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.

Mere guests in the sky

Nob off, there's a bit of coffee and walnut cake left 

and at least two date slices. 

I will beat you or die trying. 

Like so many lovely things in my life, I came to running through stubbornness and a drunken bet. Someone snorted rudely when I was invited to do the Great South Run, so I bought shoes, hired a trainer and spent many hours swearing, sweating, sobbing and stuffing myself with porridge.  I won the bet, though.

That was almost seven years ago.  I no longer drink or smoke or hate nylon, and my feet are like something from National Geographic.  I'm not noticeably skinny, either, since I refuse to give up cake.

I try and slog off every morning, wearing huge headphones that make my children shrivel with shame. Titchy ears, rivers of sweat and the need to mouth the words theatrically cause the discrete earbuds to slither out at every step.  So I must wear the comedy ones. I avoid running past the school bus stop at all costs, for very obvious reasons.  I listen to funny stuff, uplifting stuff, surreal stuff and scary stuff and never quite know what's coming.  I sweat spectacularly, and have that fair skin that turns crimson at any effort more than a languid tinkle for the butler; I look a fright.

But I don't care. It's like having a power hose coruscate the brain.  Everything is blasted into perspective; plots and worries iron themselves out; I have all the arguments I need, winning every one with elegant, stiletto-like remarks that leave my imaginary opponents (ancient school enemies, berks on the radio, the electricity board) beaten into shocked awe. I examine my life and give thanks for its imperfect colour and chaos. Very occasionally, the chatter becomes silence, and I feel an almighty peace.

When I heave, gasping, through the door, I turn on the coffee and wait for that glorious tingle to make its euphoric way into my mouth so that I grin like a child on Christmas Eve for a good 20 minutes.  It's the best time of day.  If you ever want me to agree to anything, catch me in that window - I'll sew on buttons, agree to drive a carload of children, meet your unrealistic deadlines.  I'm a maleable, lolling, sweat-soaked pussycat. 20 minutes, that's your lot.

Drowning

source

I recognised that burnished chuckle before I saw Amanda.  It had such a perfect veneer of warmth and authenticity that any fool could hear it was fake.  It echoed roundly against the chilly flat tiles, drowned out the constant roars and shrieks that rose and fell as the door to the swimming pool flapped wetly open.

I had been slumped on the bench for what felt like an eternity, willing my stolid body to get up, undress, pull on a costume, move through the warm foetid puddles of the changing room and out into the huge bright pool area.  I knew that once I was in the water, the muffled roar would soothe rather than scare; I would finally be weightless; the metallic song of bubbles would drown the jangling dissonance of my desperation.

I pulled a huge damp breath into my defeated body.  I willed myself to cling to the tattered rags of decency that flapped, like smoke-blackened pennant after a blitzkrieg.  The battle that had raged in my own body, leaving me bloody, empty and barren. I steeled myself to see her baby. I would never see mine, there would never be a single one, and that knowledge crushed me in a flat, endless pain.  I set my jaw against the howl of anguish that burned at the base of my throat.

She came in with her mother.  I recognised her from the baby group, from another life, when I had been happy; but I would have known their relationship anyway.  Both thoroughbreds, glossy and rippling, heads tossing, nostrils flared arrogantly. The mother's hair was an uncompromisingly crisp white and Amanda's an artful tawny, but the resemblance was startling.  Their laughter was an assault.

"Well, I hope she doesn't jump out of the window once he starts crying for the mid-morning feed.  Josh threatened again to sell him to the gypsies. The horror.  Three til five he was awake.  And we've got the Bishops drinks tonight.  I am exhausted."

"They're a great agency. She'll know what to do. Have a little swim, darling and let's see if you can have a massage.  It won't matter if we're a bit late.  They'll just charge a more, but you do need a break. Babies can be a real pain sometimes.  You go ahead, I'll go and find Suki and sort out a little treat."

I sat, a petrified lump of sorrow, as Amanda changed.  The soft billows of cashmere and silk, the smooth conker-brown boots, Amanda's spare, beautiful leather jacket.  Her bag I recognised from the glossy pages I stared at sometimes in my psychiatrist's waiting room.  It was butter-soft and pale yellow.  Like spring, like a chick, a daffodil, the sun.

She left it on the bench while she went to tie up her hair in front of the mirror.  She was a careless, heartless bitch.  Leaving her bag, leaving her baby.  She didn't deserve any of it.

