we shall hear angels, we shall see the sky

There's a beach near the bots' school where we have gone since they were small enough for me to see the tops of their heads or be in a room with them for more than eight seconds without their lips curling involuntarily and the klaxon in their brains shriek 'NOT LISTENING.'

I bought a painting of it last year at a local art fair; the artist told me how her life had cracked open and she and come here to start afresh.  This was the first view she had of her new home.  The painting shimmers and she told me her jeweller friend had given her a bag of diamond dust that she'd mixed  into the paint she used for the sea.

It's a perfect bowl of changing sky; beige sand and curving banks of navy blue shingle, huge oyster and mussel shells crunching underfoot.  When the tide goes out you can walk for miles on cool watery ridges.

The promenade is Victorian, offering careful pleasure in swan-shaped boats and swathes of stern forest-green bathing huts.  They cost as much as houses in the North.

On this beach, the bots have thrown off little stripy uniforms, free from the exhausting strictures of clapping and finger-painting and shot, chubby-thighed and squealing, into the sparkling sea.

They have played cricket here, had class barbecues, sand-sculpture competitions.  I'm sure they will also come here, furtively and tentatively believing they are the first generation to thrill to booze-fuelled disobedience and all the fun that brings.

They snorted in that teenage way when I told them that there was diamond dust in the painting and said I'd been ripped off and was a mug for a fairy tale.

I drove them in to do huge exams this week and went down to the beach with the dog.  She squealed excitedly, remembering the time before the cool detachment of the school bus when we came down every morning after drop-off and knew all the dogs.

I let her out in the bright early sunshine and she disappeared off across the flats, running up excitedly to friends old and new, sniffing them just to make sure.  I followed with a genteel tea and fistful of poo bags and looked at the spangled, glittering sea.

There's diamond dust there alright.

What is to be seen

With all the new schools, new countries and new mathematical systems, I am mathematically illiterate.  I thought, fleetingly, that geometry was beautiful and precise and that algebra was essentially solving puzzles, but the majority of it was hieroglyphics to me.  With fingers, I can do any sum under twenty.  Sixty if the bots are at home and I can be arsed to take my wellies off.

I ended up doing Maths Studies for Baccalaureate - it is essentially colouring in tessellations and predicting whether you'll get an ace of hearts.  One of the few things I remember is truth tables - or was it logic?  The two were sadly not always synonymous in my chaotic school life.

Either way, I rather loved the spare, clear elegance of if and then.  If I get 39 points then I can escape to University.  If I hide my lighter up my sleeve, then I can have a sly fag before drama.   If I read Walden to the end without stabbing myself, then I will discover, allegorically, the secret of solitary self-reliance.

Poor Rose is mathematically blessed and will be doing GCSE a year early.  This weekend, as a sensible antidote to teenage hyperbole and contagious hysteria, school has taken her group far away to a forest, in tents, with three tons of pasta each and a squirty bottle of golden syrup.

Last night it threw down buckets and today is blowing wild and sunny; that fabulous, illogical weather that polka-dots the pavements with blossom confetti and induces madness with jangling new leaves and gusts of blinding, sunlit rain.

They will be soaking and starving when they get back; they have no phones, only maps and notebooks. They have to record fauna and count wild ponies and species of meadow-flower.  Thoreau would approve.

Thank heaven she's good at maths; it would be a nightmare removing those great sodden boots every time she got to eleven.

After moments or lifetimes

When the bots were tiny - or at least, as tiny as giant's children can be - we all piled down to the as-yet-unrenovated house my parents and sister had just bought.

By which euphemism I mean no central heating; uninhabited for several decades bar one old chap in one room; no kitchen; a surreal mis-mash of furniture and a positively Dickensian lighting 'system' of strings of lanterns tacked to the walls of corridors and draughty rooms; ancient banging shutters at the icy windows and the biggest, most brightly-lit Christmas tree we'd ever seen, blazing away in the cavernous hallway.

Over several days, we all piled in in drips and drabs; Edward and I smuggled an electric heater into our room, panicking that we Freddy might get cold.  As it was, the babies and toddlers were all bathed in kettlefuls of scalding water in the old butler's sink, bundled quickly into all-in-one polar fleeces and set free to stump about excitedly on sturdy legs, red faces beaming in the shadowy, flickering light.

Christmas dinner was cooked on a single gas ring and in a Baby Belling cooker that year. About twenty of us sat down on a mixture of camping chairs and delicate ancient chairs to eat the full works - turkey and sausages in bacon and sprouts and stuffing and Christmas pudding and white sauce.  None of the adults had dared brave the cold to wash, so we all wore a pall of plaster dust and grime; we piled on logs and jumpers, lit candles and held torches while we took turns to stuff the stockings and climb carefully up the dark staircase to lay them along the bed piled with higgled-piggeldy, snuffling, snoring filthy babies.

This is probably the last year we'll have christmas at that special house. All the families are moving on and it's just not viable any more.  My dad might at last get his dream of a tiny bungalow that's too small for anyone to visit ever.  We'll see.

On the 26th, we'll sit in the warm fire-lit rooms in black tie and eat a feast that's been cooked on a range in my mother's kitchen.  The lights will all work, though we'll probably turn them off to play Sardines.  There was talk of a goose, it was treated with deserved contempt by all the grandchildren; this year, they'll be wearing dinner jackets and silk dresses and be allowed to stay up as late as they like.

I'm the only one still small enough to get into the butler's sink.  It's probably time to go.

