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First published by HarperCollinsPublishers 2018

FIRST EDITION

© Gill Sims 2018

Cover photograph © Tom Gauld 2018

Cover layout design © HarperCollinsPublishers 2019

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Source ISBN: 9780008298784

Ebook Edition © March 2019 ISBN: 9780008298791

Version: 2019-03-01

DEDICATION

To AE and AT

A NOTE TO THE READER

This US edition has been lightly Americanised for your reading pleasure. We have kept certain British words and slang intact but made some changes for clarity. And Mummy insisted on being Mummy throughout the book, although she kindly let us change the title.

CONTENTS

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

A NOTE TO THE READER

JULY

AUGUST

SEPTEMBER

OCTOBER

NOVEMBER

DECEMBER

JANUARY

FEBRUARY

MARCH

APRIL

MAY

JUNE

JULY

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

About the Publisher

JULY

Monday, 18 July

I have one week till the summer vacation begins. I can’t help but feel awfully jealous of the Famous Five’s parents – not only did Julian, Dick and Anne’s mama and papa simply bung them off on Aunt Fanny and Uncle Quentin at the slightest excuse, but Aunt Fanny was always sending them off to islands and moors and coves FULL OF CRIMINALS AND WRECKERS AND SMUGGLERS so that Uncle Quentin could work in peace at his inventing. I have frequently wondered if I could do similar, as I did once invent a very fabulous app that made splendid amounts of money for a little while, even if the app world is fickle and today’s hit is forgotten tomorrow and no one buys it anymore. I’m sure I could probably do the same again if only I could just send the children to live outdoors and go feral for the summer (and stop faffing about and eating cookies). As I recall, Uncle Quentin’s inventions never even made any money, which was why he and Aunt Fanny were poor and had to look after the beastly cousins, which makes it doubly unfair that it is now so frowned upon to hand your children a bicycle and a packet of sandwiches on the first day of the vacation, and tell them not to come home till it’s time to go back to school. Jane is eleven now, you see, and more than of an age for Famous Fiving. I did once wistfully suggest this to her, when we were in the middle of one of our frequent rows about why she is not allowed an Instagram account yet, and she pointed out the many illegalities with this plan and threatened to call ChildHelp if I ever broached it again.

I am feeling particularly bitter about the expenditure the summer vacation necessitates, because I have been reading the Famous Five books with Peter, though somewhat against his will, as he informs me each night that he would much rather play online games than endure another chapter of marvellous Blyton-y japes, frolics and foiling of beastly common-criminal types. Jane has obviously point-blank refused to take part in any such babyish activity as being read to in the evening, and so we compromised with her promising to read something herself instead, which I felt was a perfectly reasonable offer, until after two chapters she announced that Anne of Green Gables was stupid and boring and why was Anne always wittering on about imagination and I shouted that Jane had no soul and was clearly a changeling as no child of mine would speak thus of Anne Shirley. Now I pretend not to know that she is watching YouTube make-up tutorials instead of wandering the enchanted lanes of Avonlea with Gilbert Blythe (who I still totally would, incidentally).

Peter, however, has not quite succeeded in breaking my spirit to the same extent as Jane, and so I am still forcing him to sit with me and roam Kirrin Island. I think he is going for a chemical-warfare option to get out of our reading sessions, though, as I swear he farts far more when he is supposed to be sitting and reading with me than he does normally, and that is saying something for a child who once proudly announced he had made his teacher feel sick with his flatulence. The chapter has had to be cut short once or twice due to my eyes watering.

In theory, this summer should be less fraught for me than previous ones, due to my possibly dubious decision to take voluntary layoff three months ago. I’d had grand plans to become a top games and app designer, on the strength of creating an app, which I called Why Mummy Drinks, two years ago. Taking the layoff seemed like a brilliant opportunity to have a bit of a financial cushion until I came up with the latest hit game. When I quit the old job, I had a plethora of brilliant ideas that I was quite sure I only needed time to make into something splendidly lucrative. But when I actually try to translate them into a game or an app, they’re just a bit … well, shit. Also, the fact that I am really, really useless at working from home and managing my time properly might have something to do with my lack of productivity, and after years of dreaming about escaping from the office it’s actually quite lonely working at home by yourself with no one to talk to. I even find myself missing Jean from Shipping, who used to tell long and involved stories about the state of her gall bladder. Also, when you are at home all day by yourself, you eat a startling quantity of chocolate cookies. So not only am I failing to achieve Great Things, and feeling lonely, I have gained a stone and am now alarmed by the size of my own arse every time I accidently catch sight of it in a mirror. I feel like one of those cardboard children’s books That’s Not My Arse, It’s Far Too Enormous …

Anyway, with the summer looming, I have been booking sports camps and daycare slots, and making complex deals with friends so that we can all have some semblance of having our children looked after during the vacation AND be able to try to get some work done without spending vast sums of money. Obviously we will all end up spending vast sums of money anyway, as the children will require entertaining for the summer, as well as being fed at alarmingly close intervals, leaving me wondering how they cope when they are at school and can’t constantly squawk for food, like starving baby starlings, beaks agape, begging for snacks.

Friday, 22 July

And they are done for the summer! All week the children have come tottering out of school, buckling under piles of tattered composition books and dog-eared artwork, all of which is liberally sprinkled with glitter, now gently dusted over my house, and all of which apparently must be kept for posterity, because according to Jane, ‘When I’m a famous social media influencer, Mummy, this could all be worth a fortune!’ I am struggling to see how Jane’s indifferent copy of Van Gogh’s Sunflowers, which looks identical to every other child’s in her class, is someday going to be of any value to anyone but me, but it seems that I will be trampling their dreams and casting their childhood aside if I throw any of it away. Obviously, I am discreetly removing several pieces every night and chucking them in the outside trash, while lovingly claiming that everything is carefully stored in the attic.

Peter has also brought home his vacation homework – a small plant that must be kept alive during the vacation, and indeed nurtured over the coming year. Marvellous. I have a poor track record with plants. Even cacti shrivel and die at the touch of my black thumbs. I asked Peter if he knew what sort of plant it was, so I could purchase an emergency replacement if need be. Peter helpfully replied, ‘A green plant, Mummy.’ I’m not sure how much help that will be as I scour the garden centres of the land with a desiccated twig for reference. Perhaps it’s my come-uppance for letting the class hamster make a break for freedom when I was allowed it home for the weekend when I was nine, and forcing my mother to tour every pet shop in town until she found a suitable replacement, as Hannibal was never seen again. Mum swore she could hear him scampering around at night for years afterwards, but I think that was only to stop me crying after I discovered Alphonso, her vicious Siamese cat, licking what looked like hamster fur off his chops and looking more pleased with himself than ever.

Monday, 25 July

The first day of the vacation. I suppose it could’ve been worse. I had a book called The First Day of the Holidays when I was little, about delinquent penguins who stole a motorbike and went joyriding and crashed it (no idea why penguins were stealing motorbikes), and there were at least no auto thefts or joyriding animals today. What there was, was a lot of moaning.

I had taken today off, thinking it would be nice for the children for us all to do something together on the first day. Jane demanded the movie theatre, Peter demanded Laser Quest, I declined both, insisting we were going to do something wholesome and fun. I had the children’s best friends Sophie and Toby for the day too, as part of the complex childcare arrangements with my friend Sam (as a single father, Sam’s childcare issues are possibly the most complicated of all my friends), and I brightly announced that perhaps it might be a lovely idea to go to a stately home and learn about some history.

