboards and old walls are merciful and don't advertise their creaking, aching limbs while you lie awake, in the middle of the bed, which doesn't really fool anyone into making it feel occupied.

By Sunday, you're sick of the bloody website, and think Doctor Dreamy Derek is a wet prat, and you sling on your wellington boots and plod through the mud on Wormwood Scrubs where people look at you oddly because you are not accompanied by a dog. Damn it, even here you feel single. Back home, you walk up the red tile path and let yourself back into the house which fails to notice your arrival. You don't even glance at the house next door which cuddles up to yours, separated only by one flowerpot which your neighbour tends. Why should you? Unless the door is standing open, which has happened once or twice, or the burglar alarm has gone off, which has happened two or three hundred times, why would you look next door? Did you look when someone broke in through the side window and robbed the place? Did you look when another opportunist climbed over the back wall and let themselves in the bedroom window and stole all her mother's jewellry? Did you look the day that the woman who has lived there for the last 23 years set fire to her blouse and calmly called the ambulance herself, although you were at home and could have helped?

No. No. And no.

You did look the night the neighbour's daughter tried to kill the mouse with a brush and woke you up in the middle of the night screaming. The walls between you are so thin, you used to able to listen to the Today program in the morning without turning on the radio. They're so thin you can hear everything.

Can't you?

In the evening you go to the theatre with someone from work and get lost on the drive back, not getting in to bed until almost midnight. Daughter is in her bedroom. Her bag is slung across the kitchen table. Son is in his bedroom. His bike is poleaxed in the hall. There is a knife smeared with peanut butter on the kitchen counter.

Signs of life as we know it.

The office next morning feels like going to a holiday camp.

And then at the end of the day you park the car outside the house. It's dark. You notice a light on next door, not in itself unusual, but half of one window seems to be gone, and the other has a crack in it that's been mended with black electrical tape. Your heart sinks. Damn it, she's been burgled again. And your eyes immediately swing to your own front door, wondering if you've been hit too. But your son's bike is still in the hall so, no - even if he's fighting demons in the Land of Ork all day, he probably, might have, would have, surely, heard someone breaking in. You are about to turn the key in the lock when you hesitate. Your good neighbourliness kicks in and overrules your fear of intruding and you bang on the door.

Which is when, finally, you see your neighbour lying on the floor at the bottom of the stairs.

Quite dead and bloodied.

Where, apparently, the police think she has been since Friday.

Less than six feet from where you sat around all weekend - both of you, home alone by yourselves.

But it's only later that you start to pick at the scab of your memory and convince yourself that perhaps you heard her fall.

And did nothing.

Posted by Writer in Residence at 2:48 PM 0 comments links to this post

To beard or not to beard

Then Sales, who is also sporting a - say - 2 o'clock shadow, asks me if he should shave or not because he has a date tonight with the guy who facebooked him after selling him a couple of tickets at the theatre last week.  Ah the modern world, huh?

'Mmm, well is he clean-shaven, I mean if you rub your chins together are you going to ignite?'

He gave me the haughty stare that he seems to reserve mainly for me and deigns to initiate me into whether or not tonight will be a meeting of chins.  'No, he's smooth.'

Very, if he can chat you up on Facebook after meeting you once.

'Shave,' I say.  But I'm a middle aged woman.   I don't think my preferences hold much sway in boy circles, so I think again.  'Or maybe not.'

'That's very helpful...'  He says.  'How was I the other night?'

'What other night?'

'When we went to the theatre together?'

'I don't remember.'

'Oh come on, you were with me, why can't you remember?  Cast your mind back and think!'

I can't.  It's a  blank.  All I can remember is the mystified look on the young woman (and her mother) who we ran into in the foyer as she wondered who the hell the old matron was who was accompanying her gay friend , though this was a problem I had anticipated with a little help from my frenemies at work. 

'But what will people think when they see you?'  Chief Sales had asked when I mentioned that young Sales and I were going out for a night of culture. (Look, he asked me...)

