Suicide Green

Suicide Green is where I live. 

I live with my husband John who is 49 and works on a national newspaper . 

We have three children, Abigail aged 17, Zac 16, and Maisie 10. I also live with a spaniel called Evil, a cat called Buddy and a rabbit called Boris Johnson. 

We live in North London in  a large Edwardian villa with stained glass in the front door and two large marble fireplaces in the sitting room. We renovated the house seven or eight years ago with the help of a dodgy cash-in-hand builder, all our money and lots of antidepressants. 

Suicide Green is a colour. It is duck egg blue or eau de nil. it is a colour you will see everywhere around here. It’s on front doors and stair carpets and on that new retro wallpaper with the big flowers that people use for ‘feature walls’ in their bedrooms. Farrow and Ball do a lovely version of Suicide Green and they’ve just opened a shop on the High Street. Our front door is painted red, but, I was tempted. 

Suicide Green is our way of life. We are the desperate middle class, and lots of us went to Cambridge to read English. We work in the media or we are architects or writers or doctors, or all three. Some of us are working actors or designers and lots and lots of us have a PHD. 

We voted for the Blair government. 

We did it because we could never vote Conservative. 

We grew up in cathedral cities under Thatcher. 

We watched the love affair between Margaret and Ronald and we vowed to put an end to the “special relationship.” 

We grew up with the three minute warning,  Aircraft Carrier Great Britain and Greenham Common. Every nuclear missile in Eastern Europe was trained on us.

As a result, we’re not afraid of Islamic extremists. 

When we were young we were political. 

We joined CND. 

We freed Nelson Mandela. 

We craved power and influence and wore grandpa shirts over leggings and came to London to buy Crombies from the Great Gear Market in Kensington. Later we became punks and I think that is part of the problem.

  Now, we are very principled. 

Before we knew about carbon footprints we bought organic green beans from Sainsburys, then we were told the beans were flown in from Kenya and that polar bears were drowning so we stopped. 

We don’t fare dodge, not even on bendy buses.

For our holidays, we hire camper vans and spend August huddled together against the cold, playing Boggle on far flung British hillsides. Or we drive the people carrier to the ruin we bought in an unpopular bit of France that hasn’t much geography and is far from the coast. We don’t fly anywhere. This, we find, is becoming increasingly unpopular with the teenagers.  

We send our children to the local comprehensive school in a bid to hang on to our principles, but we have them privately tutored in every subject because which principle is worth our children's future? 

We all work really hard and we are all unwell. 

Secretly, we believe that the tap water has been poisoned by the Islamic Nazis and that there is a conspiracy of silence. 

We are not afraid, but how else to explain a soft phlegmy cough that continues for months or the boil that appeared in a neighbour’s armpit over Christmas?. 

Our daughters are called Ellie, Ella and Delilah, Abigail, Issy and Lily. Our sons are Zac and Alfie, Oscar and Harry. 

We dream of leaving London for fields and Agas, for L shaped farms in the Cotswolds, for Georgian terraces in Whitstable, for thatched cottages in Suffolk but Ellie and Delilah are such urban creatures. They would die if they lived further than 4 miles from Selfridges and Dom and Oscar have just started their GCSEs and would be totally thrown if they changed schools. Further more Dom’s dealer supplies him with nice, organic, home-grown grass rather than that revolting skunk stuff that people in the country smoke. 

  

So, this is who we are and this is Suicide Green.