‘Booooorrrrring!’ moaned my children, while Sophie and Toby clearly thought the same but at least were well enough brought up not to say so.

‘Why do we have to do this? This is so crap,’ huffed Jane.

‘Mummy, can we take our iPads?’ whimpered Peter.

‘IT WILL BE FUN!’ I bellowed. ‘IT WILL BE INTERESTING AND EDUCATIONAL AND THE STUFF THAT HAPPY MEMORIES ARE MADE OF! And also it will go some way to me getting my money’s worth from my very middle-class National Trust membership that your father keeps moaning on that I don’t use enough.’

Of course, as soon as we got there I remembered why I don’t use the flipping National Trust membership – because National Trust properties are full of very precious and breakable items, and very precious and breakable items don’t really mix with children, especially not small boys. Where I had envisaged childish faces glowing with wonder as they took in the treasures of our nation’s illustrious past, we instead had me shouting, ‘Don’t touch, DON’T TOUCH! FFS, DON’T TOUCH! I SAID DON’T TOUCH, DON’T CROSS THAT ROPE, DON’T SIT ON THAT, OH, JESUS CHRIST, OH, FML,’ while stoutly shod retirees tutted disapprovingly and drafted angry letters to the Daily Mail in their heads. Maybe I could design an app that you put on children’s phones or iPods that can detect when they are in the vicinity of something expensive and breakable so it starts vibrating and sounds an alarm and squawks, ‘DON’T TOUCH THAT!’ to save parents the trouble. It would be useful in many situations, not just in National Trust houses – the china department of a big store, for example. Though if you are foolish enough to take children into a china department, then you probably deserve the inevitable carnage that will be left in your wake …

Because the children had managed to eat the lovingly packed picnic on the way there, as they were obviously ‘starving’ within three minutes of us leaving the house, I was forced to take them to the café for lunch. A self-service café with four children in tow is not an experience to be recommended. In theory, at eleven and nine the children should have been relatively self-sufficient, but in practice, complex tasks like standing in a line, holding a tray or choosing what flavour of juice they wanted proved quite beyond them, so that by the time we sat down I think the entire county hated us. The pasta bake Jane had maintained she had to have and would definitely eat was immediately declared inedible, as she thought she saw a bit of red bell pepper and I knew she didn’t like red bell pepper; Sophie burnt her mouth on her soup, despite me telling her to wait for it to cool down; Peter and Toby inhaled the contents of the children’s lunchboxes that they had insisted they wanted in one mouthful and looked around expectantly for more, while I poured cold water down Sophie and scraped the mayonnaise off my sandwich for Jane and hissed, ‘No, no one is having Coke,’ promised potato chips when we got home and resisted the urge to simply walk out of the café and bang my head repeatedly against the picturesque brick wall outside. Though I would probably have been told off for damaging National Trust property.

I provoked further shocked looks when I rallied the children to go by shouting, ‘Right, come on then, you monstrous hell fiends.’ I am still not sure whether the shock was due to me referring to the precious moppets as monstrous hell fiends, or the fact that they responded to the name.

How many more days of the vacation are there?

AUGUST

Thursday, 4 August

The children have been at Sports Camp this week. Sports Camps are a very good idea thought up by some sadistic bastard somewhere under the guise of providing fun for children and affordable daycare for parents in the vacation. If your idea of ‘affordable’ is approximately eleventy fucking billion pounds. And your idea of ‘fun’ is providing five different changes of clothes a day for all the different activities, including swimwear that has to be rescued from their bags each night and washed and dried or else they will just leave it there to moulder and keep stuffing clean towels on top, because they are rancid beasts.

Every time I sign the children up to something like this I have secret hopes that they will discover their hidden talent and turn out to be a tennis/soccer/gymnastics virtuoso. So far this has not happened, as they seem to spend most of their time eating potato chips before pleading for money for the vending machines afterwards, so that my darling poppets, who in theory should be worn out by a day of vigorous activity, are instead smacked off their tits on the energy drinks that they bought even as I howled, ‘Just get Cheetos, sweetie, nothing else, I said Cheetos, no, don’t open that can, DON’T OPEN THAT. Oh FML!’

Simon is in Madrid, doing whatever it is he does on his important business trips, which I suspect are not nearly as much hard work as he claims, given he gets to stay in a nice hotel (how I appreciated his text informing me he had been upgraded to a suite) and go out for nice dinners in actual restaurants, some of which don’t even serve fries, and where he doesn’t have to issue strict instructions to the staff about how there must be no sauce whatsoever allowed anywhere in the vicinity of the children’s food because obviously terrible things will happen if their burgers are contaminated with anything as awful as mayonnaise or relish, although they will immediately douse them in a vat of ketchup, so they wouldn’t taste the offending sauces anyway. I dream of hotels. I never got to go on fancy trips in the old job, but I had some vague idea that my new career as an app designer might involve me getting to go to conferences and possibly even conventions. Las Vegas seems to have a lot of those sorts of things, and I had visions of myself sending casual texts to Simon from there about what a good time I was having, probably in an upgraded suite, eating food with sauce. Instead, it is just me. And the cookies. Staring hopelessly at a blank screen and wondering what the fuck I am going to do, and trying not to think about how almost all the layoff money has now gone. A lot of it spent on cookies.

I had, obviously, planned that the children being at Sports Camp would be an excellent chance to get some work done, but it hasn’t really worked out. Does anyone actually ever get any work done when they are working from home, or is it just me? I mostly just stared out the window, and perused the Daily Mail website to see who is ‘stepping out’ (going to the shops), ‘flaunting their curves’ (also going to the shops, but in a slightly tighter top than just ‘stepping out’) or ‘slamming’ a fellow Z-lister in a ‘feud’ (putting something vague and attention-seeking on Twitter before deleting it an hour later when the Daily Mail has taken notice). I also played a lot of solitaire before sending a flurry of emails at 2.45 p.m., just before I had to leave to go and pick the children up. Foolishly, one of the emails I sent was to Simon, ever the supportive and beloved husband, who replied to my email questioning the lack of work I had achieved today by saying that yes, it is just me, and he does not procrastinate ever. This is a massive lie, as I have seen his version of working from home, and it involves just as much Daily Mail as mine, and also a lot of browsing Autocar looking at sports cars he can’t afford, then staring pathetically into cupboards FULL OF FOOD (apart from cookies, because I’ve eaten them all), feebly enquiring why there is never anything to eat in this house.

I think it is safe to say that my virtuous resolution not to drink on week nights is not going well.

Aunt Fanny never had these problems.

After two glasses of wine, and an unpleasant foray into online banking that confirmed my fears about the state of my account, and no adult interaction all day apart from the perky ‘coach’ at the Sports Camp getting me to sign the accident book again, due to Peter’s decision to headbutt the floor for reasons known only to him, I decided that something needed to change, and I signed up for a recruitment agency. Maybe just a little part-time job, to make some money, but that leaves me with plenty of time to come up with my brilliant app idea. And that also will involve lovely business trips to exotic places (there wasn’t actually an option for that, but there really should be).