'That I'm his mother, or his aunt or something...  Surely!'

She looked sceptical. 

There was rhyming slang in there.  I just know it. 

Posted by Writer in Residence at 1:34 PM 1 comments links to this post

May the Stubble Be With You

We're having a Beardathon at work. Well, by we I mean Editorial, Receptionist, Corvus and Contract. All came in clean shaven on February 1st with the aim of seeing who can grow the biggest beard by the end of the month. I'm thinking we should run a book and my money would be on Editorial - it would have been Contract but he succumbed on Day 3 and the sandpaper glint disappeared from his cheeks.

'I think he probably lives with a woman,' I said when Editorial bemoaned the fact that Contract had thrown in the hot towel.

'What do you mean? I live with a woman,' He replied indignantly. 'My mum loves my beard.'

You got it at mum, didn't you?

But are there really women apart from mothers who love beards? I assume there must be since my ex took his razor burn with him to the new woman when he left me. I wasn't sad to see it go because, despite Mrs Arafat telling me on very good authority that Yasser's beard didn't scratch (waste time on the PLO's mismanagement of millions when there's the important matter of physical intimacy to discuss - are you mad?) - scratching I can handle, it's the soft fluffy hairiness that I find sooooo wrong on so many levels..

And the way they stroke it.

We were talking about hair as a male attribute in the office the other day (waste time on literature when you there's the important matter etc...). 'I like bald men,' said one of the lithe young lovelies with flowing locks to her waist and a, presumably, hirsute Italian stallion tucked away in her weekends.

'Me too - but that's just as well, because after fifty you don't always have a lot of choice.' I said, authoritatively.

Well you do. But it's either that or hair gel.

Crispy hair gel.

That gets stuck in between your fingers if you try to run them through it, just before they jump back and yell: 'Don't touch the hair!'

Posted by Writer in Residence at 1:15 PM 0 comments links to this post

For those who like lists

In the last week while not blogging I saw The Prophet, Swan Lake, The Misanthrope (for goodness sake Kiera, eat something), The Habit of Art (there should be an F in there somewhere and you can guess where it goes), Priscilla Queen of the Desert, Hairspray (at which, for the first time ever, I groped the breast of an ...erm woman - Phil Jupitus in drag - and met Josie Lawrence which was only marginally less exciting), broke up with the new man, fell out with the old man, made up with the old man again, spend the weekend at The Halkin, had a great meal at Maze and a noisy but delicious meal at Buca del Lupo, visited the Saatchi, the Serpentine, the National Gallery, The British Museum, The Tate Modern, and found a dead body.

Posted by Writer in Residence at 8:48 AM 0 comments links to this post

25 January 2010

Cold water flat

Next up: 'It's Complicated'. But this time with a friend who is in the process of separating his wife of 28 years. What a pair we are - the leaving and the left.

'Oh that stung,' He said later of the scene where Meryl Street is sitting around the table with her children and the ex-husband arrives looking forlorn to be left out of their happy little group. 'That's going to be me.'

'If you think that's bad, just don't go see Up in the Air,' I cautioned, though I started choking up in the scene where the youngest daughter goes off to college and leaves Meryl (who in the film looks like an unmade bed according to Sharon, at-least-she-didn't-make-her-living-out-of-forgetting-her-underpants, Stone) alone in the kitchen of her beautiful family home. Let's forget that Alex Baldwin looks like he should be starring in Family Guy but God forbid that Meryl Streep doesn't brush her hair.

I'm unashamedly sentimental about chicks flying the nest though I've signed up all my my remaining cuckoos for flying lessons and sent them a list of regional airports to which they might soon flit off. Two down, two to go. However, I still cry over the eldest every time she goes back to Oxford and I can summon tears at will by merely thinking about the youngest, but that's because she's usually just told me to f...  of myself, though her verb doesn't even rhyme with fly.