It took me less than a minute to stand, my body jotled into action by the shot of anger I felt.  I picked up her bag, which hugged my hip with a fluidly sensuos ripple.  I strode through reception, past her mother gesturing elegantly at the receptionists; head down and out into the pale winter sunshine.   The river was just a few steps away and I stood on the towpath, breathing the smell of decay that rose from the dirty water; the putrefaction of plants and small animals, of melancholoy, of death.

I let the pale, soft strap slide down my arm, hoisted the bag upside down and emptied the perfumed, costly contents into the swirling dun water.   With soft splashes, things fell; a blue diary, a black fountain pen, a phone, little leather bags and pouches, a sheaf of polaroids, a single pale blue mitten, as small as a pixie's hat.

I flung the bag out into the middle of the river; the current eddied there, making roiling, confused circles and swells. It swirled in the undertow for a moment then disappeared into the undertow, a brief primrose flash then nothing.

Like landmarks to a treasure

Right, that's at least 38 words today. 

Six more and I can lie down with a box of violet creams, a pint of amaretto and an oiled Liam Neeson. 

Result.

Like most literate sentient beings, I fell madly into The Secret History.  I adored its quirky characters, deft and mysterious happenings, intelligent, crisp prose and the elliptical, swooping tale which made me long to know Latin and wear dead men's coats in a freezing New England winter.

Also by the stunningly talented Donna Tartt, The Goldfinch has made my year for two reasons.

I have devoured it both on kindle and on audiobook as I have driven our ancient creaking Jeep for many hours this winter.  Through rain so hard that the wipers were a frenzied blur, and wind that walloped the old beast with a sideways, spiteful kick.

The talented David Pittu imbues the wonderful voice of James Hobart with a patina he himself would have stroked. Boris and Theo have stayed in my ear and heart for weeks afterwards.  If you haven't yet immersed yourself in this fabulous wringing mangle of a book, make it your solemn duty to do so soon.

If you regret it, I will come round and clean out the cupboard under your sink and leave flapjacks.

The second reason?  She took 10 years to write it.

Not that I will ever produce anything like that, but I take great heart from her glacial speed. And since Mary Wesley didn't crank anything out until she was 70, I reckon that's plenty of time to keep polishing and honing, singing on mountains and falling into sudden, deep ravines of self-doubt and despair.

Those kind souls still here, I am so grateful.  The short stories are undergoing a final revision and the novel is about a third completed. I went on a course run by a Very Successful Editor and had a comprehensive kick up the arse.

In the meantime, the cars swish by my writing lair, where I need a lamp on all day, spend silly numbers of hours brewing the perfect coffee and contemplating the astonishing number of shoes generated by only eight feet. And eating flapjacks.

Better drowned than duffers, if not duffers won't drown.

Fucking hell, it's that pair of sisters and their ill-disciplined dogs. Hide the cake and don't make eye contact. Does the short one ever stop bloody sobbing?

This is the house where we spent our happy childhood. I recently came across this photo of it in a book, dressed up to welcome home a son from the Boer War. The huge iron gates, melted down in World War Two and never replaced, are almost hidden under swags of ivy, and the stout stove-piped pride shines from those frozen Victorian faces.

We left it in 1977 and have been trying to find a way home ever since. It reads 'Welcome Home' and after almost four decades, I thought we should go.

Last week, I stole The Pretty One away from her life and shot away to the Lake District for some undiluted nostalgia. We ate a lot of cake in slate-y grey landscapes, shot through with blazing copper beech and relentless drizzle.

A family have lived in that house for thirty years.  We met their daughter.  She recognised our names from the message we had written in the secret cupboard our dad discovered when re-wiring the attics.

She showed us the a long curved stone with the house's name carved on it and we told her the Northern Socialist had chiseled it in the legendary hot summer of 1976, measuring the letters and tapping carefully for hours. It is still painted, bandbox black-and-white, every five years. That bit made us cry uncontrollably.  I hope we didn't frighten her too much.

I felt my heart break that she had lived a life I still dreamed of. The Pretty One, always less full of shit dramatic then I, pointed out all the adventures we would have missed if we had stayed. I'm still pondering that one.

That night, we saw this fabulous production, which echoed our lost lives of make-believe, of wardrobes as camps, beds as ships and sheets as castles. It was surreal seeing this beloved story, in the dramatic scenery which inspired it, in a bittersweet haze of nostalgia.