Learn, unlearn and relearn

It's exams at school this week, which means that Rose comes home and consults her beautifully-coloured revision timetable, inhales supper, watches exactly one episode of America's Next Top Brain Surgeon and settles down for the evening with books and charts all over the kitchen table.  She appears with metronomic regularity when the cooker clock goes off, to give me scary bits of paper decorated with hieroglyphical formulae on which to test her.  I frequently mispronounce things or hold it upside down.  This makes her impatient and snappy.

Freddie trails in wearing the face of Dame Maggie Smith, throws off an experimental sneeze and cough or two and picks sadly at his supper, shoulders defeated.  I attempt amusing and memorable ways to remember the principles of refraction and Henry VIII's reasons for trashing the monasteries but no amount of winsome mnemonics or 5-minute bursts of Match of the Day will lift his morbid shroud of gloom.

Edward, sensibly, has buggered off to London for a few days work, his own tragic pall exacerbated by the dog being violently sick all over her basket at 4am the day he left; necessitating a trip down three flights of dark, chilly stairs to let her out into the freezing night, a shivering wait in the cellar while she retched theatrically, followed by a hijus clean-up operation.

I made a lemon and poppy seed cake for Edward's return.  I think, on reflection, there's very little more romantic than letting your wife sleep through the explosive effects of a rotting badger on the digestion system of a Weimeraner.  Except, perhaps, clearing up every last trace, in the frosty black morning, in your pyjamas and t-shirt.  Because you have wrapped the dog in your dressing gown, tucked her in beside your unconscious wife and left them to sleep a few hours more before waking the slatternly pair with strong coffee and and porridge.

That's how much Edward hates revision.

And occasionally, cake.

What the f@*%? The kid lost a @!%$^ passport,
for Christ's sake.
 If I say this looks like the #&^!* mother,
this is what the %(%&!@ looks like.

Edward woke me up recently in the middle of the night, hissing furiously that we'd been burgled.  Apparently he couldn't find Rose's passport. I found it in her backpack. She went to France on a school trip.  In July.

Old friends will remember that the words 'Rose's passport' can turn me instantly into a pillar of salt.

It turned out that my throwaway comment at supper that night 'well, if you want to go to New York, it should be at Christmas time when it's all lit up and beautiful' had hit home.  Edward was mid-online-flight-booking when they demanded passport details.   Thus turning the lovely surprise into a midnight marital heart-stop.

However, daylight, a few days' distance and an appreciation of the most fantastic family surprise Christmas present in the world have restored my sunny nature.  NYC is probably my favourite winter place in the world, and we've got a whole week to walk ourselves ragged and revel in its icy sparkle.

The bots are beyond excited and can't wait to nip over to Hoeboken to Carlos Bakery to make sure Buddy survived the flooding, buy a box of enormous day-glo cupcakes and hopefully hear some of the world-class swearing that the big guy did when they crushed his sugar dinosaur.

Anyone got any more mainstream suggestions for entertaining them?

Dancing from within

"Fek's sake, I'll never get a signal up there.  Try your iPad. "
"No buggering way.  She's following me on Twitter as well."
"Nightmare.  And I forgot to put bloody trousers on."
"Revision it is, then."

If I had any shame I would be embarrassed at how long it is since I last posted.  It feels like a couple of days, so I have clearly fallen into a parallel space:time continuum that makes each second stretch to an hour.

I have had my nose gaffer-taped to the grindstone trying to finish what I started; not the most familiar of feelings to a bolter like me, but the rhythm of days you kindly prescribed (you know who you are and I thank you all) has held me fast to both task and chair and perhaps soon you can judge for yourselves if I wouldn't have been better off just defrosting the freezer or learning Swedish.

The seasonal rhythm continues outside my head too - the brown, dank landscape wears a flirty morning negligee of frost; the afternoon walks are muffled by a deliciously rank carpet of lime and scarlet.  The cooling pies and cakes have scented the kitchens of many women before me.  The muffled grumbles as bots are reminded of exam revision is also timeless; the furtive sneaking under bedclothes to broadcast complaint via phone and Facebook perhaps less so.

This afternoon, pea-soup fog permitting, I will break the rhythm with a two-day jaunt to see an old friend in Amsterdam.  There is a gallery opening, an exhibition of impressionism, some snert (ah, the fun we had with that) and that gut-aching laughter that comes from knowing where all the bodies are buried and not giving a fig.

I will be back next week. In more ways than one.

I have remembered as much

There has been a great exodus down memory lane here recently.  My parents' recent 50-year celebrations brought a sheaf of unseen photographs of us all growing up, many of us at the ages my bots are now.  Rose was horrified. "Didn't you ever brush your hair, Mum?" She had a point.  Boris Johnson has my teenage hair.  It looks marginally better on him.

Freddie scanned every photo for signs of naughtiness, which, given it was the seventies, was a fruitful exercise. "Is that your Snoopy lighter, Mum?  Did you drink that rum and coke on the table? It's quite dark, did you stay up very late?"

The cousins all piled down for half term last week; we took the three boys to a pub to hear a skiffle band and eat pints of prawns. They wanted stories of their babyhood; my sister and I, slightly horrified at our incipient Alzheimer's, scoured our shrinking brains for new tales.  Happily, they are word-perfect on the family fables and were completely sidetracked at being allowed to fetch soft drinks from the bar like proper lads, so I think we got away with it. I vowed to try and write some down before they sling me into a retirement home; I berated myself horribly for not having kept up the Notebook of Adorable Things that has about nine entries.