'At least you'll always have your children around you, I can't say the same about mine,' says my friend as he links my arm and we repair to the local pizza restaurant which is, as you might expect on a Saturday evening, heaving with the sort of young, squirming, families than neither of us have any more. Thank god.

'Well, I won't have them, but I expect they'll still visit me. Not that having them is all that it's cracked up to be. You know, it's not all group hugs, pyjama parties and big cosy family dinners - it's hair choking the drains that nobody can be bothered to pick out, and disappearing knickers from the dryer that you hope, just hope, have ended up in the girls' underwear drawers and not on the loins of the son with the long curly hair.'

He looks unconvinced. And he's right to be. Yes, I can moan as though being paid by the word for it (which I kinda am), but I would still rather be filling my fridge with food I won't get a chance to eat, and appalling the visiting new man with the line of trainers that fills the hallway making it look like he's dating the Nike sponsored version of The Sound of Music, than living alone with my cat.

Not knocking cats, so don't bother writing to tell me how intelligent they are - it's just that having got rid of one lot of indifferent creatures who cast hair and look at me disdainfully when I attempt affection, I am not keen to replace them with another identical creature who also can't flush the loo. Nor do I want to turn into one of those people who talks about their dog as though it had opposable thumbs and a complex inner life, such as the man I met recently who said that 'he and Hector' wanted to take me to dinner. Lest you think that I was contemplating a threesome - Hector is a dachshund. I think Hector might have been the better company, admittedly, as his owner, erm, I mean best friend appeared to be a conspiracy theorist who thought he was doing me a favour by considering me as a possible date given that I was eight years older than him. He also had a lisp, something of a disadvantage for an Italian.

I mean, who is the one who has dinner dates with his dog?  Not me.  I just didn't fancy it.  Or him.

But I digress.

My friend is still looking glum, however as we start saying how it would be the best solution all round if we could only cast a magic wand over our marriages and turn back the clock to pre-broken days (and I say that even though my ex also looks like Alex Baldwin but with less hair) I'm the one who starts weeping just as the burger arrives. He hands me a tissue. I wave it away.  I have my own stash.

'But just think of all the freedom we'll have,' I sniff, eagerly trying to put a positive spin on what just seems horribly lonely. 'I mean, new man, or at least future new man will stop freaking out that he's in bed with Florence Henderson every time it creaks when sex turns into a game of statues - though I think, somehow, that current new man will not be around long enough to reap the benefits.'

'Why not?'

'Well look on the second date he brought designer chocolates. On the third he brought flowers. On the fourth, it was my birthday and he brought expensive champagne and presents. On the fifth it was Christmas and he brought more presents. On the sixth he brought wine and fancy cheese. On the seventh he brought more wine. On the eighth he brought his tool box...'

'That's amazing - his tool box?  I want to date him.'

'I know, how sweet is that - he said he was going to do all my odd jobs.'

'I don't do odd jobs. I don't do presents either. So what's wrong with that?  He sounds lovely.'

'He didn't.  Do the odd jobs, I mean but frankly, I was sooooo gushy at the whole knight in white overalls thing he didn't need to even show me a spanner.  He had to rush off after breakfast.  However, that was the end of the presents.  Last few times he didn't bring anything. Not even the tool box. And the other night, he arrived drunk...'

'Ah.'

'Yeah, ah.'

'Will you stop wiping your eyes - people will think we're having an argument.'

'No, they'll think you're dumping me.'

He stands up and smiles and gives me an enormous hug, a kiss on the cheek and tells me in a very loud voice how lovely I am looking.  'I'll be damned if I look as though I'm leaving anyone else ever, ever again,' He hisses.  'I'm fed up being the bad guy.  Have a drink.'

But somehow a diet coke just doesn't have that celebratory, to-hell-with-it-all, ring to it.