We started the seven hour drive home before it was light. I felt wrung out and aching with longing to stay, to creep back into my attic room and stay forever among the dust and memories. But by Birmingham, coffee, the need to let the dogs pee and the Pogues had brought us back into the moment.

I've been determinedly living here ever since. There's no choice.  Sometimes that's what you need.

They are the charming gardeners

My godmother adored Elvis Presley.  So much so that she went into labour in 1960, watching GI Blues in a cinema in Lavender Hill and refused to go to hospital until the absolute last minute. She bit a scarf to keep the shouts to a minimum.

She was a very particular lady, and bought her jam home in a taxi from Fortnum and Mason. She hid it at the back of the boiler, and fed her great brood of children the home-made stuff. I saw her once, licking her raspberry nectar with a pointed tongue from a heavy silver teaspoon in the empty kitchen. I remember her husking bark of a laugh and the waxy gardenia-scented imprint she left on my cheek.

She died far too young, in the cruel way that life sometimes just picks the best, most perfect flowers early. She had known she would die for a long time, and before she did, bought charms to add to my bracelet; one every year until I was eighteen. I was allowed to take them out every year on my birthday, for a few carefully-supervised moments.

I could never afford to get them properly soldered on a chain, and anyway I preferred a clashing armful of modern silver.

I found the velvet bag of them when I moved house earlier this year. It was an odd moment; I hadn't seen them for over two decades, yet they were as familiar to me as the shape of my hands.  I arranged each golden charm on the pale aqua surface of my dressing table.

It was a story both told and imagined; the tiny prancing horse was easy - I was mad about riding as a child.  The saucepan, secretly sneered at by my teenage self, had become the most potent symbol of my quotidien existence as a mother, wife and general greedy guts. The exotic Aladdin's lamp foreshadowed my many years in Arabia. A crumpled 1960s pound note that never quite fitted back into the golden disc, my rather slapdash approach to finance; a dog, for a child who adored cats and became a woman devoted slavishly to a Weimaraner; a book; a wellington boot. A lipstick, a hairbrush. A bull, a lion, a bell.

I hardly knew her, but I looked at the story told in gold and felt that she knew me.

She knew how to make a good joke, though. She died on August 16th 1977, the day we flew off the the West Indies to lead a rather different life. The day that Elvis died.

Eight years old

I am dressed like a falling leaf

Though I am sturdy as a mushroom

Rust, burnt orange, russet corduroy

The hillocks of my scabbed and warty knees

Raised to my vermillion chin, furrowed echoes

Of the cattle-trodden sliced-up earth

Below my perch of crenelated stone

Hoary and xanthic-splashed

Hard, sharp flat wind

Tang of sea

Sweet stench of decay

My palms sting, rust-streaked, raw

Their ferrous stigmata witness that

Despite my swooping dreams

I am too solid

To fly.

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.

Songs that voices never share

Some of the girls at school wore silk abayahs; the elegant rippling garment sliding off their shoulders as they came into the high-walled school yard balancing armfuls of books, boxes of cake and headscarf, past the unseen, unseeing male guard in his box at the gate.

Mine was cheap black nylon, picked up quickly for opacity and expedience; it never occurred to me that it could be a fashion statement.  It was, after many years of running barefoot, barelegged and light-hearted, an unfathomable garment on almost every level.

My headscarf was black net, with black roses embroidered on it.  Vaguely Spanish, wholly alien.  I never mastered the art of tying it tightly about my head so that only my eyes showed, nor did I want to. It often slipped off my fine, slithery hair and would be handed back to me with varying degrees of exasperation and affection by my teachers.

We went one day to the souk; I was fourteen.  There was a local girl a few years my junior.  Her scarf had slipped and her hair was on public show.  I stood and watched as she was cracked soundly on her bare skull by grown men with stout wooden sticks.  The shrouded women accompanying her formed a pathetic, impotent circle.  Their keening voices rose, counterpoint to the staccato, brutish shouts of the men.  She never once made a sound.  She hunched her shoulders and stood in stoic silence. My mother hurried my sister and I away down a narrow alley to wait for my father in his car.

Some time later, we took a trip to the desert. I left the picnic site and climbed with my brother up a pale, stony path in a rubbly, unforgiving landscape.  The top of the escarpment afforded us a huge view that made me feel both tiny and all-seeing.  There was a strange hot wind, and in the distance the rock shards made shapes that looked like German castles.