Friday, 5 August

Oh dear. Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear. I fear I have done a foolish thing. I am at Scout Camp with Jane. I signed up as a parent volunteer at a meeting about the camp a couple of months ago, feeling it was a good and worthy thing to do that would give me a chance to spend some time with Jane like a nice caring mummy, and also – on some level – I would be proving my old Brown Owl wrong for drumming me out of the Girl Scouts for insubordination. (I can’t even remember what I did. I have a vague recollection of objecting to excessive knot-tying and messing around while singing ‘Ging Gang Goolie’, but whatever it was, apparently I was Not the Right Sort). But Scout Camp! Scout Camp would make up for it all. A verdant green field, with stout white canvas tents and smoky camp fires to make cocoa on. We would probably get the milk for the cocoa from a local farmer. There may even be ruffianly sorts lurking, just waiting for me to rally the girls and solve a mystery. Oh, yes! I was going to be marvellous at Scout Camp! I eagerly thrust my hand in the air, practically bursting with enthusiasm, when Melanie the Scout Leader asked for volunteers. Too late, I realised I needn’t have been quite so keen, as every other parent had breathed a sigh of relief once they saw that some other poor fool was willing to do it and get them off the hook. Melanie, meanwhile, did not look entirely entranced at my selfless gesture.

‘Ellen!’ she said weakly. ‘How kind of you! Err, are you sure this is your sort of thing?’

I assured Melanie that of course it was my sort of thing.

‘Only, you know, you’ll be in charge of some of the girls. By yourself. Are you quite sure you would be able to cope with that?’ said Melanie anxiously.

I feared Melanie was thinking back to the unfortunate evening a few weeks ago when I had been the parent on duty at Scouts and she had been called away to deal with a nosebleed. A nice policeman had come along that evening to give a talk about self-defence, and Melanie had thought it quite safe to leave the rest of the girls in the care of PC Briggs and myself. It was most unfortunate that PC Briggs was quite a young and naïve police officer. It was equally unfortunate that Amelia Watkins had chosen the moment when Melanie was out of the room to ask to see PC Briggs’s handcuffs, claiming she was considering a career in the police force. No sooner had the poor young chap handed them over for Amelia’s inspection, than she swiftly handcuffed him to a chair, and the rest of the girls, sensing weakness as only the under-twelves can, descended mob-handed and relieved him of his baton and walkie-talkie too, before going full-on Lord of the Flies. They danced around him, mocking his pleas to be released, while Tabitha MacKenzie radioed menacing ransom messages back to base and Tilly Everett tried to break Milly Johnson’s arm with the baton and I made ineffectual pleas for them all to settle down.

This all happened within the three minutes that Melanie was absent from the hall. By the time she returned, PC Briggs was on the verge of tears, his radio was crackling ominously with threats of ‘back-up’ being dispatched and Milly had Tilly in a headlock trying to disarm her (Milly at least had been paying attention in the self-defence demonstration).

One shrill blast of Melanie’s whistle restored order, PC Briggs departed hastily, his radio now crackling with hysterical laughter about Girl Scouts, and I was sent to sort out the boxes of felt-tip pens, being deemed too irresponsible to even be allowed near the PVA glue.

Nonetheless, as no other parent was now willing to come forth, since a Volunteer had been found, Melanie was stuck with me.

‘Do you know much about camping, Ellen?’ she enquired, without much hope for my answer.

‘Oh, yes!’ I informed her brightly. ‘I went to Glastonbury Festival once. It was marvellous. I’m sure Scout Camp will be much the same. It’ll be fun!’ I assured her. Melanie looked unconvinced.

And now here I am. In a field. Quite a muddy field. There are many, many Girl Scouts here, for apparently it is a County Camp, and they have come from far and wide and Melanie wishes to make a good impression. I fear Melanie had not factored in my bright pink Hunter wellies when she was planning her Good Impression. I also fear that she may be slightly judging my jaunty ensemble of denim shorts and a Barbour, which was not dissimilar to my Glastonbury outfit twenty years earlier when I was hoping to channel Kate Moss, but too late I realised that in fact Kate Moss is the only woman in Britain over the age of twenty-five who can successfully pull off wearing shorts and I looked not so much festival chic as a scarecrow on acid chic. On the plus side, the fake tan I applied to my legs has gone such a lurid shade of orange that they probably glow in the dark, so I will be easy to find if I get lost in the field at night.

If Melanie was disappointed in me, I was equally disappointed to discover that instead of the proper white canvas bell tents I had envisaged, we were accommodated in nasty nylon monstrosities in a fetching shade of puce green. These were, Melanie informed me, far more practical and hi-tech that an old-fashioned tent, and I would be both warmer and more comfortable.

‘But the other ones are so beautiful!’ I sighed, as an increasingly exasperated Melanie tried to direct fifteen over-excited girls and me to put the tents up, and I gazed longingly across the field to a row of Proper Tents. ‘How could they be less comfortable than these horrors? Why, the beautiful tents are just crying out for bunting and cushions and strings of fairy lights!’

‘For Christ’s sake, Ellen!’ snapped Melanie. ‘You’re at County Camp, not an interior design convention. Where is your Scouting Spirit?’

Where was my Scouting Spirit indeed? It was becoming increasingly clear that I seemed to be sorely lacking Scouting Spirit, which was possibly the real reason I had been so ignominiously thrown out of the Girl Scouts all those years ago. I couldn’t help but think mutinous thoughts that if there were mysteries to be solved and criminal sorts to be thwarted, the thwarting would almost certainly fall to those lucky souls in the charmingly rustic, vintage tents.

Saturday, 6 August

I have decided I do not like camping. Camping is basically sleeping in a field. Sleeping in a field is fine when you are twenty-two and off your tits on fifteen pints of hard cider and some dubious illegal substances after dancing like a loon to splendid nineties rock and pop, but other than that, why would anyone want to go and sleep in a field for fun when they have a perfectly good house and bed? Moreover, why would they sleep in a field when they were stone cold sober? It is not right. There is nowhere to plug in my hair straighteners. But then again, there is nowhere to wash my hair either, so at least the grease is weighing down the frizz, so you know, swings and roundabouts. I think a beetle got in my hair last night too. I am sure I could feel something moving. Melanie wasn’t very impressed when I woke her up after I tried to get the beetle out of my hair. She asked me to go back to sleep as there are no poisonous beetles in Britain. She was unsympathetic when I whimpered that what if I was allergic to the beetle and didn’t know on account of having never had a beetle in my hair before. I think Melanie is regretting letting me come, which is fair enough, as I am very much regretting coming myself. It is not at all like Glastonbury, and nor is it anything like my Famous Five fantasies. I think we have the wrong kind of mud here.

There is no adorably smoky wood fire to cook sausages on. Instead there is a terrifying gas stove that could take my eyebrows off when I light it. It is even worse than lighting the Bunsen burners in the chemistry lab at school. I didn’t say this to Melanie, though, as between Beetlegate and her having to get up multiple times in the night to settle homesick girls/break up midnight feasts/minister to tummy aches brought on by excessive consumption of chocolate toffees at 3 a.m., she did not look like concern for my eyebrows was top of her list. Nonetheless, I am quite admiring of Melanie, even if a part of me suspects that she made me light the gas stove in the hope that I would manage to set myself on fire and she would be relieved of my ineptitude. She just gets on with it all, and even when the Scouts are being really annoying, she doesn’t lose her rag with them and tell them to just fuck off, like I probably would if I was in charge. Nor does she resort to mainlining gin, which would probably be my other coping strategy if I was her. I think it must take someone really quite special to do something like this – perhaps that is where the Scouting Spirit comes in.