I ate carbohydrates instead and went home to plumbing hell where not one, but two bathrooms are out of action due to the fact that nobody scoops anything out of the plug hole.  The central heating is blazing at the temperature of a Caribbean summer because the hot water only works when the thermostat is set to 28 degrees.  All the lights are on.  I tidy up the assorted dirty dishes, close the door of the microwave and wipe up the exploded food from its perimeter.  I scrub the table, fold the laundry,  throw away out of date food and decide to have a bath before I go to bed.  I run the tepid taps in the one remaining bathroom with plumbing and go back downstairs to fiddle with the boiler to see if I can get it to give me lukewarm bubbles without razing the planet.  I can't.  I go into the sitting room to turn off all the lamps and hear the rain battering down outside.  What a downpour, I think, looking out at the dark street which is, I notice - with horror - totally dry.

Damn it, the sound of the deluge is coming from...  I run next door... the kitchen, where water is pouring through the ceiling.

Five saucepans, three tea-towels, six bathtowels and a hole gouged into the plasterboard my eldest son - he of the long curling hair and major cause of current blockages - arrives with his girlfriend (maybe she's the one wearing my knickers, I think - then banish it as just too, too weird to contemplate).

'I hope you don't want to use the kitchen,' I say, wringing out my third towel into the sink.

He looks at me the way you imagine aliens would if they suddenly landed in your house in the midst of a domestic incident, as though water streaming through the roof were somehow a quaint custom that everyone indulged in on a Saturday night. 

'Nah,' he says eventually, and he and his girlfriend disappear upstairs to their bedroom.  It's a testament to my low expectations that I doesn't occur to me that they might have offered to help until after my cold bath the next morning when I leave new man - who arrived, garullous at 1.30 am on his way back from a gig and got arsy with me when I hadn't sufficiently appreciated the effort he had made to come and see me - and went downstairs to make his breakfast.

I clean up all the towels.  Empty flying nest, bring - it - on, I think.  But then later, after new man has left and I've cleared away all the dishes,  miraculous eldest daughter makes me home-made cookies and coffee.

I turn on my laptop and see that New Man has left me to go home and check his internet dating site.

'What do you want - a cup or a mug,' says daughter.

'Oh mug.  Definitely, a mug.'  I say.

Posted by Writer in Residence at 4:40 PM 0 comments links to this post

19 January 2010

Come fly (away) with me...

Another weekend, another cinema, another film.

I'm here with my ex. It's a way of passing time together companionably without actually having to talk - which is what keeps it companionable. He's been in the Middle East for a week and is about to leave for Stockholm, Strasbourg and then Brussels. He spent the period after Christmas in the States. When not in flight or in conference, he spends his time between anonymous hotel rooms and, so my kids tell me, a less-anonymous-than-it-was, one bedroom flat which, when I last visited had nothing but a single bookshelf of Arabic books and a television. Though it was all seductively tidy seen through the eyes of someone who wades through a sea of trainers in the hallway every night, I looked around at the sparse, shonky rental furnishings, the tiny two-seater sofa, the bare dining table and realised just how much he must have wanted to get away from me and the domestic accoutrements of family to have preferred this, which he does. He likes living alone. He likes being able to please himself. He likes not having any demands on his person or his time. And of course, there's the girlfriend who visits now and again, but not often enough that he's never available at the weekends to go to the cinema.

We're watching Up in the Air. The sterile, unencumbered character of Ryan, a man who fires people for a living, and who lives in an efficiency apartment when not - as the title suggest - 'up in the air', aiming to clock up 10 Million frequent flyer miles, makes even George Clooney look tired and in need of a shower.

His wallet bulges with plastic loyalty cards as packs his folded underwear into a his carry-on suitcase, slots his ties into a leather case, sets it on top of his capsule wardrobe, then zips his life up into a case small enough to fit on an overhead locker. Even his fridge is stocked with miniature bottles of hootch.

The last scene features him in a plane, with a voice over saying:

'Tonight, most people will be welcomed home by jumping dogs and squealing kids. Their spouses will ask about their day and tonight they’ll sleep. The stars will wheel forth from their daytime hiding places, crowning their neighbourhood with lights. And one of those lights, slightly brighter than the rest, will be my wingtip, passing over.'