I sat down in the lee of the rock and the sudden, complete silence was crushing.  My brother had an expensive new camera and wanted me to pose.

I looked at that picture recently.  At my smooth, young face, my eyes crossed and my tongue poking out for laughs.  At my uncovered hair, blowing almost vertically in that burning breeze.

I thought about the nature of silence and I felt grateful that I can make a noise, speak, write.  I must remember not to to take such a gift for granted.

Little Annie's greetin' tae

The first year we lived in Barbados was on the wild East coast.   Not many tourists bother going over there; the swimming is dangerous and the tides unpredictable with very fierce currents. There are some beautiful old churches, though, with graveyards full of mossy, skewed stones.  If you trace the shallow, weathered marks with a finger, you can sometimes still decipher the names and dates; improbable centuries have passed since those souls first tried to eke a living from the barren land they'd been allotted.

These Irish and Scots peasants were indentured servants, fleeing famine, hardships or criminal records.  They were shipped out to work on sugar plantations for a set number of years before being granted freedom and land.  Because they were of no real worth long term, the plantation owners made no effort to feed or care for them when sick; the unforgiving sun burned those peely-wally* limbs so badly they became known as the Redlegs.** The stony, hilly terrain they were allotted was nigh impossible to cultivate and many starved to death.

Their descendants peopled our district.  Mr Wilson used to bring us milk every morning from the painfully bony cow he grazed opposite our house.  The milk was warm and delicious and came in an old ice-cream container.  It softened our bowls of cornflakes and sticky clumps of tawny sugar into a comforting mess.

His family also worked for friends of ours further down the bay.  Mr Wilson's great aunt Marie was the nurse to their baby boy.  She was as shrivelled as a forgotten apple, her faded dress flapping about her gaunt bare knees.  So gummy and wheezy and cackling; we were never sure what she was saying.

One day, I was sitting outside waiting for my friend to come and play and I heard Aunt Marie singing to the baby.  "Greetin' for anither bawbee, tae buy mair Coulter's candy." The same Scottish lullaby that my Pa used to sing to us.  It was a moment of utter surreality; the familiar words and tune floating about the breadfruit tree I sat under.

I often remember that moment and think of the centuries of mothers singing to their hungry children and  of that gnarled old crone who brought an unwitting moment of comfort to a homesick little girl.

*hijusly pale and freckled.  Almost blue.
** this is fascinating if you want to read more

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.

SOS

A few years ago,  I stopped working in an office 9-5 structured sort of way.  I had worked like a driven banshee since I left university, so I was giddy with excitement and apprehension in equal measure. After about six weeks on the mummies-coffee-morning circuit I was a wreck.  For twelve years I had brought up my children, run a home and functioned physically on a daily basis without an awful lot of input from my peers.

This was a very different style of living.  The mummies consulted each other on absolutely everything; what to feed them, when they should go to bed, how long to do prep, The Facebook Question.  I inhaled a silly amount of caffeine and silently ate a stack of cakes as I absorbed the painful truth that most people ask for help.  They also spend quite a lot of time considering options, finding out how other people do things, and then slowly come to a conclusion, gathering facts along the way.

I panicked. I've never over-thought anything in my nelly. I teamed up with another recent-released-from-daily-grind Mummy and we whirled off into an 18-month adventure setting up a vintage and handmade homewares business. We belted about rescuing treasures from old junk shops and car boot sales.  We painted and restored, mended, stencilled, sanded and shabbier. We took stalls at little vintage and antique fairs and made bunting.  We made lovely cushions out of old-fashioned wool blankets and embroidered surreal and amusing and soppy things on them in colours that reminded us of the seaside.

After a lot of fun but not quite as much profit, we're going to do other things.  She, with a heart as big as Wales, is caring for less happy children than our own.  I, with a yellow streak down my back as wide as the Thames, am trying to write.  I have finished six out of ten short stories that I wanted to publish this Autumn and I am stuck.

My cupboards are alphabetised and there is nothing in my house, cellar or attic that is not labelled.  Should there be a pandemic, I could feed most of this county on the food I have cooked and stashed in the freezer.  My linen cupboard is more starched and anally organised than Martha Stewart's. The dog is skin and bones from daily hikes.

So I am asking for help.  How do you write? When, where? How do you shut the internal monologue off and the bloody computer screen on?

Just don't make me go back to those coffee mornings or i don't think I'll be able to get out of bed.

