A soul controlled by geography

"My dear young ladies, what a pleasure! Do come in and meet these delightful young men in search of wives.  This is Captian Johns, hasn't seen a woman since 1837, don't get downwind of him.  Reginald Blenkinsop is a keen tennis player and renowned Sodomite.  Hattie and Gertrude hate your guts already, you pretty little things.  And I'm usually pissed as a rat by 11am and likely to try unspeakable things at garden parties.  Tea?"

The day the Olympics started, we had a gluten-intolerant little friend to stay.  This pleased me on two counts - the bots and Edward would have someone to host and would therefore be less likely to notice that I had wiggled out of watching the Opening Ceremony; and if they did, it would be on the grounds that I was stuck in the kitchen making a gluten-free cake.  With Xanthan gum.  And Xanax.  And spelt flour and carob and chia seeds and Pritt Stick.  So I had an excellent excuse to miss it.

Old chums here will attest that I am far from sporty.  Also, and I am not proud of this, I could only too well imagine the mimsy little apologetic 'show' we would be inflicting on the rest of the world.  A bit of bad hip-hop to show how street and multicultural we are, some cliched old cock-and-bull all-inclusive watered-down inoffensive bollocks that would leave me yawning or apoplectic.

So when they all shouted excitedly at 7pm that it was starting, I enthusiastically yelled back that I would be through in a tick - fingers, covered in gluten-free stickiness, firmly crossed.  But they did a sort of Olympian intervention on me and I found myself standing, apron-ed and floury, in front of the most amazing sight I have seen in years.  Dark satanic mills, Windrush, Brunel, Poppins, Great Ormond Street and a little ordinary street.  I was utterly transfixed and to my profound astonishment, felt, for the first time in my globetrotting citizen-of-the-world life, extraordinarily proud to be British.

Thus it was with a slightly altered mind-set that I began reading The Fishing Fleet, a fascinating account of the women who have left these shores for India over the past couple of hundred years, to seek British husbands in far-flung corners of the Raj.

First the East India Company paid them £300 a year (a fortune in the 1700s) to travel to India, sight unseen and marry a British bachelor.  Then, as the word spread, and many marriage-age women were staring down the twin barrels of governessing or pitied spinsterhood, the women's fathers paid a 'bond' of £200 to get their daughters married off.

The politics of being sold (whether your pimp be the EIC or your own father) aside, this is a fascinating read.  Anne de Courcy is a cracking chronicler of women's lives in days gone by, and there are gems on every page - the empty cabin filled with your own furniture, the spectacularly mad dressing-up-and-games to pass the long voyages, the astonishing amounts of booze they sank and the squirming awfulness of the cattle market when they arrived.  There are funny, touching and downright tragic stories of the ladies of the fishing fleet, and Ms de Courcy has had very special access to original letters and photos which make this book a nosy parker's delight.  There are shocking bits of racism and snobbery too, even in historical context.

Jingoism and xenophobia are the shameful cousins of patriotism and I wonder sometimes if we British really know what to feel about our national inheritance.  A few short weeks ago, with teary eyes and dough atrophying in webs between my fingers, I know exactly how I felt and it was lovely.  In the morning, I bought a gluten-free chocolate cake from Waitrose.  I don't think anyone cared.

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,

Prophesy, prediction and puke

My lovely friend Markus rang me at the end of August. "We are all very bored of your attention-seeking. I'm having an actual proper crisis and I need you to drop everything and come to London for the weekend. I will feed you and water you and take you to an antiques fair. I've painted the sitting room and it's got a pinky undertone not grey. Doing the woodwork and trim in Pointing simply will not work." Now that's a real emergency, so I dropped the bots and dog with Edward and jumped on the next train. Markus made chocolate martinis and we ate plates of delicate Asian fish stew poring over paint chips and fabric samples and moving furniture about till the small hours. Bliss.

The next day was gorgeous so after the antiques fair, we went for lunch in Chiswick. Next to the restaurant was a chalked sign 'Psychic Readings this afternoon only'. Markus' eyes lit up. "Bloody no." I said. "Bloody yes" said he. "Nooooo," I wailed. "It'll be crap and what if she says I'm going to die?" "They can't say that and anyway, she might forsee some good stuff. Come on."