Today, I am looking after a 9-month old baby girl for a friend.  She has eaten envelopes, the corner of a maths book and fistfuls of bread and honey.  She moves like a ninja whenever I turn my back;  she has pressed all the buttons and reset the printer forever.

I am remembering exactly how my own children were at this age; those gummy sticky beams of sheer joy, the primitive desire to cram absolutely everything in one's mouth, from a camera to the dog's tail, and the furious Glasgow-drunk fist-swinging before falling suddenly asleep under a chair.

It is also a matter of absolute astonishment that I even managed nine entries in the NAT.

Drowsy with the harmony

Freddie, Rose, your mum and dad have arrived.  See, they've made a banner.  And that's quite a big camera they've got. Should your dad really be standing on that table? Ah, that's sweet, they know all the words.  And they're dancing, how charming.  Look, your mum's crying her head off.  Aren't you going to say hello?

This year, both the bots were finally old enough to go on the senior school music tour.  Two coach loads of singers and musicians, plus overexcited teachers, go for a week every August to somewhere fantastic in Europe.  They sing and play jazz and swing in squares, by lakes, in churches.

It was Freddie's birthday while they were away.  He was a bit thoughtful about that and so we suggested Edward and I fly out for a week.  We would attend the concerts and on his birthday take them, any little chums they cared to invite, out to dinner.  Rose immediately asked to be excused; the whole thing would be embarrassing. And anyway, they had a rooftop pool at the hotel.  And anyway, it was Freddie's birthday, not hers.  And anyway it would just be really, really embarrassing.

By the time we waved off the coach, prior to our dash to the airport, Freddie had also decided that he'd be fine on his birthday, and in fact, we really didn't need to come to any of the concerts.   It would probably be embarrassing.

I had made a list of the paintings and sculptures I thought we should see.  I organised early-morning bookings at the Florentine museums, googled restaurant reviews and made reservations.  We sorted out a hire car and printed maps and directions to the five concerts they were performing.

Our hotel, which turned out to be a castle, was in the absolute middle of nowhere.  It dated from the 14th century and was a cicada-filled paradise; great scented bushes of ancient greying lavender and rosemary; crumbling ochre walls; thoughtful spots of shade for the wimpy Inglesi. That dry, throbbing heat for the sun-worshipping Scot. Heaven. That first night, the bots texted - it's fine, don't come.  Please.  You'll be embarrassing.

We negotiated attendance at one evening concert.  The tiny cobbled square was pinpricked by candles; we perched on rickety old chairs and tried not to cry or clap too loudly.  The bots muttered 'Hi' as they ran past at the end. It took three hours to drive back to the hotel.

The next morning, we cancelled the tightly-packed schedule of reservations we'd made.  We didn't see a single masterly brushstroke.  Not a solitary marble rump.  Not a shaving of truffle passed our lips.  Instead, we spent the entire week reading by the deserted swimming pool. Giddy with solitude and  freedom, we played Marco Polo, pushed each other in and did cannonballs. I did yoga and fell over a bit.  Edward found an old wooden ladder and scrumped white peaches and tiny pears from the orchard.

How really, really embarrassing.

there ain't no need to go outside

"Come, my babies, let us dance dance between the raindrops"
"Fek's sake, I'm covered in stud marks and I've got hypothermia, are you mad woman?"
"And I can't see the new One Direction video cos the shagging internet is bust. I wish Madonna would adopt me."

When I was a small girl, pedalling furiously about on my sturdy bike, looking for wrongs to right and injured animals to bandage, the weather was usually on my side.  Anything below a Force 9 gale warning and I would be belting outside after breakfast, free, off up trees, climbing walls, licking the satisfying blood-like taste from my palms after swinging about on rusty iron poles.  And really, in the north of England, you're pretty safe if you prefer inclement times.

But the famed Summer of '76 was a nightmare of glaring sunshine, and I was like a stray dog in a dustbowl depression-era film, mewling unhappily and slinking around to cower in the shade, unmoving.  My mother would slather us in Ambre Solaire oil, a smell that to this day spells sticky enforced displeasure.  And we would be sent out to Make The Most of It.  I hated it.  I would be winkled out from behind the curtain, re-reading the bit where Ginger dies in Black Beauty, wallowing happily in great hiccoughing sobs.

That summer was followed by emigration to the West Indies. We had sun every sodding day.  I lost the joy of hearing chilly rain splatter heavily against the window, the haunting song of blasting wind and the indescribable pleasure of uncurling your raw, scarlet claws from your bicycle handles and feeling the prickling sting as you shoved them under hot water.  But you get used to anything as a child and soon we were berry-brown and barefoot and couldn't remember log fires or twilight or slush.

It came back in spades, though, yesterday.  Lamps were on all day, I cranked up the heating, gleefully dug out my boots from the attic. The internet fizzled out, some branches came down.  Fantastic.  The bots' matches were called off half-way through and they were as navy-blue as their kit as they dripped miserably on the doorstep.  I ran hot baths, roasted chicken, lit candles, shook blankets.

They moaned like mad about the cold, the grey sky, the rain coming in under the back door.  "You love this, Mum, don't you?" they accused crossly.  They did prep, theatrically thumping about and shivering, incandescent at being cut off from Facebook, internet research into King Lear and respiratory disease.

