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.

Mock the meat it feeds on

Overgrown Orchard

Andrew Wyeth, 1959

Metropolitan Museum of Art

"The mind I love must have wild places,

A tangled orchard where dark damsons drop in the heavy grass,

An overgrown little wood,

The chance of a snake or two,

A pool that nobody’s fathomed the depth of,

And paths threaded with flowers

Planted by the mind."

Katherine Mansfield

I bloody wish I'd written that.

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.

A mistake is to commit a misunderstanding

"Bloody brilliant party, Mr Floyd! And excellent nibbles, thank you.  Shit! Here comes that woman with the frightening criminal haircut.  Quick! Everyone inside and hide in the cellar. Bring the sausages with you."

In the mid-nineties, Edward and I were expats in a place I rather disliked and which was the utter opposite of the bucolic, lush, verdant English countryside in which we had courted and for which we longed.  One leave, Edward rented a fantastic thatched house for us on the Dart Estuary in South Devon.

Though far from cluttered, it was perfectly furnished with rustic, rescued treasures.  Hand-thrown mugs for our coffee, which we sipped in the bright summer mornings, watching the river bustle noisily past the end of the garden and feeling exactly like sleepy animals from Wind in the Willows.  The chairs were mismatched and perfectly comfortable in the way a chair can only become after it has borne witness to the theatre of life through a thousand bottoms.  The kitchen featured ancient freestanding cupboards filled with a charming, chipped and chic assortment of china, enamel, pottery and copper.  I fell completely in love with it and couldn't wait to entertain all our friends whom we hadn't seen in a year, and whom I had invited down from London for some fun.

None of them turned up.  I rang them from the call-box on the corner of the lane and wondered why they sounded stilted and distant.  Their excuses were insultingly crap and I felt a bit annoyed. I wandered back along a sun-dappled road past an Inn that I realised with star-struck greed was run by the garrulous and hilarious TV chef Keith Floyd.  Well, at least we would eat well this holiday.  I popped in to book a table and was met with absolute indifference.  Added to my mates dumping me and a particularly disastrous haircut I was still coming to terms with, I was pretty narked off.  Especially when Edward went off that afternoon in the car to buy logs.  In bloody August.

I remember vividly sitting in the garden reading the fabulous Island in the Sun by Alec Waugh, a haunting, salutary tale on the dangers of taking events at face value and believing you know what others are thinking.  When Edward got back, I had made Pimms and was lost on a 1950s Caribbean plantation with all its undercurrents of politics, danger and racial tension.

That night, he proposed to me, by firelight.  Of course I said yes.  The Ceylon sapphire he produced had been hidden in his sock drawer after a business trip to Sri Lanka, about which he had been uncharacteristically secretive, thus getting right on my wick for several weeks.  He had called the London chums before we few home on leave and told them in no uncertain terms not to come to Devon as he had other plans which they'd all bugger up, and not to say a word to me about it.  He'd already booked the table at Floyd's Inn, and been equally forthright with the staff, knowing I was bound to go in and spoil things by booking another table.  We went to dinner there, the food exquisite, the grumpy patron less so.  He appeared at our table, bizarrely, with a teddy bear, and told us that marriage was over-rated.

I was reminded of all this earlier this month when I listened to an old interview with the late, much-missed Keith Floyd, who said that during his time running that Inn, he'd been broke, overworked and deeply unhappy in, I think, his third marriage, his TV star on the wane as his producer had dumped him for Risk Stein and was battling bowel cancer.  I just thought he was rude.

I am sorry that, as I have done so often, I leapt effortlessly to a quite erroneous conclusion.  I suspect it won't be the last time though.

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.

Morbidity, Murder and Mud

Watson: Was it his constant drinking and unfaithfulness that led to her shoot him?

Holmes: No, my dear Dr Watson, it was him banging on constantly about his crappy peripatetic life

that drove her to blow his self-pitying brains out just to shut him the f*ck up.

Freddie's friend lives on a fantastic farm. Apart from the endless alliterative fun it provides, it gives Freddie the occasional chance to be a boy from the 1950s. Julian is an only child; his mother Rebecca farms and his father is an old-fashioned country solicitor, and they have both lived here for many generations. Julian has a barn where he plays cricket, he fishes in the river and there are thousands of lead soldiers in the attic, where he and Freddie invent wars and battles with glorious and admirable disregard for historic fact.

Recently, one of the farm tenants was shot by his wife who had finally tired of his violent drinking and womanising ways. Bypassing Relate or an ASBO, she woke him at 2am, shouting, 'Look at ME, you bastard,' then blew his head off with a shotgun. I know this because the cottage is close enough to the farmhouse for several people to have been woken by it. I also know because Freddie and Julian frequently re-enact it with grim attention to detail. They also spent most of half term searching for evidence in the cottage garden and sitting for hours in a bush with binoculars trained on the cottage, in case important clues had been overlooked. It was verging on obsessional, and now that the poor woman is languishing at Her Majesty's Pleasure, Julian's parents decided to take his mind off it all.