After losing the sort of unseemly scrap we used to indulge in as students, I presented myself to the psychic, a nicely dressed lady called Clarissa. I felt like the bots at the dentist - resentful, afraid and praying it wouldn't hurt too much.

I think when a fortune-teller is faced with a middle-aged woman wearing no rings other than black ones under her eyes, it is fair to make some pretty obvious assumptions. I sat opposite her in an empty room while she shut her eyes and held my hand. She smelled of wine. She urged me to relax. What she said absolutely blew me away.

"You are thinking about your dog and how much you miss her. She is teaching you the real meaning of love and you must let her have as much of your heart as she needs because the more love you give her, the more will come back to you. She's on her favourite hill right at this moment and she is running and happy." I was stunned and tears ran down my face. It's true, her unconditional waggy glee at everything and her head pushing tenderly into my hand night after night have brought me untold comfort.

I was thinking about this today as I nagged the dog to hurry at the end of a walk. I was in heels and velvet coat and late for a meeting at Rose's school. She ran into the woods. I stood on the path and bellowed. When she finally appeared, there was a plastic bag on her back. She ran up to me and rubbed her head delightedly on my coat and into my hand. I pulled off the bag. It had contained, it would appear, a regurgitated Indian. The dog and I were smeared with magenta-coloured, vomit-smelling rice. I put us both in the shower and missed the meeting.

Didn't foresee that though, did you Clarissa?

Time for a Bath

I believe it was Aristotle (though with my half-cocked education, it might also have been Churchill or Buzz Lightyear) who defined happiness as the complete and habitual exercise of all one's functions. Which is fine if you are an Ancient Greek who needs only exercise his need to scamper the hills of Athens in a Dionysian fashion, enjoy the odd orgy, some shotputting and running and heaps of olives and Nana Mouskouri albums.


For a long time, I have felt overwhelmed to the point of mania by the myriad of functions I am expected to exercise. So in the spring, when the Colonel left after several years of false starts, I had the time and space to examine my functions. Like Woody Allen in Hannah and Her Sisters, I did a lot of beetling about in baggy cords, muttering at the pavement and tilting at priests. It was an improbable acupuncturist, a former Chelsea wine dealer turned shaman healer who countered the Greek with some ancient Chinese wisdom. Something along the lines of "you need to have nothing before you can claim to have anything at all." I may have got that wrong - I was distracted by the copper forest of needles bristling along my Gate of Hope.


However, in the last nine months, I have distilled my roles to one: Mummy. I have baked and walked the dog, read books in the afternoon and stopped trying to make things happen. Just existing has been enough. Emptying my life has been frightening and liberating, but silence, it turns out, has its own sweet music.


Last weekend, Edward and I went to Bath, which glowed in a late autumn Georgian ochre. We walked through damp piles of pungent oak leaves and thawed hands and hearts over hot coffee and hazelnut cake. We are giving our marriage a second chance. Slowly, privately. Just the four of us. And the dog. And bloody Aristotle.

Cells of madness unconfined

George: Ripping Cornwall, hurrah for the hols. I DO hope we have a topping adventure.

Dick:I fancy getting lashed in Rock and pulling a posh tart.

Anne: I wonder if Matalan in Truro is open

Julian: I bloody LOVE the feel of tweed on naked buttocks

Over the summer, Edward rented a mini stately in Cornwall. The owner, Lady Charlotte, had refused to use email or mobile, so several cars’ worth of our guests ended up very confused in the car park of the Jamaica Inn, trying to work out her loopy posh hieroglyphics. It added quite some time to the journey, so the welcoming scones had atrophied in the Aga by the time our covoy rolled up the drive through overgrown rhododendrons.

Lady Charlotte was mad as cheese. Millimetres short of Edward’s 6 foot 5, she was a full-sail galleon of mid-Eighties electric-blue eye make-up, huge stiff crackle of frosted hair and shoulder pads like bungalows. The bots were transfixed. She spoke in a breathy ingenue voice, which, coming from a tight-head prop-sized body swathed in black and fuschia, was completely wonderful. Rather than the traditional "Here’s the airing cupboard, are those children house-trained" traditional spiel, she spied the champagne being unpacked and settled down, sparking up a long More, to share her thoughts on what bastards men are.

