I am assuredly not The Captain of My Soul. I have chanted madly whilst hanging up the washing to no avail. I am not the cabin boy either. I am the rat that is about to abandon the sinking ship that is my soul and decamp to Panama or similar.
Yesterday Zac spent the entire day in the playroom watching DVDs. Abigail spent the entire weekend going to parties in tiny mini skirts, coming home and saying she had a rubbish time. John said ‘Well, instead of going out to parties where you know and like no one why don’t you try doing some revision for your A levels ?
‘I haven’t got any revision and I can’t be bothered ’ she replied ‘It’s three months to my A levels and no one starts revising until the end of the Easter holidays anyway.’ I think we really have lost control of Abigail. John says that if she gets 3 Bs it will be absolute proof that A levels have become far too easy.
This morning I went into Abigail’s room and searched for drugs. Instead of drugs, I found a teapot full to the top with cigarette butts. I sat on the unmade bed and took in the piles of dirty washing and the mouldy teacups, and felt suddenly weak in the face of such chaos. Really I knew she had no drugs in her bedroom but I had hoped to find some explanation that didn’t land her misery so firmly at my door.
Yesterday, Maisie played me a beautiful piece she had written for the piano called ‘Butterflies.’ She played it to me as a shaft of palest spring sunlight danced in her hair. She bowed her copper-gold head above the keyboard and my soul quailed. I am a useless parent and Maisie will become a teenager and all joy will be sucked out of her.
Maisie too, will sit in the dark watching videos and drinking beer on a golden sunday afternoon. She will lounge sullenly in the kitchen with a sneer on her ashen face eating peas with a teaspoon. She will roll her silver blue eyes at me and she will not love Shakespeare, the Brontes or Jane Austin. and I really can’t be bothered with it.
Richard Madeley was interviewing John Lydon on television the other day and he asked, ‘ If I could throw a fishing rod back into the corridors of time and reel you in, you’d throttle you wouldn’t you?’ I think, if I had a similar fishing rod, I would find my older self more throttlable than my younger. I don’t appear to have the resources readily available that would have made being my older self workable. Actually, I wasn’t very good at being my younger self either. Oh crap! I wonder what John Lydon said.... Come to think of it, I remember Richard Madeley once saying to a young male actor he was interviewing ‘Your eyes are like great dark pools aren’t they ?’ He does have rather a peculiar interviewing style.
Panama here I come! But I’ll just make sure I’ve buggered up Maisie’s life properly first.
26th February 2008
Friendship
Book Club
Abigail and I are friends.
I told her I went to look for drugs in her bedroom and she told me ‘Fuck off!’ I told her I knew there weren’t any drugs in her bedroom really, and that if she wanted to smoke she didn’t have to do it in her bedroom, she could do it in the kitchen like a normal person.
She said ‘I can’t believe you rifled through all my stuff.’
I told her I hadn’t ‘rifled through all her stuff’ because if I had, I would still be in her bedroom about a third of the way through all the stuff under her bed and anyway I knew there wouldn’t have been anything worth finding. She doesn’t even keep a diary, for goodness sake.
She said ‘If I smoked downstairs you would all laugh at me and Dad would have a fit.’
I admitted that that was probably true.
Later, Maisie, Abigail and me sat in the sitting room and watched Masterchef. Abigail ate two oat cakes and an avocado. Hurray! Then she ate some 3% fat ice-cream and sicked a bit up into a bowl.
Abigail and I, think the ex-barrister should win Masterchef. Maisie favours the 18 year old Oxford student who made a complete arse of her lasagne. Abigail said ‘Just go back to Oxford where you belong.’
I said ‘I bet she’s the child of older parents.’
I felt really hungry watching Masterchef because I only had peas for supper.
Zac came into the room and we told him the only person left for him to support was the Irish single father. He said, ‘Why have you taken the beer out of my room? That was for the weekend. Why have you taken it ? I bought that with my own money and Abigail keeps drinking it, so I have to hide it in my room. It’s not fair!’ Then he said ‘Why have you taken the DVD player out of my room ? God I’m not allowed to do anything.’