I made gravy and moved soggy mountains of blue stuff about it the laundry room.  I made those unconvincing soothing noises that come from a place of unspeakable smugness that never again will I have to do prep or enforced team sport.  I could hardly keep the smile off my face. Today it's still slashing down.  A man is coming soon to hang great thick blackout curtains over the huge windows in Rose's room.  The second they're up, I'm taking the dog, a huge mug of tea, a loo roll and Black Beauty upstairs to road test them.

Illustration here

In heaven, where there is no depreciation

Hellair?  Lorst property? I'd jest like to report a lorst telephone.  What's thet? You've only a  gramophone and a tin of peaches?  Look again, sir! Now you're jest being silly.  Do I sound like the type of gel who'd wear size twelve brogues? What, a whole bagful of them? What unspeakable fool would throw those away?

Like many Englishmen, or perhaps it's just chaps in general, Edward doesn't see the point in getting new things when he already has a whatever-it-is that is perfectly serviceable.  On honeymoon, we stood on the dock at Fort William waiting for the ferry to Iona.  We had left London in the hottest August on record and found ourselves standing, with the worst sort of Champagne hangover, in the slate-grey stair-rod rain which usually welcomes folk to Scotland.

Edward squelched off and reappeared in a full-length Drizabone, towering above the crowds like a jackaroo in exile.  He was giddy with the thrill of purchase.  "It's an amazing coat, look these straps go round your legs for riding and if it snows it just slides off this cape thingie.  And the best thing,"  he fished about in the ridiculously huge pocket.  Out came a half-bottle of peaty, oaky Oban single malt, whose smoky scent will forever take me back to that squally day of tilting ferry and a springy heather climb, the sudden sunshine on John Smith's grave, dolly's cottages in colours to shame the ferrous skies and above all, the kind of easy rolling laughter that dances on the edge of everything when you are young and excited and let loose on a bottle of whisky at 11 am.

We moved house later that year, not in an organised fashion.  Still young and excited, I was pregnant and prone to sudden narcolepsy and memory losses.  I packed all Edward's footwear, (the shoes that had been made for him as a 21st present, brown Church's brogues for Sunday country pub walks, his smart black Loakes for tramping the Square Mile, his ancient wellies that were the only ones big enough for his feet, yards of wooly sock and acres of threadbare corduroy) in a black bin back.  The same kind that I was merrily filling with all the crap superfluous to our next house and flinging down the chute into the communal rubbish bins.  I will spare you the details of the horrific subsequent mix-up, but you may be assured that the sound of rolling easy laughter was absent for several days.

His phone dates from the last century, just.  He has tried to teach the bots to be proud of sentiment and frugality.  However, we three all have iStuff.  Edward's Nokia has sellotape keeping the battery in and never gets a signal in the pub.  It has almost a decade's worth of photos on it and every morning he clicks the noisy buttons to read the papers online in Delhi, Sydney, New York.  He says, "This is all I need, look at this, I'm reading papers across the world from bed."  The bots say "oh Dad, your phone makes us want to cry."

Last night, in a taxi after a long conference-and-drinks in London, the phone fell out of a hole which has inexplicably appeared in the Driza pocket after a solid 13 years of wear.  It was returned, hurrah for black cab drivers, to Edward, but had been sat on by a large passenger and may be beyond repair.  The bots have been online before school, squabbling about os-something and does he need a cloud.  They cannot wait to help him choose a new one.  He is inconsolable.  I've just put a bottle of Oban on the Waitrose order.

the wave that has passed by, be recalled

"Are you coming in, Ethel or what?"
"Doubt it, think I'll just dither about on the step attention-seeking and threatening to faint until you all lose patience and pelt me with whelks."

Over the summer, we spent a happy annual week with family in Wales near a tiny seaside town, where the nearest neighbours are sheep farmers with tough, freckled, big-hearted lads about Freddie's age, who are initiating all the cousins in the dark art of jetty jumping.

The trick is to time the jumping for when the tide is out and the leap is stomach-droppingly high.  Later on, the tide comes in and the ancient bell below the pier tolls sonorously, announcing time for the small fry and tourist kids in new wetsuits.  The coolest kids jump in ancient board shorts, flipping, diving, pretending to fall.  Rose and her cousin Annabel have been jumping with the local toughs for a few years now; Freddie has always point-blank refused.  Even the high-tide soft-kids-from-London jumps were met with his bare feet planted firmly against the wooden pier edge.

Each day, he would announce over breakfast that he was going in this time, get kitted up, come down to the jetty and greet everyone, and then decide he didn't want to jump after all.  He'd then spend an hour being preached at, hassled, counselled and cheered on by the lads, sister, cousins, assorted aunts and uncles, locals and total strangers.  He would get thumbs-up in the evening queueing for hot chocolate 'hey, Freddie, did you go in? Never mind, bet you jump tomorrow.' Each evening, he'd listen to the girls' tall tales, see their matted-sea-hair, runny noses and huge grins, and swear blind that, next day, he'd jump.


Edward and I hung about cajoling, bribing, getting the camera out, putting it away again, spending fortunes on flotation devices, goggles and hot chocolate. By the end of the week, neither of us could handle the pathos of the towel-wrapped figure shivering and peering white-faced over the edge for another second, and decided to pursue land-based activities that would leave us all less traumatised.