The golden thread that united

"You've bloody well done WHAT woman? Are you MAD? I told the whole sodding lot of them never to darken my doorstep again.  Lunch? I don't blasted think so. Anyway, I've blown the whole inheritance on Newcastle Brown Ale and pork pies and rum so they can sodding well bugger off."

This weekend, my Pa, the Northern Socialist, and my Ma will celebrate 50 years of marriage.   I say 'celebrate' because we are making them do something to recognise such an achievement.  We suggested theatre trips and jaunts to London, Michelin restaurants and a big party.  Like small children faced with unpleasant vegetables, they demurred, feigned deafness, twisted napkins and asked to be excused.

We compromised eventually; they would book somewhere local for a small family lunch and we would promise on our honour not to get them any presents or make a fuss.  Then they're going to slither quietly off back to Barbados and gather their thoughts with a dusting of silver sand and a frosting of Planters' Punch.

It's funny, the gift thing in our family - we all love giving them but aren't terribly gracious about being recipients. I will ponder the wherefores another time.  What we have done, to our enormous glee, is secretly contact every single person with an email address, phone or Facebook that was at the wedding, met them later, was taught by either of them, shared sporting, literary or musical passions or was just sucked laughing into their orbit.

We told these old friends that the olds were being royal pains in the arse and refusing gifts, so we wanted to make them one instead. A book recording all the gifts they have passed on to their friends, grandchildren, neighbours, colleagues. A book that details the gifts that they have and how they have used them over the past 50 years.  So we asked them to write their thoughts and maybe look out old photos instead of sending stuff.

It has been an eye-opening fortnight collating the bugger.  Seeing one's parents through an entirely new prism has been extraordinary.  Some of the tales and people were well-known, faded and comforting, old blankets we were happy to see. Some stories made us cry a little bit - they seem to have committed acts of extreme kindness and secrecy. Many just made us wonder how any of us were still here and functioning.

But the golden thread that shines through every one is the gift of their hospitality and laughter; my mother conjuring fabulous suppers on stoves in half-demolished kitchens, on barbecues on windy moors, in deserts.  She seems to have mended marriages and hearts along with split trousers and unravelled socks.  My father's socialist and sporting philosophies are still quoted in Canada, Berkshire, Barbados and Antwerp. There are grown men out there who are still terrified of him on a football pitch, in a boxing ring, guarding his teenage daughters. Every single person mentioned how much he had made them laugh.

We're going to take turns reading them aloud over lunch tomorrow. We're giving the six bots the really soppy ones.  That'll teach them.

Whistling blackbirds and the sun of October

October is a wonderful month.  I love the rhythm of routine, the cosy lamp-lit evenings, the smell of the first fires and the sweet crackle of pork belly on a Sunday.  But it is also a month of gravitas.  Much more so than September, with its frivolous conceits - new uniform, new faces, pencil cases bristling with sharp points of resolution.  No, October is where the real thing starts.  It's a month of putting your money where your mouth is, of living up to all those easy promises made in September - reading the books, sustaining the friendships.

Seductive one-last-time Indian summer sun gives way to briskness and the need for serious clothes - the unyielding clamp of long boots adding purpose to a stride; the serpentine shrug of scarf and weighty heft of jacket.  Darkening nights demand a sporting commitment too. Training under sodium light as the fine cold drizzle haloes the scene is a far cry from the flirty kick-about of last month. New uniforms soften and fade, pummelled in mud and pride.

Decades ago, I started University in October; cold blue skies filled with cascades of Cathedral bells; nose-tingling coldness and a sense of freedom and promise. New books and new friends, many of whom are still there, cracked and worn but still capable of making me question, debate and laugh until I can't breathe.

Bounty is rare, but worth seeking.  Spiny sloes will bring a throaty sweetness in the black of winter if you hunt now.  Dress for thorns and sudden downpours.  Fill your poacher's pockets with tiny crab apples and your larder with jewelled amber pots.

Many Octobers ago, came a wonderful gift. Wrapped in a white blanket embroidered with oak leaves, my long, self-contained daughter with wise eyes and see-through hair.  Whose birthday we have celebrated with pumpkins and witches, ghost walks, bonfires and curry. Who is, bar none, the best gift of all.

First, a little cake...

Baking, as we used to say when we were small, always got my mad up. There seemed absolutely no margin for error or indeed creativity, Baking was just so Draconian.  And boring.  Cream the sugar and the butter, always.  Until your aching arm fell off.  No tasting, no extemporising, just clinical orders.