Credits.

I was so depressed I could hardly get out of my seat and it seemed there was a long, communal sigh from the audience as they scrambled to their feet in the dark, to the crunch of underfoot popcorn.

'So, did anything in that last monologue resonate with you?' I asked the ex as we walked out into the equally dark night.

'Yes, it did a bit,' he said after a pause long enough to fit in a set of golf clubs.

'No jumping dogs, no squealing children, no spouse...' I added, just to rub it in. I've never been one to go for the understatement. 'He's exactly like you, right down to the British Airways Gold Card, except that you chose this life over the alternative.' Salt and wound, I'm thinking - it's never been that much of a surprise that the man would prefer solitude and air pressure to me turning the screws, though actually rubbing salt into a wound that isn't gaping and has healed over is actually just a salt scrub and

'Well, not exactly. I mean I don't have nobody.'

'Erm, you kinda do.'

'No, I don't. I've still got you in a way.'

'No you don't. The pictures once a week isn't 'me'. I'm not waiting for you at home. I don't know where you are or when you come back. You return to an empty flat with nothing in the fridge, and nobody to welcome you. It's not like Natasha is even waiting for you since she doesn't seem to be here most of the time.'

'Well, I've got the kids.'

'The kids are mostly gone and it's not like when they were babies and you lived with us and they would ask "when is daddy coming back", they don't know whether you're in the country or out of it. You've removed yourself and they've got used to it.'

He goes quiet.

I look at him wearily, waiting, wishing he would say something to indicate he feels some sense of our absence.

'Well, I must say, I wouldn't mind his 10 Million frequent flyer miles.' He adds.

And he laughs.

Posted by Writer in Residence at 11:44 AM 1 comments links to this post

14 January 2010

The Oxford Blues

Oxford.

Snow up to my knees.

My daughter is taking me to have dinner a la Harry Potter in the Gothic dining room of Keble where she currently immerses herself in apocalyptic texts in the School of Divinity. Yes, laugh if you like, but I have a daughter who is going to be a Doctor of Divinity - though just at the moment she's flogging children's books at Waterstones to the navy blue of Oxford.

We're having tea in the newly refurbished Ashmoleum. Outside there's a foot of snow covering the terrace on which a lone classical figure hunches, his shoulders burdened with two white icicled epaulettes. He makes me feel cold just looking at him though the museum is toasty warm and redolent of the smell of damp felt and mothy wool.

A waiter approaches. Professionally French with a comma of black fringe over one eye, he shrugs, leans on one hip and pouts.

'Do you have a menu?' I ask.

'We 'ave tea, coffee, and some cakes,' He says.

'What kind of tea?' (Look I'm pedantic but 'tea' is a generic term.)

Another pout. 'English Breakfast, Peppermint, Camomile...'

I wait.

'...Earl Grey.'

He waits.

'Okay, Earl Grey then. With lemon.'

'What about the cake?' Asks my, she-isn't-on-a-diet, daughter.

'Oh I fink we have carrot and chocolate and somefing...' He says airily and wafts his hand in the general direction of the bar where no cakes seem to be on display. It's odd to think we're in a restaurant as the food seems almost incidental, not to say inconvenient.

She settles for a hot chocolate as does my friend from days of yore who has joined us, and we all pass on the mystery cake.

My friend used to share a house with me. Back then he was a member of the Socialist Workers Party, but perfectly normal beforehand when his hair was not unlike the French waiter's but with a few flecks of grey, and his face, cherubic and cheeky. It's all gone now. But actually it had gone even then since he shaved it off to stubble and got a few earrings when he joined the party. I think that was the entrance fee. We had been great friends back in the bedsit days, but didn't have much in common once he started selling Socialist Worker outside Boots. However divorce is a great reuniter of old friends just as time is a great healer of relationships, as well as a smoother of previous political convictions. His have gone the same way as the stubble. Now he's clean and shiny, with a polished head and a polished face and scant sign of piercings in his ear though you can still see the dimples if you look closely. My specs are so strong I can see craters on the moon. We have no secrets... He even has rosy cheeks which he tries to pass off as a consequence of the cold but I think it's a symptom of middle England myself. He has kids at prep school, and like me, a partner who made him redundant. She was also a Socialist Worker in the late seventies. Now she's in the City.