On the second-last day, a cousin came to relieve me of lifeguard duty so I could take Freddie to the honey ice-cream factory for pride-salving cones.  She raised an eyebrow, I shook my head, we sighed and I turned to gather the towels, shoes and resolutely dry boy.  A huge cheer went up, followed by a splash and more cheering and clapping.  Freddie had jumped in and I had bloody well missed it.  He appeared a minute or two later covered in saltwater, snot and triumph.

'Come on then,' he said, grabbing his towel and marching off down the pier.

'Is that it?  Don't you want to hang out with the lads? Can I get a video of you jumping?'

'Nope.  I told you I didn't want to because I wouldn't like it, I did it and it was just as horrible as I thought. So now can we go and get honey ice-cream and can everyone stop going on about it.  I won't be doing it again, I knew I'd hate it and I did.'

I'm not going to labour the point here, but 1. I'm back and 2. some of you might just end up taking me for honey ice-cream.  You know who you are.

the frailty of our human clay

This morning's two minutes' silence happened at the beginning of Freddie's Sunday League Under 11s football match. It's been hotting up recently; they are unbeaten so far this season, and are through to the semis of the Shire Cup. So there was quite a large crowd of parents and grandparents huddling under huge brollies along the touchline. The promised rain lashed down on us and the car boot sale with which we shared the field.

The goalie for the opposition, who were also unbeaten, was wearing a black armband. His Grandad was just down the muddy touchline from me. "His dad didn't come back from Afghanistan last year," he said quietly. The two teams lined up to observe the silence. The car boot sale was like a frieze - ordinary people in waterproofs and soggy fleeces stood with bowed heads in the rain. Two rows of small boys, napes bared poignantly to the elements, looked solemnly at their boots. The referee and the opposition manager stood protectively behind their goalie, a hands each resting lightly on his skinny damp shoulders.

There were no medals. No hymns, no bands, no wreaths. Just ordinary people respectfully remembering. The most genuinely moving two minutes' silence I have observed in years.

And we're through to the next round,

Vulgar vulgar vulgar, but by God, we've missed you...

Occasionally, when the blood sugar is low or they've just had double maths or cross-country, the bots will work themselves into an indignant home-time back-seat fury that they weren't born American. They see it as a huge waste that I went to High School, had a locker and a boyfriend with a letter jacket and STILL act more Penelope Keith than Irene Cara. With all my advantages and all.

On less angry days (lost trackie bums, lost hymn books), they content themsleves with whining 'Why did you leave London, Mummy, whhhyyyyy, we love London, whyyyy can't we still live there, all the cousins do, it's not faiiiirrr.' And sometimes, as I stand in Morrisons with more teeth in my head than the rest of the shop put together, I wonder the same thing myself.

However, they went off happily this weekend for a metro-fix and I stayed here thinking, for the second time in 16 years, that however bleak my life may feel on waking, at least I am not the Duchess of York. God Almighty, woman.

The cousins the bots are staying with have a friend whose dad used to Play For Chelsea.and now Manages A Team. Freddie hyperventilates just going over the threshold, even though he has never met him and is also furious that I have. 13 years ago when babysitting the cousins. Before he was born. Anyway, Freddie rang me this morning. 'Daddy's got something to ask,' he squeaked in a big rush. 'Well,' drawled  Edward, 'the bots have been invited to go swimming with the cousins at you-know-who's place. If we go, we'll be back too late for supper, so we were just wondering.. He paused. I imagined Freddie, sturdy legs and sticky fingers pretzelled in prayer - I heard him breathe 'pleasepleaseplease.'

'No bloody way,' I sputtered, 'I've been slaving over the curry all damn morning, how dare you even ask?'

Just kidding.

I said yes, and heard the shriek all the way from south west London. I'm going to put aubergines and courgettes and other hijus vegetables in the curry and when I've eaten it, I'm going to fall off the wagon into three bottles of burgundy, spark up a Silk Cut and stagger down the Rotary Club to see if anyone wants an introduction to Edward. Fifty quid'll do it.

Confused readers click here for the whole fabulously funny intrusive gutter journalism at its worst story.

Munters in Hunters

Just cock off, I'm not bloody well coming back. She's got every episode of Pineapple Dance Studios on SkyPlus, she's bought me bloody legwarmers and body glitter AND she's replaced my Eminem CDs with the Cabaret soundtrack. Jesus, Rose, get the mad bitch to start drinking again. I'll call you from Australia.

The bots had an Easter week in Wales at Edward's family farm. They rang me where I was battling elements of all types up in the Lake District: 'It's fab, we saw loads of these small lambs.' 'Oh, darlings, how wonderful, there are masses here too, aren't they adorable when they leap into the air?' 'Not these ones, a fox ate their brains and all their livers have come out.' 'Oh, and we went on quad bikes. With no helmets.'

Meanwhile, ignoring rising panic, I revisited the lovely house I grew up in on a cliff, climbed the wall I have scaled in my dreams for over 30 years, spied on the children who live there now and discovered that a middle-aged heap of sobbing nostalgia stuck on a very high wall is statistically more likely to frighten than enchant.

Like a Hobbit, I stumped about the fells and cliffs in attractive waterproof trousers, fuelling up on heavenly coffee and walnut cake from the WI in Cockermouth (which name still, pathetically, makes me snigger), being uplifted by and warbling tunelessly along to this and working through the first series of this on my laptop each night. I walked and climbed for miles and my poor old wellies have finally given up the ghost. So, in time for summer, I have discovered this amazing website and my new-dead-cheap-technically-I-have-saved-money Graphite Gloss Hunters arrived this morning. I'm rather pleased with them, but suspect I am rocking less of a Kate-Moss-British-summer-festival vibe than a Lego Lady Policeman.