I always thought that I would have been quite splendid in the German bombing of Britain during the war – that I was a trooper and would have been some sort of inspirational figure, leading rousing sing-songs and fashioning ingenious things out of clothespins, but it is becoming apparent that I would probably have spent the time being useless and flapping around while the Melanies of the 1940s built bomb shelters with their bare hands.

There are no signs of coiners or smugglers to thwart, which is probably just as well, as all the girls seem more interested in going to the toilet en masse and stuffing their faces with more contraband sweeties than they do in Solving Mysteries. There was an archery session, where Jane came over all William Tell and had to be restrained from trying to shoot a Granny Smith off Tilly Morrison’s head, and an orienteering activity during which the girls were unimpressed with maps and compasses and pointed out that Google Maps existed.

‘Ah,’ I said. ‘But what if there was no Google Maps?’

‘Why would there be no Google Maps, though?’ said Amelia Benson.

‘Well, you could have no signal, or your battery could be dead,’ I pointed out, but the girls looked unconvinced.

‘Or you could have lost your phone,’ I added.

‘So, we’ve lost our phone, but we just happen to have a map and a compass?’ objected Olivia Brown. ‘It’s not very likely, is it, Ellen?’

‘Well,’ I said, starting to get irritated, ‘maybe there has been a nuclear apocalypse and Google Maps no longer exists because civilisation has been wiped out along with most of the human race, and you are one of the lone survivors and all you have to help you get to safety before you starve to death is a map and a bloody compass, and if you are unable to navigate by them then you will die by the roadside like the rest of the population of the planet!’

Mia Robinson burst into tears. ‘I don’t want to be the only one left alive!’ she sobbed. ‘What about my hamster? Can hamsters survive nuclear apocalypses?’

‘No,’ said Jane. Mia sobbed harder, and proved quite inconsolable. Melanie had to be summonsed to comfort her and assure her that there was no chance of a nuclear holocaust any time soon, and the orienteering was just a bit of fun, and her hamster would be fine, yes and her mum and dad too.

While Melanie was doing this, her own orienteering group managed to wander off and get lost somewhere in the woods and a search party had to be launched. The other Scout leaders were quite judgemental of Melanie for losing her Scouts, and I fear she blames me for all this. We were summonsed to a singalong this evening and we had to sing some complicated clapping song where you also had to clap the hand of the person next to you, and I’m pretty sure that Melanie didn’t need to slap my hand nearly as hard as she did. Hopefully there will be no beetles tonight, as I think she might do more than slap me if I have to wake her up. I’m sure there were no beetles at Glastonbury – it’s probably the wrong kind of mud here that attracts them. I wonder if I am too old to go to Glastonbury again? Do they let in fortysomethings? Could I even hack the pace, or would I just die? I mean, obviously one could no longer dabble in illegal substances, because one is middle-aged and respectable, and all the hard cider would make me need to pee all the time because I’ve had two children and my bladder is not what it was, and I’m not sure I could cope with festival toilets anymore. Maybe I would have to go to one of the Old People’s Festivals, like Rewind or something? I wonder if they have better toilets? But they are often billed as being ‘family friendly’, and if I have escaped my own cherubs to get sloshed and behave badly for the weekend, the last thing I want is Other People’s Children roaming around. Oh God, I am a terrible person. Melanie can probably tell, and that’s why she hates me. As well as the whole traumatising one of her Scouts and making her lose six others thing, obviously.

Sunday, 7 August

I am home! I am washed! Eventually. Oh, the bliss. Sort of.

This morning, after Dicing with Death with the Stove of Doom and dispensing frankly revolting eggy bread to the girls, who didn’t seem to care, we took the tents down. Melanie was relieved to find that I am not totally useless, and could at least work out that to take the tent down, you simply reverse the putting-up procedure, and it all went relatively smoothly, despite the Scouts’ best efforts to get trapped in the middle of collapsing tents. We didn’t lose any more girls, and I managed not to upset any more of them, which was just as well, as Melanie was up several times in the night with Mia having nightmares. Hopefully she won’t tell Mia’s parents that it was me who has caused her fears of the Nuclear Winter. Something has bitten me in an unspeakable place, though. I suspect the killer beetle.

On arriving home with a grubby and sleep-deprived Jane, I was hopeful that Simon and Peter might have kept the home fires burning in my absence. I may lack Scouting Spirit, but sometimes I am an incurable optimist. Sadly, my optimism was misplaced, as the house was a pit of fucking hell. I would go so far as to say squalid. I am not going to be an optimist anymore, I have decided, I am going to be a pessimist. It seems a much better idea. A pessimist will only ever either be proved right or pleasantly surprised – there is no disappointment lurking for pessimists the way there is for optimists.

Simon was the picture of injured innocence as I shouted about why was there underwear strewn in places that underwear ought not to be, and no one had emptied the trash or flushed the toilet, let alone removed the skidmarks or wiped the counters, and instead of putting away the clean dishes in the dishwasher to make room for the dirty ones, they had simply taken to piling the dirty dishes on the countertop above the dishwasher, waiting hopefully for the Magical Bastarding Dishwasher Fairy to wave her wand and furnish them with clean bowls.

‘What exactly have you done while I have been gone?’ I ranted. ‘And DON’T say “Looked after Peter”. He is hardly a baby that needs constant tending.’

‘Actually, darling,’ said Simon with irritating smugness, ‘I have cleaned out the fridge and sorted through the cupboards and thrown out everything that was out of date.’

I went cold. ‘You have done what?’ I said in horror.

I flung open the cupboards. All the spices – gone!

‘Some of them were two years out of date,’ said Simon indignantly.

I whimpered.

The cupboard full of posh rice and pasta and the token bag of quinoa, because middle-class – empty.

‘FOUR years!’ Simon informed me. ‘The quinoa was four years out of date! It hadn’t even been opened! And the risotto rice expired last month, and the red carmargue rice was two months out of date, and there was a packet of funny shaped pasta that went off six months ago. And there was a can of spaghetti hoops that was SIX years out of date!’

‘These things don’t go off,’ I said furiously. ‘Spices are MEANT to be out of date! Nobody has in-date spices, the people who say you should throw them out after six months are just trying to trick you. When they start tasting like dust is when they are getting GOOD. And pasta and rice are clearly edible for months after the arbitrary date on the packet and now I will have to waste money buying more quinoa for no one to eat, because if we have no quinoa in the cupboard are we even middle-class? And canned stuff NEVER goes bad. NEVER! That is why people hoard cans for after the nuclear apocalypse. If there is a nuclear apocalypse tonight, we needn’t bother trying to survive, because we will all starve anyway because YOU THREW OUT MY EMERGENCY SPAGHETTI HOOPS!’

‘I think you’re over-reacting again, darling.’ smirked Simon. ‘Look in the fridge.’

I opened the fridge. No jam. No ketchup. No mayonnaise. Not a single vegetable. The three tubs of antiquated houmous that were looking increasingly menacing and I was actually quite scared to touch had also vanished, which was something.

‘All out of date,’ beamed Simon.

‘The potatoes?’

‘Out of date yesterday.’

‘Carrots, onions, garlic?’

‘Gone, gone, gone!’

‘But there was nothing wrong with them. Unless they are actually sprouting, going green or decomposing, they are absolutely fine.’