I stir my tea with its treasure of three slices of lemon smiling up from the bottom of the cup - I wonder if the waiter thinks I'm sour - and look around the room. Eldest daughter is looking at a squirming three year old at the next table with some distaste.

'You know, when I was your age and lived here on Banbury Road, I used to go out with your father on a Sunday and we'd do exactly this - go to a museum, or a film, or to a concert in one of the colleges, and I'd look at all these navy blue people with their cut glass accents and messy, scrunchied hair, in their sensible shoes and with their grubby children called Jeremy and Jemima and want it all with a passion. I wanted to be them. I didn't want to live in a freezing bedsit in North Oxford with a two bar electric fire that was one more than I could afford to run on my pathetic salary, seeing my boyfriend once a week when he managed to drag himself away from London, trailing round the Botanical Gardens and looking through other people's windows in Park Town where there was always a fire burning in the grate and book-lined rooms where someone played the violin. I wanted the violin. I wanted the kids on the back of the bicycle going to the Squirrel School and the chintz skirt and the upholstery to match. I wanted to be conventional and middle class.'

I say this waiting for Rob to shoot me down in flames, but people in combustible houses don't throw napalm.

'And I got it.' I add.

My daughter doesn't react. Her childhood is all she knows. She grew up in violin-land, though in fact we had drums, piano, guitar and recorders but never the violin. We had, and have, the shabby, book-lined rooms that now I'd be delighted to get rid of but the ex refuses to pack his books up and take them to his new flat. We had the tow-headed, grubby children and despite my Scottish speech impediment, I even got some cut glass accents and a notch up the class ladder for me, and a few down for the ex, at ten grand a year London day schools.

Nevertheless, we are still not the most conventional of families. I mean I don't think mummy and daddy Navy-Blue take Jemima and Jeremy to see a Burlesque Striptease for their Christmas treat.

Indeed, my friend took his kids to the Messiah.

But Oxford, where I grew up, got married (twice), fell in love (four times) and lived from the age of 17 to 25 always makes me maudlin. It's like being a ghost and haunting yourself. You meet friends, like the ex Socialist Worker, who is now wearing a cashmere sweater and a blazer (and it's not even red, but powder blue) - or Mimo, who owns Ash-Shami, the Lebanese Restaurant. I saw him in St Giles and stopped and talked to him as though he was still my husband's landlord in Walton Well Road and I was going to see him later in the basement kitchen while I made a salad with newly discovered iceberg restaurant, that twenty-eight years later I wouldn't even consider a vegetable. I see my younger self walking along the Corn Market in a succession of fashion mistakes, with long red hair instead of bottle blonde, carrying half my body weight but heavy with anxieties. And the nostalgia, the regret, the sense of loss for what was falls upon me like the snow that's swirling through the black afternoon and traps me.

I look at the table beyond us. There's a man with silver hair and a matching woman, slim and petite in the ubiquitous navy blue uniform. Another couple in their late middle age sit next to them and there are two daughters, one of whom has a child. I try to work out if the two older women are sisters - they both have the same frame and grey, page-boy styled hair, but I can't be sure. The two men, however, are definitely their well-worn, long-accustomed husbands, and one of them is the father of the girls though I don't know which woman he's married to until she stands up and he helps her on with her coat.

'So, I used to look at the young couples and want their life, but now I look at the older couples, and think - I want that too.' I say, gesturing at the people who are now gathering up their belongings and slotting the baby into a stroller, preparing to leave. 'I want to be sitting here on the weekend with my husband of many years, having just had tea with my grown up children and our friends, or our in laws.'