Either way, they are hideously shiny, so I am taking the dog into the fields now to get them covered in lamb's brains.

Shovelling and Schadenfreude

Bot: "Grampa, how do we address the second cousin of a widowed Bishop who is also the first son of an heriditary baronet?"

Northern Socialist: "Tosser."

Half term and my lovely nephew's birthday always coincide and over the years we have built a tradition of nice-dinner-sleepover-and-decadence. The last bit comes from a grandmother's arch remark many years ago on seeing the four bots in my bed watching a Disney film with bowls of Hula Hoops and juice. Anything fun and likely to be disapproved of is now known in our house as decadence and I think that's probably about right.

Anyway, being on the cusp of teenhood, Oscar requested a visit to our favourite Indian, the Arsenal game on TV and everyone to wear neon. The owners of the restaurant are delightful and kind and treated our colourful party like royalty.

This followed on nicely from the conversation the bots and my sister had been having in the car about good manners and etiquette. They had been (surreptitiously) taking the piss out of their grandmother for banging on about manners at lunchtime and the Pretty One had tried to explain the difference between the two.

In our family, we think that good manners are vital and a way of welcoming everyone, duke to dustman and treating them the same. We don't have much truck with etiquette and think that it's more about exclusion and making those who don't know the form feel awkward and left out. She tried to explain this to the four bots. Freddie, being a fair bit younger, cottons on eventually, 'Ah, is it like shovelling?' 'What?' 'You know, helping up a lady when she falls over in the street like the Colonel is always saying.' Silence while they all wonder what sort of female company the Colonel keeps that is likely to be so unsteady in public. 'Oh, chivalry you mean.' 'Yes, that's it. Helping her up and not laughing.'

After a feast, the bots settled down to watch footie and the Pretty One and I holed up in the kitchen with tea and fancy chocolates. We hacked my brother's account and invented Facebook Schadenfreude. It's a hilarious game for adults based on spite, bitterness and nerves of steel. Look up people you really should have got over after 20-odd years. Check out as much of their lives as they've posted in the ether. Award yourself one point each for divorce and redundancy. Take away one point each for photos of a ten-year anniversary party and second homes (second homes on another continent, minus five points). Award yourself two points for each child that is boss-eyed, scowling or otherwise unappealing. Deduct two points for each child that is playing sport at an international level under the age of 16 or well-dressed and smiling. Profile pictures by Demarchelier, school reunions at Fouquet's you weren't invited to and a Porsche for a 21st birthday (I am not making any of this up, sadly) are just Plain Bad Manners.

We laughed ourselves silly. But I think chivalry may have died a tiny death at my kitchen table last night.

Lionel the Lollipop

Christ, what is Mummy doing to the vicar? Dunno, perhaps his zip has broken. She only said she needed to speak to him about parking. Golly, that could put someone's eye out.

So for the last twenty-odd years, Lionel the Lollipop man has safely escorted generations of children across the road from the church car park (where we abandon our huge 4x4s to the utter fury of the vicar - I once left both doors wide open on mine, being late and in a tearing hurry, and came back to find some MOST un-Christian sentiments stuck to the windscreen) across a busy road to the school grounds. Rain and shine, he's there in his hi-vis tabard, cheerful, helpful and just the tiniest bit wistful.

The brand-new Nursery children do traffic projects and a proud, beaming barrel-chested Lionel spends an hour in the upstairs hall explaining his important role to class after class, year after year; then they draw pictures of him and always remember to say 'good morning, Lionel' when they see him. Freddie always signs off his phone calls 'bye-bye Mummy/Daddy/Gan-Gan/Tante, I love you.' One day, unthinkingly, he said 'bye-bye, Lionel, I love you,' and it wasn't till Rose walloped him that he realised what he had done. Not surprisingly, from then on, Lionel always stopped everything for Freddie; flashing ambulances, juggernauts, coppers on bikes. They have also discovered a mutual love of cricket which, especially in the summer months, leaves crowds of little ones stranded on the other side of the road as Lionel and Freddie earnestly discuss batting averages and what their heroes might get for tea at the Oval.

On discovering Freddie's Other Grandparents live abroad, Lionel presented him last term with a special sim card for a mobile which apparently saves a fortune on international calls. In fact, it did and I instructed Freddie to thank Lionel very much indeed. On Monday, he did, and Lionel said 'Oh good. I only ever phone my wife and my friend in London, so I didn't need it.'

By the time we got to the Jeep, Freddie was unable to speak. He and Rose sat horror-struck on the back seat. 'What?' I demanded crossly. Freddie was crying silently. 'Lionel,' he sniffed. 'He's only got one friend to phone.' 'And he lives in London,' sobbed Rose. 'Oh God,' she looked at her brother, 'I bet he stays up all night getting cricket stuff off the telly to talk to you about.' Their crying continued. Freddie said his heart hurt when he thought about Lionel. I suggested he stop thinking about him then. 'The holidays,' they gulped. 'He must be so lonely.' 'And we never even sent him a card from Barbados. He'd have loved that, it's where Brian Lara lives.' They were super-enthusiastic when they greeted him on Tuesday.

I am in London working for a couple of days, so my parents are managing the delicate emotional state of my children. I think I might tell them the vicar's only got one friend and he lives in Heaven; perhaps four huge tear-swimming blue eyes will distract him from my crap parking. It's worth a go.