John had gone out to meet a PR about a girl called Amy Levere who they were trying to get a record deal for. John discovered her playing in Nashville last year and thinks she might be the next big thing like Cat Power only not so mad.
Claire texted me and said she and Paul had accepted an offer from a very thin German for 835. I texted back ‘I hate you both.’
This morning I walked back from school with Paul and he said the German wasn’t that thin and that ‘There is ‘many a slip betwixt cup and lip.’ I said ‘Well, I still hate you both.’
On the next episode of Masterchef they are going to cook for the British Army in the jungles of Belize. I bet the ex barrister rustles up something really delicious.
I have to rustle up something really delicious for Book Group. Book Group are coming here tomorrow to eat and to discuss my book of choice ‘O Caledonia.’ I love ‘O Caledonia because the heroine reminds me of me but I won’t tell Book Group that.
I will tell them that I feel, the author evokes the quality of adolescent isolation perfectly, by placing her heroine in, what for most people, would be an alienating and challenging natural environment with which she, tellingly, feels an empathy. Thus we see that Janet is, infact, an elemental and, ultimately, untameable entity.... a bit like Heathcliff. I like Wuthering Heights too.
I don’t think I will say any of that actually I think I will say ‘’Ummm’ and ‘Do you think so ?’ and other noncommittal things. I hope they liked the book.
I will have to cook supper for Book Group. Perhaps I will pick up a few tips from the ex barrister in the jungle. Of course, if he is cooking guava and crocodile cakes with banana leaf coulis I would have to go all the way to Waitrose to get the ingredients which would be a bore and the Book Group might think I was being a bit show offy. Maybe I will make Spanish omelette and Greek salad instead. I must do an Ocado order, there’s absolutely no food in this house.
28th Fevruary 2008
Book Group
Fiona’s Bloody Mother and Her Friend Pixie’s Bloody Mother
Sex
Yesterday Book Group came here. I ordered Ocado but they couldn’t come at such short notice so I went all the way to Waitrose to get food and wine. I am unaccountably nervous about Book Group.
I made Spanish Omelette and green beans with toasted flaked alomonds., with a green salad and some date and walnut bread . I burnt the lemon tart from Waitrose beyond recognition.
In the end only four people turned up. Anna rang to say that she couldn’t come but didn’t give a reason. I thought it was a revenge attack because I missed her Book Group evening when we were going to talk about Elias Koury’s ‘Gate of the Sun’ because I was going to Will Smith’s ‘I Am Legend’ premier party. Abigail said it was probably because she had something vital to do like searching for loose change down the back of the sofa. Kim said that the real reason was because Anna’s marriage was coming to a bloody end and she was very depressed. Then I felt guilty.
Kim and Helga hadn’t read ‘O Caledonia’ because they are very busy with careers but dear Mina had, so we left them out and talked about how very much we liked it. We talked about how we enjoyed Janet’s untameable hair, how we loveed the way she almost murdered the baby and how funny it was when Janet’s sister fell out of the car.
I drank too much wine because of the nerves and also because Kim had given up alcohol for Lent and Helga only wanted one beer and Mina does not drink as quickly as me. Now I have a headache.
Today I drove the older children to school because Abigail had made a beautiful cake for Briony’s birthday and she didn’t want it crushed in the bus crush. When I got back John told me that Maisie had fallen down the stairs and had said ‘Take me to hospital!’ very loudly for about 10 minutes but that he thought she was fine now. She is fine, as long as she can lie on the sofa and watch Tracey Beaker and not go to school. If I suggest school she says she can’t move and begins to cry.
I am glad I don’t have to take her to hospital because unless you can demonstrate that your child has a compound fracture or has severed an artery our local hospital makes you wait four hours to see a doctor and then two more to have an X ray and they are very rude too.
My friend Fiona from Essex rang.
‘Can we come and stay?’ she said.
I haven’t spoken to Fiona for ages. Her husband doesn’t like me much. When we were little we were best friends.
‘Can Sam come too?’ she asked ‘He’d really like to see you.’ Sam is her husband.
‘Would he ?’ I said ‘Well you can’t come this weekend because I think my mother is coming and you wouldn’t be able to have the spare room.’
‘Oh,’ said Fiona ‘Would she drink half a bottle of gin and then just slump in the corner unconcious? It’s boring when they do that.’