My daughter looks uncomfortable, as though I'm saying that she, on her own, isn't enough of a pleasure, but it isn't that - it's that I'm longing for a fantasy of the life I thought I had already bought into, and paid all the instalments on, and only had to cash in. And you never compromise in fantasies. I mean, you don't dream of going to bed with someone who looks like George Clooney but shorter and a bit fat round the middle - you dream about George Ruddy Clooney!

My friend looks as glum as I feel. 'I know what you mean. That's what I wanted, what I still want...' He says and looks so sad that I immediately feel I have to dust myself down and get rid of all these chilly reminiscences - we can't both be sitting here, miserable about what was lost. But then, I remember when he wanted Revolution and brown rice and thought that all property was theft. Sometimes, thank goodness, you don't get what you want. And it's no bad thing.

I drain the last of my tea, button up my pink cardie to keep the cold off my cleavage, I tuck my bottle blonde hair into my vintage Dior coat that once belonged to the ex-husband's aunt, and which the daughter and I share (though she wears it as a cross over, and I button it straight), shuffle my feet across the floor until I find my totally unsuitable-for-snow-shoes which I've kicked off, throw round the fake fur stole and pull on the gloves lined with orange fur that is not fake. I check my lipstick and add a dab more red, pick up the zebra patterned pony-skin handbag, link arms with my agnostic Dr of Divinity daughter, and my ex Socialist Worker friend who muffles himself into a sleek black overcoat, and the three of us set off for the slush like The Scarecrow, the Lion and the Tin Man.

Actually, all things considered, it's probably a huge blessing in disguise that I didn't turn out to be navy blue.

Posted by Writer in Residence at 2:39 PM 3 comments links to this post

13 January 2010

Le Clique

I waved the tickets under the noses of the assembled offspring feeling like Mother of The Year. 'I've got us tickets to Le Clique at the Roundhouse, how great is that?'

Stunned silence and foot shuffling ensued.  It was like watching calves being rounded up for the abattoir.

'How great is that?'  I repeated, eagerly.

Apparently, not that great.

'Ma, it's an erotic circus.  I'm not going to an erotic circus with my mother.' said younger son.

'It's not erotic.  It's Burlesque.'

'What does Burlesque mean?' asked the teenager.

'Erm, sort of risqué ...'

'What does riskay mean?'

'Erotic,' jumped in younger son.

'Not really.'

'Yes it does, one of my friends went with his wife and he said it was an erotic circus and that one woman does a striptease and pulls a hankie out of.. '

'Don't give it away!'

But it was too late.  The teenager's eyes widened with revulsion and refused to go, as did younger son. 'What's wrong with the ruddy Nutcracker or a Carol Concert, like a normal mum?' He retorted.  Eldest son was working, he told me with some relief, which left only the eldest and me, and three spare tickets.

First stop was new man.  Total disinterest.   He was visiting his brother in trendy Macclesfield, that Mecca of frivolity and jewel of whichever part of the North it happens to be in, without a mobile signal or email, and didn't seem keen to cut his three day visit short to frolic with naked women in Camden, or anywhere else in the Greater London vicinity.  He's also been reading my book since Christmas and has only got to page 170 by now and so I think the words 'not' and 'bothered' can safely be married together without even the glue of a 'that'.

'Are you sure?  I haven't seen you for more than a week and it should be fun - it's an erotic circus (oh to hell with it, call a spade a spade, Marion),'  I wheedled.

'Nah, it's been a while since I've seen my brother...'

Alas, I think I have bigger problems than the size of my backside.

Nevertheless eventually I rounded up a few friends and packed into the trunk of Fran's Jag, off we went to the circus.  However - erotic?  Not really.  In fact, except for the woman pulling the hankie out of an unusual place that I would never have thought of, even if I had lost the option of stuffing it up my sleeve having taken off my jacket and tossed it across a stage, it was all pretty tame, old fashioned stuff like acrobatics and juggling served up with innuendo.  There was even a woman with hula hoops and another old guy doing tricks on roller skates - I mean it was hardly Dita von Teese.  I've had more smut on my reading glasses.