‘Out of date! Out of date!’ insisted Simon. ‘They had to go.’

‘FML,’ I muttered. ‘Well, I suppose we’re getting a takeout for dinner, then. And where is the ham? That wasn’t out of date.’

‘No, but it said eat within two days of opening and it had been open for more than two days, so out it went.’

‘FFS!’ I said. ‘Literally NO ONE pays any attention to that. NO ONE! I am going to have a shower and scrape off field residue, and you can go to the shop and BUY SOME FUCKING FOOD.’

‘But I’ve been busy sorting all this out and looking after Peter all weekend! Even though, really, sorting out the fridge and cupboards should be your job, now you’re not working, but I did it for you anyway.’ protested Simon. ‘Can’t you pop to the shop?’

‘Firstly, I AM working, I am trying to build myself a new career, I’m hardly sitting around reading magazines and eating bonbons all day like a lady of leisure,’ (this might be a slight lie, obviously) ‘so I don’t know where you get the idea that everything in the house is now my responsibility. Secondly, I HAVE BEEN SLEEPING IN A FUCKING FIELD AND BEEN TORMENTED BY BEETLES AND RISKED MY LIFE WITH A VERY DANGEROUS GAS STOVE IN ORDER TO CREATE WONDERFUL CHILDHOOD MEMORIES FOR YOUR DAUGHTER, WHILE YOU THREW OUT VAST QUANTITIES OF PERFECTLY GOOD FOOD!’ I roared. ‘YOU go to the bastarding shop!’

Simon went to the shop. He came home chuntering in outrage at the iniquitous price of food, which frankly serves him right for throwing everything out. How marvellous it is to be home. I have several weeks more of such fun to look forward to.

Wednesday, 10 August

Today, lacking any other inspiration for something to do with my darling children, we went to the park. I hate the park. The park is where mummies go when their precious moppets have driven them so fucking crazy that they now need to be in the presence of witnesses to stop them doing something they regret. Sometimes I wonder about trying to tot up all the hours I have spent in cold, draughty parks since the children were born, but frankly it is too depressing. Also, everyone witters on at you about the dangers of getting piles in pregnancy, but no one, not one single fucker, ever tells you that actually you are more likely to get piles from the hours upon hours upon hours you will now spend sitting on a chilly, damp park bench. Still, at least it is summer, so the risk of piles and chilblains is slightly diminished.

I cannot enter the hallowed portals of the actual play park because I brought the dog with me, so we lurk outside while toddlers’ mummies glare at us in case we make a break for the gate so Judgy can do a shit in the sandpit and I can rub it in their cherub’s eye and BLIND THEM FOR EVER! Obviously, I know dog poo can be very dangerous, and of course I don’t condone people who let their dogs crap in children’s play parks. I just resent the hisses of horror from the mummies whenever a dog ventures within a hundred feet of the gate. Luckily, Peter and Jane are now old enough that they don’t need close supervision in the park anymore. Peter is perfectly capable of trying to break a limb on the monkey bars all by himself, and Jane is more interested in taking selfies with Sophie on the old iPhone she cajoled out of me and now insists on taking everywhere with her despite me pointing out that she doesn’t actually need a phone at the park.

While the children played, I had a quick look through my emails, where there was nothing of much interest – another Nigerian general just needed my bank account details to transfer his millions (I wonder if I could invent an app that somehow spams back the spammers?), Gap had another sale (when does Gap not have a sale? Does anyone ever buy anything full price in Gap? Maybe I could make an app for Gap, for all their sales. Oh, they already have one. Damn), and one more email from the recruitment company I had signed up for. I almost deleted the recruitment company’s email, as despite carefully filling in the forms telling them my qualifications, my interests, the fields I wished to work in and the salary I was looking for, so far they had sent a steady stream of jobs that were nothing to do with my expertise, were located five hundred miles away and paid approximately a third of what I previously earned. However, mainly so I could look like I was doing something important – and thus avoid catching the eye of any of the other parents and having to engage in conversation – I opened it, and lo and behold, IT WAS ONLY MY DREAM FUCKING JOB!

It was perfect. I’d be working for one of the hottest new tech start-up companies of the last five years, who occupied a sexy, shiny, modern, glass office block, instead of a grey building on a grey industrial estate, yet was only about twenty minutes’ drive from my house.

I have often passed the office building and metaphorically pressed my nose against the glossy mirrored-glass windows. Apparently, it’s just as cool inside (yes, I might have googled it. Repeatedly), with light and space and acres of white desks and Beautiful People. OK, maybe I am imagining the Beautiful People, but I am pretty sure everyone who works there is super-cool and trendy and probably wears hipster glasses and ethical pants. They probably have Whatsapp groups to discuss things instead of insisting on pointless two-hour meetings to resolve something that could have been sorted with one email, and if they do have meetings they sit on … oooh … I dunno, beanbags or something. Actually, do I want to work somewhere with beanbags? I’m almost forty-two. Could I manage to get up off a beanbag with dignity? They probably don’t have beanbags, it’ll be fine.

And I’d actually be doing something quite stimulating and challenging and interesting, unlike the old job where the best thing I got to do was tell Dodgy Ed in Accounts that actually, no, it wasn’t possible to eradicate all traces of the hardcore porn that he had ‘accidentally downloaded’ from his laptop (in a fit of malice I also claimed that, in fact, the internet tracks everything you do and so even if he bought a new laptop and threw that one in a river, the internet would know about the porn and so his wife would still be able to see what he had been watching).

The pay is really good, too. Which would be awfully nice, as the layoff money has almost run out, and I hate the idea of not having my own money. I know it all goes into the joint account anyway, but I’ve always contributed to that, and the idea of being ‘dependent’ on Simon sticks somewhat in my throat. The only downside is that it would be a full-time position.

I suppose I should really have discussed the whole full-time thing with Simon first, but I was so excited about my perfect job coming up pretty much right on my doorstep (and mentally I had also spent most of my lovely new salary already) that I just went ahead and told the agency to put me forward for it. Oh, what bliss it would be if I got it! And now the children are at school most of the time, the extra money would easily cover any increased daycare costs, and then some. I am crossing my fingers and toes and legs and … what else can one cross, apart from eyes? Maybe I am still a bit of an optimist.

Saturday, 20 August

I am rested, recharged and raring to go after my wonderful, relaxing family vacation with my darling children and beloved husband. Oh, what a splendid time we had! Oh, how we frolicked! And the japes. The japes! One day the children will look back on those golden sun-drenched days, and they will smile fondly at the #happymemories created as they laughed and ran along those sandy Cornish beaches in tasteful knitwear, the wind in their hair and their youth before them. Or at least they will if they look at my Instagram account, which reports on the vacation I would like to have had, as opposed to the vacation I actually had, which mainly consisted of doing laundry, attempting to play an ancient game of Mousetrap that was missing half the pieces, trying to cook in an unfamiliar kitchen and swearing because every damn knife in the place was blunt. Incidentally, why are knives in vacation houses ALWAYS so blunt? Is it because they are concerned that under the pressure to have a marvellous time and keep those #happymemories coming that someone might crack and try to murder their family if they have to listen to one more whine about how everyone else goes to Disney World and why do we have to go to Cornwall (because we are middle-class, darling, and also slightly pretentious), and can we go to Disney World next year? (No, sweetie, because your father hates People.) Then there’s the moaning about why is there no wifi (because we’re here to talk to each other, poppet, and have a lovely time, not stare at our tablets, and yes, I did go outside to get a 4G signal, but I needed to upload my photographs to Instagram because how else will anyone know we are having a lovely time? We ARE having a lovely time. YES, WE ARE! WE ARE HAVING A LOVELY TIME BECAUSE I FUCKING WELL SAY WE ARE HAVING A LOVELY TIME! No, you can’t borrow my phone to play Pokémon Go. Because there aren’t any Pokémon in Cornwall. No, of course I’m not lying to you, why would I lie to you?).