I said that no I didn’t believe she would.
Fiona said ‘Oh no, that’s my mother isn’t it ? Your mother doesn’t do that does she ?’
I said ‘No, she doesn’t like gin much. ‘
Then Fiona said she had the most terrible shock the other day. An artist had come into the university gallery she runs , with his work on ‘Man’s Inhumanity To Man’ and one of his pieces represnted a garotting machine.
What’s that ?’ asked Fiona. He told her and Fiona had a funny turn. She’d recovered a memory from the 80s when she remembered her maternal grandmother drawing a garotting machine on a restaurant napkin. ‘Perhaps you could use one of these.’ She’d said to Fiona’s father.
Fiona feels that her mother’s mother was suggesting the murder of her own daughter i.e. Fiona’s mother who drinks gin and slumps in a corner. I thought it terribly funny.
‘Stop laughing.’ said Fiona ‘It’s not funny. I felt quite ill. How would you feel if you remembered seeing something as terrible as that?’
I said that I thought that her Grandmother had been being ironic but Fiona is sure she was not.
She said her mother had been horribly behaved throughout her childhood and that her friend Pixie’s mothert had been worse. Apart from calling her ‘Pixie’ she had upstaged her own daughter at many fancy dress parties. I have never been to a fancy dress party.
‘How exactly does one upstage one’s daughter at a fancy dress party?’ I asked.
‘Pixie’s mother dressed up in a scuba diving outfit when Pixie had only dressed up as a Cavalier and when they got to the party Pixie’s mother had wet herself because she couldn’t undo her scuba diving zip.’ said Fiona.
I have to admit that must have been quite challenging.
I am very pleased. John has started to pester me for sex. I knew if I ignored him for long enough he would capitulate. I have turned him down three times. If he knew what a Brazilian was he would probably be insisting upon me having one by now. I must invite lots of random people over for coffee to tell them about my sex pest husband.
Friday 29th February 2008
Proposal
I am already married, so will not be proposing to any men today.
Saturday 1st March 2008
I hate March. Piceans are born in March. Piceans are slippery to a man and I tend to avoid them. I also hate the way March pretends to be spring and then turns bitterly cold just when you have taken the horticultural fleece off your echiums. You have to watch the weather forecasts like a hawk.
Today we went to the Royal Academy to see the Russians. In fact they were almost entirely French but the Russians own them. We took Maisie and Sylvie. Sylvie is staying the weekend while her parents are in America.
We had to become friends of the Royal Academy to get into see the Russians or else we would have had to queue for 40 minutes. John says this is a good thing because we can go to the Summer Exhibition early and buy a painting. We are already friends of The Tate and it’s a major operation to get there so I don’t know exactly how useful this new friendship is going to be, but I simply cannot queue for 40 minutes so there was nothing else to be done.
We all loved the Russians. Maisie loved the Chagalls. I loved the Matisses and John loved the Monets. Sylvie said she liked them all because she is very well brought up. After the Russians we went to Fortnum and Mason.
What is the point of Fortnum and Mason ? How does it work ? We had lunch there and everyone in the restaurant was older than us or foreign and John said he didn’t think any of them had been there before because he kept hearing people asking the hundreds of staff where things were. As in ‘Excuse me, where can I find an extraordinarily expensive eau de nil tea set with small gilt flowers on it ?’ or “Do you sell easter egg hampers with a price range between say, £50 and £80 ?’
The little girls had potted shrimps for lunch and I had wild salmon. John had a tiny bird but I have forgotten which sort. After lunch we bought some wine and two passion fruits and then we walked through Soho.
The weather had changed again and it was very warm. People sat outside and smoked at cafe tables. Prostitutes lounged exotically in doorways and the sex shops had their doors open. Old Compton Street was not as much fun as it used to be because, according to Ellis, all the gay men have moved to Vauxhall. Melati is still in Great Windmill Street and the French Pub is just the same on Dean Street. If we had stopped and peered in I am sure we would have seen an old chum of Henrietta Moraes enjoying an afternoon absinthe with Lucian Freud in the snug, but we were in a hurry.
‘What’s a sex shop?’ asked Maisie.
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