In which I grow a large moustache and spout the Telegraph.

What the f*ck? Where the hell is the X-Box? Tell me the mad bitch doesn't think we're gonna play outside with that shitey pile of branches and old string. Get my mobile now. I've got Max Clifford on speed dial.

The bloody dog ran away this morning on our walk. She's still only a puppy but she's also a shocking tart; she will go home with pretty much anyone that gives her a bit of attention and we all know girls like THAT. She charged off to the corner of the field and into the graveyard, following a golden retriever and a tall man in a waxed jacket. I scrambled over the wall and cut them off, grabbing her collar and redeeming her reputation. The man was most amused that I'd climbed a wall. Perhaps he thought I was too sophisticated for such child-like pursuits. More likely he thought I was too old.

On the long hike back, I was remembering the many many walls I have climbed in my time. As children, before the Abdication, the Northen Socialist used to take us walking for miles about the North of England. Sometimes we came across natural obstacles; sometimes he went on ahead and made them for us. We kids then had to make bridges and walkways; the higher and more dangerous the better. Bits of wood, old tyres, rope and haybales. Fording freezing streams, often falling in. Climbing trees and great dry stone walls; inventing labrynth plank-lined passages high above the fields; stalking imaginary lions in the fells.

My own children, and several others, once spent a whole day under the Colonel's command, re-routing a river in the Lake District. They moved tons of stones, ferns, soil. Some of the operation took place up a cliff; some waist-deep in water. There were duckings and grazes and squabbles, but eight filthy happy faces cheered a new torrent through the gloaming as night fell. But it was a rare day; they certainly weren't Macguyvering suspension bridges out of old cardboard and string on a weekly basis. More's the pity.

I know it's fashionable to decry the lack of physical challenges our children face, but I think they are losing out more on the mental and emotional benefits. Not to give up straight away. To laugh at yourself when you can't do something instead of casting about for someone to do it for you. To admire those who quietly don't give up instead of whining, sobbing-in-newspapers arseholes who think that making your lack of spine public absolves you of responsibility. To encounter a challenge and bloody well give it a go, not crumple pathetically and bemoan the cards fate dealt you.

I came home bristling about this. The Colonel is begging me to spend less time alone. And to start drinking again. He's probably got a point.

Bienvenue au Boudoir de Barbie

Ken! Get your plastic arse in here and call Malibu Security. That hideous old dyke Miss Marple is stalking me again and she's in my BEDROOM.

When Rose was four, she dithered around, like most girls of her era, on the edge of the Barbie-Disney-Princess vortex I felt it was my maternal duty to keep her out of. It was April, I thought a trip to Paris would distract us both, so off we flew, Rose getting all the business travellers to shout 'Weeeeee' as we zoomed down the runway and took off.

Paris, in delicate early spring light, is as close to heaven as you can get. In the company of a curious and independent-minded little daughter, it actually is heaven. I love the insouciant rudeness of Parisians; I find it so much more authentic than a greasy insincere smirk as someone pretends to care where I come from before they rip me off. We had breakfast in the 6th arrondissement; Rose looked crossly at the bowl of cafe au lait and croissant. 'Can't I have apple juice?' I pushed through the chic crowd to the counter, trying to keep an eye on the little figure perched at the tiny table with a bucket of hot coffee. She didn't miss a trick; when I got back, she had ripped up my croissant, filled the coffee with sugar and was dipping in the pastry, scattering soggy crumbs and icy smiles about the place. Just like a native.

We walked for miles and miles. In the Marais, we passed a couture shop selling a dress made of rose petals. She popped in to look closer; I watched through the window as she and the skeletal assistants exchanged solemn words, fingered the dress and bid unsmiling farewells. Not a gusher, my daughter. Unlike me. 'What a gorgeous dress, did you tell them your name was Rose, how funny, it was made of roses.' She looked at me pityingly. 'I'm English. I don't know what they said.'

One night we went for a late and grown-up dinner. The restaurant was hushed and empty apart from some bourgeois matrons in fur and matching lap dogs. Rose had something the chef thought appropriate for a four-year-old. It involved a lot of chicken, lentils and celery and she ate every bite. Then the waiter, unbidden, brought her a shiny, dark-as-sin chocolate ganache. She'd never seen one before, and frankly didn't spend much time looking at it either. The squeaks and sighs of happiness from my usually hard-to-impress daughter were fabulous. The matrons laughed and ordered one to share.

The Northern Socialist had taken us to the Louvre when I was six; he showed us the Venus de Milo and warned that that's what happens if you bite your nails. We never did. I thought it sensible to do the same for my daughter. The queues were awful, so I took her instead to the new wing with all the apartments decorated with amazing furniture liberated from fleeing aristocrats and Napoleon's tents.

I must confess to feeling a tiny bit smug as I watched my daughter stalk through the mahogany campaign tables, past priceless vases and pictures, cast an eye over tapestries, ceramics and furniture. In one room, some bow-tied German academics were standing taking notes on a gorgeous crystal table and mirror from the Louis-Philippe period of the 19th century. Rose marched up to it; they smiled indulgently. 'Look, mummy,' she shouted, delightedly. 'They've got Barbie's dressing table.'

Wiped the smile right off my feminist, never-too-young-to-give-them-culture face, that did.