So Rebecca got her remaining farm hands to build a zip wire, and we went up last Sunday to try it out. It goes all the way down the orchard, ending just shy of a muddy stream. Sensing the inevitable, Rebecca and I headed for the kitchen.

There are two things about Rebecca. First, she makes a cup of tea so mahogany-coloured and so laced with tannin that after sipping it, my mouth makes the exact shape of a cat's bumhole. So now I make my own. Secondly, she lives in a house where she, her father and her grandfather were all born. To a gypsy like me, that is amazing.

So, tea in hand, we settled down in front of the Aga for a natter. I was telling her that it wasn't at all glamorous to have no roots and that I had recently discovered a blog which encapsulated those feelings of un-belonging with more eloquence and bravery than I could. Especially the bit about losing friends and always having the wrong clothes. She countered with the fact that her father, in the one year she was away from home at agricultural college, sold off all her horses and converted the stables. One-all. Then the children trudged in, filthy, soaking and ruddy-cheeked, so we stopped snivelling and got them into dry things.

In the car, I told Freddie that Julian was a lucky boy to have such permanence in his life. Freddie kicked the back of my chair like a metronome and patiently explained the reason for Julian's luck, which in his superior opinion was more to do with bloodshed and zipwires than my soppy old thoughts on the matter.

He's probably right. And tonight is Wednesday, which is Science Prep, hairwash and Rose's choice for supper. Then a half-way-through-the-week glass of wine and Spooks. But there's a lot to be said for humdrum, heel-drumming same-old.

And so it is, just like you said it would be...

I met an interesting chap at a conference recently. An ex-Army Officer, his job is to parachute into trouble spots and deal with the families of expatriates, getting them to safety, and eventually home. Hugh was wiry and softly-spoken and on first-name terms with pretty much all of the Global Baddies. He was highly decorated, and the most modest guy in the room. His colleagues told us more about the things he had done, and I must say, if I was cowering under an Embassy table in a smoke-filled room, he'd be my first choice of rescuer. In the bar afterwards, he was talking about the stresses of his career. He had been given all the most up to date psychological assistance, debriefings, decompression chambers, the whole nine yards. But what he found the biggest yardstick of his state of mind was his washing pile. He reckoned that if the dirty stuff was piled up everywhere, he needed to stop and take stock - piles of clean kecks, and he was storming the compounds.

I'm reaching that piled-up state myself. I feel ever-so-slightly out of control - work is manic as we try to atone for a two-month lull while the our IT system played silly buggers and we achieved nothing but expanding our repetoire of hate crimes; the children have social schedules on a par with Paris Hilton; I have been up and down to London peddling my wares and sitting in stalled, unheated trains. None of which makes me the fragrant, calm lady who should be presiding over this household.

So. The Colonel has stepped in, and this is his recipe for a de-stressing evening of pre-Christmas peace:

• He has lit a fire. I cannot think of anything more seductive and primitive than building a fire for someone you love. This is the first of the year, and the first the dog has ever seen. She has a ten-minute window while I write this, then I will be replacing her on the rug to gaze at the flames.
• He has poured me a gigantic whisky mac. Those dear readers in recovery look away. Warming ginger and an afterburn of peat. Heaven.
• He is playing Damien Rice's incredible album, O. If you don't have it, treat yourself immediately. It is quite the most beautiful thing you will hear this week. Play it loudly.
• He has, quite brilliantly, arranged for Episode Three of Spooks to come on while I am eating supper.
• There are candles lit all over the shop. It makes all hovels look wonderful and the light turns any haggard harridan into (in my case) Cate Blanchet. Excellent.
• I have the latest Tatler to drop into the bath later.

Hugh, your pants are safe.

Chicory and Cole Porter

My brother and me. Check out my fabulous titfer.*

There was one redeeming feature of the rubbish international experience that comprised my final two years of high school 'education.' It came in the form of my drama teacher, Mr. McBain. Drama teacher doesn't even begin to do him justice. A great bear of a man, from Maine via Tehran and several European capitals, he was one of those teachers that come along once in a lifetime. His belly laugh reverberated down the hall from his studio at the top of the stairs. It was filled with ephemera from a lifelong love of the arts and a lot of cigarette smoke. (This was the 80s, bear with us.) He looked like Balloo, coated in cashmere and swathed in scarves. He expected, and was rewarded with, professionalism and committment. Woe betide anyone who didn't learn their lines or was late to rehearsal. He wasn't afraid to colourfully erupt and that man took swearing to an art form. Everyone adored him.

He saved my skin on several occasions in those early furious days. He caught me weaving my way to the physics lab having liberated a bottle of Martini from the faculty fridge (like I said, it was the 80s) and hauled me into his cave. 'Sit down, drink this black coffee and learn this song.' 'But I can't sing.' 'If I say you can, you will.' He had no truck with my teenage life-is-shit-my-parents-teach-here-I-have-no-life-pass-me-the-Sartre bullshit. He took the rap on the stolen Martini and in return, I would knuckle down and take the lead in the end of term all-school production of Anything Goes, playing Reno Sweeney, a reformed nightclub-singer-turned-Evangelist.