At one of my many schools, I did a year of what they called housecraft.  At 11, I just wanted to eat cakes.  Instead, we were dictated the rules of the kitchen, the order in which to wash up, how to keep the cloths clean, how to order the cupboards, how to remove stains with baking soda, clean windows with vinegar.  I was achingly bored until I was asked to leave the class for cleaning the cake batter bowl with my bare hands.  Then licking them.  The following term I helped with the baby swimmers instead.

Cooking, on the other hand, seemed to positively encourage such wanton sensuality. Such blowsy measurements, so many methods - a handful, a pinch, taste as you go; simmer, fry, roast, sear.  No hanging around waiting for things to bake, rise, prove. It's an ongoing process; the food is ever at the end of the wooden spoon.  It seemed more sociable too; people gather round a stove for tasting, discussing, adding, telling tales.

When I got very thin and miserable a few years ago, a clever friend asked me to make some cakes.  I finally had an oven that stayed at a constant temperature and some scales that measured to the nearest nanogram, so why not?  I also had many amazing bits of kitchen equipment that did all the drudgery, and so I baked my way through several books.

I discovered that there is a certain comfort in the strictures of regulation, the removal of any personal input which makes life, should you need it to be, rather clear and straightforward.  Here are your weights and measures, here is the method. Do not deviate and all will be well. Your kitchen will smell like a buttery golden childhood and after the exact amount of time, you will be rewarded by the springing triumph of a risen cake.

Now that I am perfectly happy again, I still take great pleasure in the strict discipline of baking.  A fifty shades of flour if you will.  The thwack of spatula, the whip of whisk.  The bossy dictation of the rules I must follow if I am to have pleasure.  The naughtiness of a stolen finger lick. The achingly interminable wait for the timer to go off and the sweet release of cake from tin.

I don't think I've got my mad up any more.

They think warm days will never cease

Blackberry picking in Cumbria in the 1970s was an endurance sport.  The cliffs from which we harvested once held a Roman amphitheatre; occasionally, your welly would encounter the russet stone remains of something ancient and you could follow the curved line of centurion's seating through the huge ancient thorns.  If you slipped, there would be a split second to decide between saving yourself from slithering down spiky perilous falls or saving your precious berries.  If they fell, black beauty winking heartbreakingly in the gorse and coarse grass, the Northern Socialist would be unsympathetic.  "Aye.  Bad luck.  Start again."

The sun would always be out, lighting up the usually murky Solway Firth, and the bucket would fill with a satisfying blue-black heft.  I loved it, though of course we kids moaned like mad.  I loved the tiny thorns that would catch in my ink-stained fingers; the thrill of silently finding a great cache of huge fat blackberries hidden from view and quickly, greedily eating the biggest one of all in an act of breathtaking defiance.  I loved the depths of sweetness that would explode with mellow lusciousness; the shock of the occasional badly-judged blackberry which puckered the mouth and sent me quickly into the damp depths of the bucket for another to take away the taste.

We would come home that week to a saccharine fug in the kitchen; the huge old windows running with condensation; the battered jam pan rattling fiercely, hissing clouds of sugary steam; glossy amethyst smears on cold saucers.  Blackberry jam is my Proust's madeleine - one lick of the knife and I am eight years old again, devouring slightly burnt toast with a slab of cold butter and a seed-flecked puddle of complete heaven.

When we moved our little family out of London eleven years ago this week, I went first, staying with my parents in their mad old house.  Edward stayed on to downsize our conference company from over twenty down to four, and supervise the house and office moves.  I put Rose into nursery school and went with my parents and Freddie up the downs to pick blackberries and fight the feelings stirred up by my little girl's first big steps.

I sobbed silently a little bit, stealing comforting sun-warmed handfuls of perfectly ripe blackberries; the absolute silence we have up the downs throbbing a little in my ears.  My Ma and I picked and talked about the stoicism we need in the face of motherhood.  The NS had stayed in the car to listen to the lunchtime news and when we climbed back in, eyes red and mouths and fingers stained magenta, he told us how the world had changed in a very new and final way.

Even watching the news, as we all did, all over the world, over and over, that strange and awful day, it didn't make sense. One of our competitors lost 16 employees and 65 delegates, doing exactly what we did every day.  And yet, I had to get Rose from nursery school and shrink my world to match her life and somehow, we all stumbled through, as did everyone else - the heroic, the brave and the terrified alike and here we are, eleven years later.  I sometimes think of the girls I knew who had never become mothers, whose lives had ended in sudden nothingness on that sunny New York day eleven years ago.