Brass Monkeys and Brass Necks

'F*cking genius kid, you actually cried. Brilliant. What a dozy old tart your mother is. Now get an arse on before the chippie closes.'

Yesterday, Freddie appeared at breakfast. Not in the warm mufti they are instructed to wear to school until the Polar Ice Cap unfreezes, but still in his pyjamas.

'I've got a sore throat,' he said in a tiny voice of sadness. 'Get dressed. Now.' I countered. He smelled metallic; in our house that is either tonsilitis or morning breath. He cried and felt a bit warm. I felt terrible and bundled him back under the duvet; he smiled bravely at me. I left the Colonel with great lists of instructions about temperatures, how to make chicken soup, the importance of staying warm, which books to read to him if he felt well enough.

About eleven, I called from the office. My cleaner answered. 'Don't worry, Love, 'e was 'avin breakfast watching Soccer AM when I got 'ere. 'Im an' the Colonel's been 'avin a right laugh all mornin'. I think they've gone sledging.'

I picked up Rose after school and we stopped for hot chocolate. 'Is Freddie OK?' she asked. 'Harry really missed him and the Headmaster said to get better soon.'

When we got home, Freddie was under a duvet on the sofa. There were four wet wellies melting ice on the doorstep, two large, two small. I called him into the kitchen where I was sitting at the table supervising Rose's homework. My foot was drumming ominously on the floor. Being nine, he is unable to look at a lady and read The Signs.

'How are you feeling now?' I asked. 'GREAT!' he shouted. 'Me and the Colonel went out for fresh air and I felt SO much better that we went to the chippie and spoke to all the people about who likes vinegar and I had chips and then we went sledging and then I did dog-sledding then I watched football and it's been SO MUCH FUN.'

In a quiet, scary voice I asked him to go and put his pyjamas on. He dropped his jeans enthusiastically to show me he was still wearing them. The Colonel joined us. Being 53, he is well able to read The Signs, he just still doesn't know what to do when he's read them.

'Isn't it GREAT he's feeling so much better?' he gushed. 'You'll never guess, we took a tray and the dog pulled Freddie along SO fast on the ice, AND the field has a REALLY icy bit now that we just FLEW down. Don't worry about supper, we had loads of chips just now.'

There was silence apart from the tapping of my foot and the plop of Rose's tear onto her maths prep.

The Colonel put Freddie to bed double-quick. Rose got to watch Wayne's World in my bed and have three of my secret stash of Godiva chocolates.

Two bots have gone to school today. The Colonel has fixed the bathroom radiator and made pesto for Rose. He has got Wallander lined up to watch on the i-Player and has texted that he'll run me a bath later on.

I should bloody well think so too.

Icy Surrealists

Sheep! Move your bloody arses or I'll swat you with a BA blanket and flick cold coffee on your wool. Oh yes, I'm prepared for all eventualities.

Several worried texts, a couple of calls and an email had me leaving the office yesterday two hours early to pick up Rose from netball, as apparently it was going to snow. A man down the hall insisted on escorting me to my car through a couple of pathetic flakes and hanging about like a bad smell to make sure it started. My eyeballs couldn't have rolled back further in my head as he approved the blanket lightfingered Rose liberated from British Airways a few weeks ago, that was crumpled on the floor of my Jeep. I sniggered 'half a Starbucks left from this morning, might come in handy too.'

It took me an hour and a half to make the 25-minute journey to netball practice. The snow was coming down pretty fast and furious by this point and the traffic was averaging ten miles per hour. The netball coach was standing outside with a roll-up in his mouth, watching the girls belt about in shorts through what was by now very thick snowfall. I grabbed Rose and her chum Leona and popped them in the car to drop Leona at home.

Leona's mum Natasha is an artist who also makes tiny celebrity pixie shoes, and yes, it is as surreal as it sounds. She said, 'you'll never get home in this, stay here. The radio says it'll get worse. I'll light a fire and make hot chocolate. It'll be like in a film.' Pffft. How I snorted. Rose, disappointed at no emergency sleepover, slumped in the front seat. Off we set.

Two hours and a fruitless, frozen and frighteningly skiddy half a mile later, we were back. Natasha was black-faced and red-eyed. 'I've set the house on fire,' she said. And she had. In the slowly dispersing smoke, a man was pouring water on the rug and brandy into a glass. 'You'd better have one too,' he said and crept carefully off into the white night. 'It's like being in a film,' said the faerie cobbler several times as we ate dinner, watched the girls build a snowman, chatted to a random bloke from New York who was passing the gate, listened to the snow cracking her ancient iron drainpipes, sat on the Aga to warm our frozen arses, popped a bottle of Champagne and made Jerry Hall's miniature cowboy boots dance on our fingers across the floor of her studio.

We finally made it home this afternoon at 2pm. We gave two hitchhikers a ride. They had both abandoned their cars. I positively oozed Dunkirk spirit. Rose had the blanket on her knees and I considered splitting the cold latte with the strangers. The 12 mile journey was littered with abandoned cars and a Morrison's lorry had jacknifed across the big roundabout and sat empty. Tree branches had fallen, and we listened to the local radio station taking calls from pretty much the entire county who had also been taken in by strangers. There were a couple of hairy brake-lock moments, but we made it. There has never been snow like it in these parts. The Colonel was waiting with two bum-shaped rubber sledge things we bought in Denmark on the offchance, and he, the bots and I have spent the afternoon whizzing down a hill and filling each other's collars with handfuls of snow.

Really, it's been just like a film.