It was a small school, only twelve in my class and about a hundred all in, all nationalities and degrees of acting ability. Several kids didn't even speak English. He kicked our arses. He brought in the Belgian Army to build sets. He had the hatmaker to the Queen of Belgium design our gorgeous costumes. He wheeled in a Hungarian refugee jazz musician to arrange the score. Someone's mother had been on Broadway and she did the choreography. You'd do anything for him, I told you.

Rehearsals were seriously hard work; we sweated - just like Fame. Including legwarmers. We also laughed till we cried - Mr McBain's trousers splitting waistband to waistband as he demonstrated high-kicking down the staircase still makes me smile. On opening night, he quelled my inner diva with a slug of wine and a Cocktail Sobranie in an elegant black holder, having gone nose to nose with the Head to let me smoke during my torch song. All of us loved it, we had a riot - even the audience.

After I escaped to University, a highlight of every holiday was dinner at his impeccably decorated townhouse. I count myself a lucky girl to have in my memory bank the sight and sound of him, throwing back his head in a huge roar of laughter, candles flickering on the pictures, hats and sketches. He usually cooked this traditional Belgian dish, which must be eaten with lots of wine, reminisces and dirty jokes. Follow with Cole Porter round the piano if you can.

Parboil 6 heads of trimmed chicory. Drain then wrap each one in a slice emmenthal or gruyere then a slice of good smoked ham. Lay in a buttered dish, cover with cheese sauce (the usual way - roux, milk, grated cheese and a scrunch of nutmeg.) Sprinkle more cheese on top and bake in a medium oven until golden and bubbling. Fresh bread and a bitter salad are good here.

*Tit fer tat. Hat. I've still got it.

Sins of our Fathers

Freud, and where the hell were you when I needed you in 1984?

So one day I find myself living the nightmare of all teachers' kids.  Not enough that I have been again uprooted, this time from a school in Scotland, where I was constantly bullied for being an English bastard eventually pretty happy and settled, and dumped instead in a rich kids' International School in Northern Europe. Now, worse still, my dad, the Northern Socialist, turns out to be my geography master.

My classmates, from what I can gather before the nightmare begins, are a heady mix of Eurotrash, US corporate offspring, children of diamond dealers, Indian princes and South African arms dealers' spawn. I have surmised this from behind my silent veil of chewing gum, gallons of mascara and Duran Duran scarf. This outfit does, I must admit in hindsight, rather tend to differentiate me from my new classmates. They, by sartorial contrast, sported the mid-Eighties uniform of jade green cashmere, frilly blouses and stonewashed baggy jeans. Even the girls. Being an International School meant that, in the 1980s, if you could write your own name and use the bathroom unaided, you would graduate cum laude.

Anyway. Period six, and  I am slumped in the back row, furious. The Northern Socialist is showing uncharacteristic bonhomie. 'Right, I want you all to stand up when I point to you and say where you come from and we can all get to know each other.' 'My name is Dimitri, I'm from Greece', 'Hi, my name is Phil, I'm Californian.' 'Good day, I am Ton, I come from Holland.' The NS is like a cocktail party host, 'Oh, lovely, how interesting, California, are you a vegetarian?' The pointing finger moves closer.

'You. The bovine one in the back row (he is undoubtedly talking to me). Chewing gum in the bin, please.' 'Manish, great to meet you, we'll be looking at diamond mining this term.' 'Susan, you're from Georgia! Do you know what a levee is?' Oh Christ, I know the NS and he can't resist the lure of any tenuous link to song - in this case to a man-made feature.  Just please don't let him sing Don Maclean. Too late. He sings - and I use this term in its loosest sense - 'Drove my chevy to the levee...'. I slump even lower in my chair.

With ominous certainty, the finger alights on me. 'You. Where do you come from?' I lumber crossly to my Doc Martin-ed feet. 'You want me to say where I come from?' Collective gasp of breath at the new girl showing unspeakable insubordination. 'Aye, I do.' I  mutter 'Scotland.' 'What? a JOCK? Well, no doubt you'll be educationally sub-normal. Don't worry, I will use very small words and you can have special colouring-in exercises to do.' This is my Dad, trying to be funny, oh and put me at my ease. Nice one, Dad.

I forget, mercifully, the rest of that lesson. At the end of it, I find myself in the oxymoronic 'study hall.' A kind Dutch girl, who later becomes one of my dearest friends bounces up to me. 'You were in Geography just now.' I burn in shame and nod imperceptibly. 'That was appalling. He really bullied you and showed no respect for your nationality. I'll come with you if you want to make a complaint to the Faculty Board.' 'Leave it,' I mumble, 'He's my dad.' 'No, really, I will support you with the B - what did you say?' 'I said he's my dad.' A long silence ensues as the entire room considers this statement.  Well, what could they say, really?  I like to think that the silence was redolent with empathy at the sheer awfulness of my predicament.  In retrospect, they had spotted a hideous troublemaker and all sidled silently away from low geography marks. They weren't as stupid as they looked.

Me? I'm over it now. Honestly.