Were it not for the fact that I am just as adept as the next person at lying on social media, I would be convinced that every other child in the country spends the entire summer vacation in some sort of sun-drenched, golden Enid Blyton world, laughing and frolicking on beaches, skipping through wildflower meadows, flying kites and building sandcastles with their loving parents, but according to Facebook and Instagram, with a little help from a few filters, my children had done exactly the same all summer long.

Anyway, we are home now, everyone is exhausted after the long and hideous drive, we appear to have brought most of Cornwall’s beaches back with us in the car and the suitcases, and there are vast mounds of laundry to be done, and frankly, I don’t actually know why we bother going on vacation, when you need another vacation to get over going on vacation. But anyway, I do at least have some lovely photos, even if the children did keep complaining that I took too many photos of them and whining about why did I need so many photos and I snarled that I needed the photographs for my dotage, when I was old and grey and they had grown up and left me and all I had to remember their childhood was these photos. I even got a nice photo of Simon, which is miraculous as usually he just pulls stupid faces when I point a camera at him. I suppose at least I know where the children get it from!

BUT, on the way back, I got a phone call to say that the Dream Job want to see me for an interview! Simon was somewhat dismissive, pointing out that an interview is very different to being offered the job, sighing deeply and telling me not to get my hopes up, but fuck him. It’s a step in the right direction, even if Simon is insisting on raining on my parade as ever. Just for once, it would be nice if he could be positive about something I do and encourage me, instead of always seeing the dark side and predicting dire results. Just a little bloody faith, that’s all! Is that too much to ask? Anyway, much more important than Simon Misery Pants FartFace, is the question of what I am going to wear?

Astonishingly, Peter’s plant is still alive, despite being abandoned for a week.

Friday, 26 August

How many weeks has it been? It feels like forever. Will they ever go back to school? I am starting to lose hope the vacation will ever end. The only bright spot at the moment is the upcoming interview, and the potential to become a high-powered, corporate Proper Person, instead of a dispenser of snacks and referee-er of fights. I suggested today that building a den in the yard might be a fun way to pass the time. The children looked at me as if I had proposed that they should shit in their hands and then clap. Instead, since it was sunny, they demanded to have a water fight instead. Much against my better judgement, as I am firmly convinced that water fights are nothing more than a fast track to the ER with a broken limb, or at the very least some blood and nasty bruising, but lacking the strength any more to argue, I agreed.

For at least ten minutes they were outside hurling water and screaming before they decided they were bored and cold and instead it would be far more fun to tramp mud and water and grass through the kitchen, use an unfeasible number of clean towels, get dressed in a whole new set of clothes to the ones they were wearing earlier, and then, just as I had mopped up the swamp from the kitchen floor, request to play on the Slip’N Slide.

I denied them the Slip’N Slide, as we had been fortunate enough to get through the water fight without anyone being maimed, so I was not tempting fate by getting out the plastic Mat of Doom that should really be renamed the Slip’N BreakYourNeck. I pointed out the many wholesome activities available to them in the yard: they could jump on the yellow and blue monstrosity that has destroyed any tasteful Zen vibes in my yard, they could play with the swingball, they could read a book underneath a motherfucking tree, but they were not coming inside on a glorious summer’s day to stare at a screen and nor was I taking them anywhere or spending a single penny on their entertainment that day. They were playing in the yard – and that was final.

With that, I retreated inside to stare at a screen under the guise of work. Well, I told them I was ‘working’. In actual fact I was googling ‘cool interview outfits’ (all of which seemed to involve alarming high heels and very thin people in amazing jackets that I don’t think I could get my tits into) in an effort to present myself as ruthlessly professional but also Down With the Youth at my interview. I was also fretting because all the women in the photos were carrying takeout cups of coffee – is this now a required accessory? Might they not take me seriously if I don’t turn up clutching a cardboard cup of a grande soy latte? Is that even the order the words go in? Also, I thought all the big coffee chains were frowned upon as unethical tax dodgers. Maybe if I bring the wrong sort of coffee I’ll be off the shortlist before I’ve even opened my mouth. Perhaps I should just take the free coffee from Wholefoods. Is Wholefoods considered ethical? I DON’T KNOW! I only know it is middle-class! All these, and other worries, were swirling around in my head when after half an hour or so, I realised I could hear something terrifying. Silence. There is never silence from my precious moppets unless Something Bad is happening. I flung open the back door to find a disconsolate Jane trying to disentangle a yoyo string.

‘Where’s Peter?’ I demanded.

Jane shrugged. ‘I dunno.’

‘Well, isn’t he out here with you? Didn’t you notice him going somewhere?’

Jane shrugged again, and mumbled he was probably inside and that wasn’t fair, if he was on his iPad then, she, Jane, who had not defied my instructions, deserved EXTRA iPad time to make up for Peter’s getting time just now and also even more extra time to reflect her obedience. I cut short Jane’s lengthy argument about her screen time and dashed inside to look for Peter. I bellowed and shouted, to no response. He wasn’t in his bedroom, he wasn’t in the sitting room, he wasn’t in the loo, he wasn’t even in Jane’s bedroom stealing things to annoy her.

‘JANE!’ I shouted. ‘Are you SURE you didn’t see where he went?’

Jane insisted she had not, adding a hasty disclaimer that whatever fate may have befallen Peter, it was definitely not her fault.

That icy dread started to grip me. My rational brain was churning out statistics, reminding me that the chances of him being absolutely fine were really very high, while the rest of me was screaming silently inside because my baby boy was missing, and I didn’t even know what he was wearing to give a description to the police because he had changed clothes so many times today already due to bloody water fights.

WHY hadn’t I just let him play on the Slip’N Slide? Better an afternoon at the ER with a mildly mangled limb than the scenarios now playing out through my head – the treacherous ponds; the unmarked vans screeching to halt and speeding off again, unseen by anyone; the boy racer, flying down a suburban street slightly too fast to stop for the small figure darting out to chase a ball. For a fleeting second, I wondered whether there were any disused mine shafts around that he could have fallen down. Would Judgy Dog be able to track him? Probably not. He hates Peter with a vengeance, and the feeling is mutual.

By the time all those thoughts had run through my mind I was out on the street, yelling Peter’s name at the top of my voice and trying not to sound too hysterical. He could only have been missing for fifteen minutes at the very most – it was too soon to call the police, I told myself. Hearing me shouting, my neighbour and kindred spirit Katie appeared from across the street, and I gabbled out what had happened.

‘Oh God!’ she said. ‘I’ll help you look. Let me grab my girls, then I’ll go down that way and you go down the other way, and if he doesn’t hear us shouting, we’ll start knocking on doors. We’ll find him, Ellen, don’t worry.’