It was terrific fun though, especially when Chocolate Gateau, an obese black man with a beard dressed in leopard skin spandex and feathers chose my friend Fran as his target and straddled him in mid-song, then proceeded to rub his face between his large prosthetic breasts (having first handed me his specs).  He took it all in good spirits, though I hesitate to think how either of my sons would have reacted if a cross-dressing baritone had attempted a bit of bump and grind with them in public, not to mention new man.  Ha, if he thinks I'm big!  But at least I don't have facial hair baby.

Posted by Writer in Residence at 9:54 AM 0 comments links to this post

6 January 2010

crotchety

ding


Hurrah - a text!

just checking to see if your phone is actually on silent, Nico

Go on, shame me in front of the whole office.

Posted by Writer in Residence at 1:50 PM 1 comments links to this post

5 January 2010

Stockholm Syndrome

And then the youngest and I went to Florence.  Four days  in a hotel by the Ponte Vecchio doing a mother and daughter bonding break.

You've probably all been to Florence so I won't wax lyrically about standing in the rain under an inadequate umbrella in the long, snaking queue outside the Uffizi, after you've stood for half an hour in another long, snaking queue to pick up tickets that you paid for on the internet (including a (9E booking fee each) so that you wouldn't have to join the other queue for people who didn't prebook which was, admittedly, longer.  But not much.  Neither do I have to tell you that David has hands like spades and looks like he's been taking a lot of steroids judging by his not so dangly bits because you can see him in plaster in the V&A and in replica outside in a piazza for free.  There was also a Maplethorpe exhibition on at the Accademia which since it was called something about 'perfection in beauty' - the subject of youngest's latest art project, she really wanted to see.  I approached it with trepidation wondering if it was going to be a series of explicit photographs of rippled male torsos which it was, but only one contained anything explicit enough that it would frighten the horses, or indeed was in any way reminiscent of a horse and that would leave an impressionable seventeen year old doomed thereafter to be sorely disappointed by all the real life Davids.

So, we did the galleries and the churches and the shops and the restaurants and then came the really fun part:  How long is it since you've been under hotel arrest, sharing a bedroom with a teenager who doesn't particularly like you, held hostage by a boxed set of DVDs that she thoughtfully gave you for Christmas with the ominous title:  Supernatural?  I wouldn't be giving anything away if I told you that the whole premise of the series starring two wet, slightly dim boys hunting demons and ghosts is that their mother was glued to the ceiling of her bedroom and burnt alive by a devil.   Hmm.  Getting the idea, are you?

In episode one, the hot pouting girlfriend of one of the main characters goes the same way (that would be what we call in the business - a spoiler - for those of you who were going to run out and get the whole series) and this is rapidly followed by every single nightmare you've ever had being replayed in 50 minute parts.  Walking scarecrows with hooks for hands, blood drinking psychopaths, Bloody Mary scratching teenage girls' eyes out, Lunatic ghosts in the asylum - you name it, they're all here and all the action always happens at night.  One after the other.  All 11 episodes of the first season.  Hurrah!  Hook me up for a telly marathon!

I was scared stiff.

Daughter, however, relishing every minute of it - calmly playing solitaire with her creepy Tim Burton deck of cards like a knitter at a guillotine matinee, hoping to cram in four slots of gore, haunting and terror, every single night, while I cowered in my bed and thought pretty thoughts, terrified to put the lights out after the DVD.

Since returning home I've had to put the DVD case into a sealed box.  There's still the second series to go.

I'm thinking of leaving the box next to the fridge at home as it's one way to ensure I don't open the door.

The terror diet.

But it worked.  We bonded.  I was so frightened I hardly left her side.

Posted by Writer in Residence at 6:22 PM 0 comments links to this post