Her ire was divided equally between the rental agent and her most recent ex-husbands. The agent had shown remarkable insubordination in asking her to deal with the trailing wires, falling-down beds and mouse-infested pantry. He clearly had no idea how Proper People lived. The two exes had had lucky escapes; one had run off with a trollop from the taxi queue at Paddington and the other had taken the back of his head off via a mouthful of shotgun. I brightly skipped the saucer-eyed bots off for a swim and left my friend Maria to enjoy the show.

The bots were prune-wrinkled by the time we saw her weaving up the hill and I judged it safe to return. The rest of the party were still at the table, shaking with mirth and surrounded by empty bottles of pop. Rather a decent way to start a holiday, I reckon. The house was, au fond, very beautiful, but, like its owner, plastered in decades-old frills and furbellows. The bedrooms were each a trellis-and-tiny-rosebud nighmare of matching Laura Ashley wallpaper, bedspreads, tart-knicker window ruffles and frilly bedside table covers. Even the (empty) tissue boxes and wastepaper bins were covered in matching wallpaper.

Most bonkers of all, though, Lady C had moved into a little caravan for the summer which was parked behind the house up a steep hill. From which vantage point she surveyed her guests from a plastic picnic table surrounded by glass pyramids of empty bottles. Like a Molly Keane heroine via a David Bowie album cover. She popped up from time to time with suggestions for activities. Some were clearly ridiculous (open-air opera?) while some were just fantastic ("I’ll telephone to my great great chums who’ve cleverly opened the most wonderful restaurant in a tiny little bay and they can look after you. They’re from New Zealand. What fun.") They did, and it was. The elusive sun burst suddenly forth to light up the rain-twinkling headland and blind the hardened surfers. We sat on the balcony watching the dog tear up and down the beach, ate plates of seafood tapas, caught up on London gossip and all remembered how special Cornwall can be.

Sell your clothes and keep your thoughts

Drama and chaos are the perfect accessories for youth; when one's skirts are short and the nights are long, tortured tears and eliptical, unending conflict are absorbing, exciting, vital. Limping into my mid-forties, though, I prefer peace, stability and an impeccably-edited wardrobe.

After a year of brick-wall-head-banging and misery-induced skinniness, I am celebrating the impending arrival of winter with a spare, verging on monastic wardrobe. Bag after bag has gone to charity, on E-Bay, to friends. The walls and wardrobe doors in my room are now a flat violet-grey. Less than a dozen garments hang aesthetically from matching hangers. The resulting closet space has given the rattling skeletons such acres that many of them have fled in fright.

The hard-won lightening of my heart I am enjoying was matched yesterday by Freddie who was off school with a 40-Woodbine cough. After exhausting the surreal offerings of every obscure sporting channel, some God TV and the unmissable opportunity to buy a set of coloured chopping boards, he bounced into my room where I was arranging three t-shirts on an otherwise empty shelf. He sprawled on the bed next to the dog who was perched with elegantly-crossed paws.

"Pliz," I sneered. "Leaf de showroom. We sell clothe only to rich customer. Not peasant in mis-match pyjama suit with sticky-out hair."

"You know clothes?" he interrupted, rolling his eyes. "Well, can I get some nice ones? All my jeans are soooo flared and I hate pants. Now I'm ten, I should be wearing boxers. Cool ones from Top Man."

I segued seamlessly from Snooty Shopnazi to Cricket Mummy. "So is that why you went on a six-day tour with six pairs of pants and came back with five clean pairs and one pair missing?"

"Oh Mummy, he dimpled, shameless. "I love your funny voices. Do it again."

So later, we drove into town and conducted a skinny-jeans-cool-boxers commando raid, creeping about with a lot of scarves on in case any teachers were loitering in the 9-14 Boys department of H&M.

When we got home, he put on enormous headphones and listened to some bloke boasting that the club couldn't handle him. I held up his entire wardrobe item by item and he gave thumbs up or down like a gangsta Roman Emperor between admiring glances down at his lanky denim legs.

I filled a lot of bags with summery Boden checks and Gap pastels, remembering his once-chubby thighs and sartorial malleability. When the car was full, he inspected his own sparse shelves, the jumble of sweet colour replaced by a few neon T-shirts, a lot of nylon sports tops and some reverently-folded Top Man boxers.

"Cool. Please don't do that gay voice again though."

I wish I could grow up in one afternoon.