I nodded, too afraid I would cry if I had to actually speak, and set off, bellowing for Peter, Jane trailing behind (I could not let her out of my sight. It was bad enough I had mislaid one child; to lose another would doubtless cause Lady Bracknell-esque pronouncements upon my parenting).

I got to the end of the street, still shouting, and was working my way back up, my voice now hoarse and the fear held at bay by the thinnest of threads, when Karen Davison up the street opened her door, looking surprised.

‘Peter’s here!’ she said. ‘Didn’t you know?’

‘No!’ I choked. ‘I thought he was in the yard and then he was gone.’

‘He’s here, playing on that bloody Slip’N Slide with my grandsons,’ said Karen. ‘He was playing in your front yard when we came past on the way home from the shop and the boys asked him if he wanted to come over. I told him he had to check with you first, and he went inside and came out with his swim trunks and said it was fine, so I assumed he had told you.’

I was too relieved at finding Peter alive and intact and not trapped down a collapsing mine shaft to even be angry at him for waltzing off without telling me. I grabbed him and hugged him tightly (a bad move in hindsight, as he was soaking wet), and then rather embarrassingly burst into tears and sobbed, ‘Don’t you EVER, EVER do that again. I was so worried!’

‘I’m sorry, Mummy,’ said Peter. ‘I thought it would be OK because I wasn’t going very far. I didn’t mean to scare you.’

‘I was only scared because I love you,’ I wept.

‘I love you too, Mummy. I won’t scare you like that again, I promise.’

Oh God, I nearly lost my son because I was too busy worrying about what sort of coffee to take to an interview! What sort of mother am I? Maybe I should give up all thoughts of going back to work full-time and just become an earth Mother, and do crafts with them – even though I hate crafts – and devote every moment of my existence to them to make up for my previous abject failings, in the hope that they are not too scarred by my selfishness. I mean, they seem unscarred – the only person who seemed to be traumatised by this afternoon is me, but maybe the damage is deeper and will only be revealed in their thirties when they enter therapy and realise that everything that is wrong with their life can be traced back to my dubious parenting?

Both Jane and Judgy Dog were unimpressed by Peter’s safe return.

SEPTEMBER

Monday, 5 September

Argh! The job interview is THIS FRIDAY! I still have nothing to wear, but I think I need to stop worrying about that and start thinking about what I’m actually going to SAY. I haven’t been to a job interview in years. What do I tell them? Oh God, I’ll have to pretend to have hobbies and be a proper person and try not to gabble at length and fall back on my favourite conversational gambit of telling people about the interesting fact that otters have opposable thumbs. I’m pretty sure the only reason one could have to legitimately discuss otters in a job interview is if one was applying for a job as an otter wrangler or something. (Actually, that really would be my dream job. I love otters and have frequently expressed a desire to keep one in the bath. Simon does not even dignify this suggestion with a response, but I have seen Ring of Bright Water many times and think keeping an otter in the bath would be perfectly feasible – I could get cut-price salmon from the supermarket for it to eat. And tangents like this are exactly why I get so nervous about interviews.)

I also always come out of an interview with absolutely no idea what I might have said in response to the questions and all I can do is hope that when asked, ‘Why do you think you would be the right person for this job?’ is that I replied something about my skills, qualifications and interests, and threw in something about being a team player and didn’t actually answer, ‘Because my lord and master the Dread Cthulhu thinks it would suit me. I slaughtered a black cockerel and inspected the entrails for portents and signs, and he spoke to me thus.’ But I am never sure. It’s a bit like when voting in important elections and despite carefully making sure my cross is in the right place, as soon as I pop my ballot paper into the box I am gripped with dread that I voted for the wrong one, and what if the election comes down to the wire and every vote counts and I voted wrong and now Western Civilisation will collapse and it will ALL BE MY FAULT?

I tried discussing my fears and concerns with Simon, but he is still not entirely sold on the idea of me going back to work full-time. ‘I just don’t see why you need to be full-time,’ he said. ‘Doesn’t it fit in much better with the children if you are part-time, and you can be there to help with homework and make dinner and stuff? I’m not entirely sure I like the idea of them being latchkey children.’

‘They will hardly be latchkey children. I only worked part-time when they were tiny because it meant we didn’t have to spend such prodigious sums on daycare, and yes, we thought it was better if one of us could be at home with them at least some of the time. But they’re both at school full-time now, and there’s breakfast clubs and after-school clubs and in another year, Jane won’t even be at primary school. They’re not babies anymore, they don’t need me as much as they used to, and as time goes on they will need me less and less, but I might not get another opportunity like this, so I’d quite like to give it a shot.’

‘But why now? Why can’t you wait until they’re older to go full-time, and just get another part-time job? I don’t think you are really thinking about what’s best for the children here, darling.’

‘Because I want THIS job! I don’t WANT another part-time, stop-gap job. It was only ever meant to be a temporary fix, to keep the wolf from the door while the kids were little. The only vaguely interesting thing I have done to earn any money in the last eleven years was designing that Why Mummy Drinks app, which, if you may recall, did rather well. And now the children are really not that little anymore, if you haven’t noticed, so I’d quite like to do something that is a bit more stimulating, a bit more challenging, instead of babysitting the computer illiterate and explaining to Jean from Shipping for the eleventy billionth time why her computer does not “hate her” and does not “eat things”. Why is it so wrong that I want to do something for ME? What about MY hopes and ambitions? Do YOU think of what’s best for the children every time you make a career decision, or do you think about what YOU want?’

‘Well, you did literally just tell me your main ambition in life was to keep an otter in the bath,’ pointed out Simon. ‘So forgive me if I don’t try to facilitate all your dreams. And of course I think about what’s best for the children,’ he lied. ‘I just don’t think that that’s having two full-time working parents, that’s all.’

‘Well, darling,’ I said. ‘If you are so very concerned about the children’s welfare, there is a very simple solution, you know.’

‘What?’

‘Well, if I get this job, I’ll be earning as much as you. So if you are really worried about it all being a bit much with us both working full-time, you could always go part-time instead and take on responsibility for the house and the childcare?’

Simon paled. ‘Err, no, no, I’m fine, I’m sure we can make it work. If this is what you want to do, I’ll support you. No need for me to go part-time. I’m sure the children will be OK.’

‘Thank you, my love,’ I said sweetly.

Tuesday, 6 September

Ha, ha. I am READY! Bring. It. On.

The school uniforms have been bought, at vast and painful expense.

Hours upon hours have been spent queuing in the shoe store, desperately clutching our little ticket and glaring menacingly at any parents who look like they might be trying to queue-jump, and more appalling sums of money have been handed over for shiny new school shoes that will shortly be battered and scuffed and caked in mud, leading me to wonder why I spent eleventy billion pounds on properly fitted shoes so my precious moppets’ tiny, youthful feet will not be squashed and can develop into suitably middle-class trotters, when they couldn’t care less and will trash them within the first week. And I could have saved myself the money and effort and bought them a pair from Walmart for £10.

Sneakers and gym shoes and PE clothes have been purchased. School bags and pencil cases and water bottles and what appears to be the entire bastarding contents of Smiggle are now grasped in my darlings’ sweaty paws, while they continue to whine about the unspeakable injustice of my refusal to pay £5.99 for a SINGLE ERASER!