I have just been up the downs with an old colleague, who has become a dearly loved friend. Our girls are teenagers now and are taking even bigger steps. We need the same maternal stoicism as we did for the first ones.  I craved the comfort of toast and blackberry jam; we unpacked buckets and dogs from the car.

But the brambles have all been cleared so ramblers can see the sea.  I don't understand the role of pectin, and anyway, the bots hate blackberries.  We walked for miles instead, under a bright azure sky, watching the buzzards hover and the sun dazzling on the sea.  We followed the curve of the downs, emerald patchwork fields falling away below us, fat highland cattle watching lazily through silly long fringes.  We talked about being mothers.  We cried a little bit but we laughed a lot more. It was just as good as jam and toast.

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,

talk of situations, read books, repeat quotations

Yesterday, I took my imaginary black dog and my very real taupe dog to a meadow close to my house. The taupe dog leapt about like a March hare, pausing suddenly, stock-still, in hunting pose. Her ear pinkly folded back, paw cocked, nut-brown nose quivering before dropping her haunches and charging madly off in the opposite direction to the ball I had launched.

I lay in the grass and thought about how long it felt since I'd been warm. Fat, mauve clover and leggy eager-faced buttercups have carpeted the ground in a matter of days. The sun was so strong it almost throbbed. I could smell the lacy drifts of hawthorne, heard bees, boats on the river, distant shouting. From my prone pose, I threw the sopping ball, then tensed as I heard her thunder back to throw herself heavily on top of me, panting delightedly and proudly.

I am alone for the weekend. The sun has been blazing for hours, mocking my pitiful gloom. The roses from my birthday party are soft and wilting. I am making a flask of lattte to take to the beach with the dog, the paper and a grisly murder on my i-pod.

Later, I'm making a complicated curry for the bots coming back tomorrow night. That's when the sun will really come out.

Getting Out (More)

Spot! Move your fucking arse, stupid dog. How in God's name can I career down the hill in an attention-seeking-out-of-control-cry-for-help if your stupid canine carcass is in the way?

I haven't forgotten you all, but am taking a much-needed break to concentrate on being a good and organised Mummy and not resorting to prescription (or even whatever I can score in the car park behind Iceland) drugs, fags, domestic violence or booze to pack sports kit, stuff for bot overseas trips, go on work trips, watch concerts and tournaments, deal with visitors and get some bloody work done.

Roll on Easter. Or more precisely, the great big G&B dark chocolate egg I am going to inhale.

The dullest post in history

'Yes, young man, what can I get you?' 'It's for my mummy, can we have a bucket of gin with a Guinness top. Only she's on a coffee drip at the moment and she's boring as f*ck.' 'Yup, we've just read the Ikea post. Try a Blue Stratos chaser.'

Very emotional old day today - Carrie The Radio One Sports Presenter is off to have her baby and, given that she has been a huge part of our morning routine for five years, we are all a little damp about the eyes this morning.

I took the bots to Ikea last night, eschewing maths prep. We were supposed to be looking at wardrobes but of course passed immediately into that twilight land where things you never knew existed never mind needed suddenly fill your basket, and all sense leaves your head.

They were enchanted by the tiny-flat-you-could-kit-out-for-50p. 'Look!' shrieked Freddie. 'This is exactly what my first aparkment will be like.' He sat somberly at the teeny desk looking tenderly at the photos of random gorgeous people decorating the bookshelves. 'I can turn the telly on from bed and there's a coffee machine for when you come to stay. It's perfect.'

We came home with coloured clips-for-bags, a heart-shaped cushion with arms, some espresso cups, a new blanket for the dog and god knows what else. I thought very seriously about getting the built-in espresso maker for the kitchen - what utter bliss. I could just lie under it, mouth agape like me and my mates used to lie under the optics at college.

Of course, we didn't get near the wardrobes. We laughed a bit about that in the car this morning until the enormity of Carrie leaving hit us. I dropped them at school sniffing and gulping. I'm not much better myself. I have promised Indian takeaway for supper and a lot of games at the newly-painted library table. In the meantime, I have a billion emails to answer and a mountain of work that all needs to be dealt with before half term next week. Am thinking about getting in the stationery cupboard and not coming out.

I wonder if I could get a coffee machine installed in there.