My hands are calloused and bleeding from sewing name tapes on to all this cornucopia of capitalist consumerism. This is due to my starry-eyed naivety when Jane started school, which led to me ordering them five hundred fucking name tapes EACH from the kind people at Mr Cash’s label emporium, thinking fondly as I did of how smart their school uniforms would look with the pretty labels sewn in (green for Jane and blue for Peter, with a little motif of a dinosaur for Jane and a choo-choo train for Peter), but completely overlooking the fact that I can’t sew, that I hate anything to do with sewing, and that I invariably end up throwing any project that requires sewing across the room and swearing furiously. Also, do you have any idea how many name tapes there are in a bag of FIVE HUNDRED? Approximately eleventy fucking billion, that’s how many! There will be enough to see them off to university, and actually, the website recommended the name tapes for nursing homes, too, and I wouldn’t be surprised if those bloody bags of name tapes were still going strong by the time Peter and Jane are ready to enter Shady Pines themselves.

Next year I am buying one of those clever stamper things for labelling their stuff. Admittedly I say this every year and forget to order one until there is no time left, so I end up swearing and bleeding on the new white shirts as I wrestle with the sew-in ones, but maybe next year will be the year I remember. Actually, the really clever thing to do would be to order one NOW, so I have it to hand, but that seems wanton and profligate when I still have SO MANY BLOODY NAME TAPES and have just spent so much time sewing them in.

Anyway, it is done now. Well, most of it is done. Well, OK, I sewed in three labels, looked at the mountains of stuff that still needed labelling and went, ‘Life’s too short’, had a glass of wine and got a Sharpie and wrote their names in the rest. It’s possible that this happens every year, which is why the supply of name tapes never actually diminishes much.

But the alarm is set, bright and early for tomorrow morning, and another school year shall commence. Hopefully, this will be the year when my darling children finally reveal their hidden talents and turn out to excel at something, so I can be the proud, smugger-than-smug mummy in the playground, boasting shamelessly about their achievements, but given I am now struggling to come to terms with the fact that I am almost forty-two (FORTY-TWO! Withered cronedom is approaching at an alarming rate, despite the obscenely expensive creams I slather on my face) and I still haven’t discovered my own hidden talents, I think it is unlikely.

When I check on the children before bed I will just have one more peek at their drawers filled with their lovely clean new school uniform, as it will be the last time it looks like that this school year. Within a week they will have transformed those bright white polo shirts into grubby, paint-stained rags, and when given clean laundry to put away will either dump everything on their bedroom floor willy-nilly or cram it all anyhow into the drawers, completely ignoring the time I spent carefully folding it for them. At least I have the wit not to iron their uniforms, though I eased my guilt at my slatternly ways by buying the ‘non-iron’ uniforms.

Wednesday, 7 September

Well, today went well. Peter and Jane have blithely spent the entire summer vacation getting up at 6 a.m. for no apparent reason other than to annoy me by galumphing down the stairs like a herd of elephants and then loudly fighting over who gets which iPad (as it is UNFAIR if one of them has to use the slightly older iPad, despite the fact that it makes NO SODDING DIFFERENCE to their horrible cartoons on Netflix), but this morning, when they had to get up and get ready for school so that we would actually start this academic year as we meant to go on – well, of course, this was the morning that they chose to sleep in!

I had to drag them out of bed, both of them snarling like angry weasels and complaining bitterly that they were still tired, while I spat back that they were probably still tired because they had not gone to bloody sleep when they were told last night. Instead, they had spent two hours after bedtime getting up for drinks of water and trips to the bathroom and come downstairs and tell me about how they couldn’t sleep until I became incensed with rage after tucking them back in for the sixth time and shouted that OF COURSE they couldn’t sleep, because they were up wandering around the house, and I wouldn’t be able to sleep either and maybe if they tried actually staying in their actual beds they might be able to get some actual sleep. And, more importantly, I could watch Game of Thrones without them walking in at every single inopportune moment just when someone had got their tits out! Apparently this was mean of me, and I was told once again how EVERYBODY ELSE in their class gets to choose their own bedtime and go to bed whenever they want, and also THEIR mummies let them watch NC-17-rated films and play Call of Duty. So all in all, I was distinctly lacking in sympathy for my darlings’ protestations of weariness and exhaustion this morning.

I did, however, manage to feed and wash and dress the cherubs (well, I didn’t actually wash or dress them, obviously, at nine and eleven they are – allegedly – perfectly capable of doing that themselves; I just hurtled into their rooms and shouted at them to PUT THEIR CLOTHES ON, while Peter messed about with his Lego and Jane complained that she only had the ‘wrong kind’ of socks), and we were all ready(ish), with plenty of time to take the obligatory First Day Photo.

The First Day Photo, as every parent knows, involves finding the corner of your house that looks least like a shithole and hustling your offspring into it, while shouting, ‘SMILE, darlings, JUST FUCKING SMILE. I need one nice photo of you today, just one, so I can send it to your grandparents and show them what adorable poppets you are. And put it on Facebook, so people know I love you! Oh FFS, please, it’s not that hard. You both just have to SMILE and LOOK AT MY PHONE at the same time. No, you BOTH have to look at the phone. Together. No, with your eyes open. Because you’re not fucking looking at the phone if you’ve got your eyes shut, ARE YOU? And SMILE! For the love of God, SMILE!’

Some parents actually have special signs made for their children to hold, with the class the children are going into and jaunty little ‘Back to School’ phrases, the better to smugly remind us all via social media that they are #soblessed and just love #makingmemories, before lamenting that the vacation is just too short and their #mamahearts will be missing their #babies who are #growinguptoofast. I am not one of those mothers. I fear I do not even have a #mamaheart, as sadness is NOT the emotion I feel when my beloved munchkins are returned to the glorious bosom of education after six long bastarding weeks of us #makingmemories that mainly consist of everyone crying into ice-creams after being thwarted once again by the British weather.

It was especially important that I got a suitable photo of the First Day of Term this year, because a) I forgot last year and had to fake it the next day and bribe the children not to tell their grandparents that it was in fact a ‘second day of term’ photo that I sent them (with the inevitably scuffed shoes cropped out) and b) quite astonishingly, it is Jane’s last year at primary school. I can’t quite believe it. Everyone says, ‘Oh, they grow up so fast,’ and I always wanted to snarl, ‘Do they? Really? Because I am not convinced they will grow up at all, ever. I think that my life will now consist of trying to stop this small wrecking ball destroying my house and picking half-chewed organic rice cakes out of my hair, and that is ALL THERE IS NOW!’ but it really doesn’t seem that long ago that I was counting down the days until she could start playgroup, and now she is finishing primary school and next year will be at BIG SCHOOL!

I finally got some approximation of the photo I wanted, but not before I had ended up with an entire camera roll filled with photos of the children pulling faces and sulking, which I will feel guilty about deleting because #firstdayofterm, and, after yet another argument with Jane about why she is not allowed her own Instagram account (‘Because you have to be thirteen! Are you thirteen? No, no, you are not, so you are not having your own account! I don’t CARE if the rest of your class has their own account! It is not happening!’), we were ready for the off, for even I can manage not to be late on the first day of term.

Simon, obviously, wasn’t able to come with us for the first day of term because he had to go to work and be very busy and important. It never fails to astonish me how Simon’s busy and importantness always seems to coincide with school events, so I have to go myself. I used to make a point of talking about ‘MY HUSBAND’ in a loud voice on such occasions, but since my husband never actually materialised I have stopped doing that, as I am afraid that all the teachers think I am a crazy fantasist who has invented a husband for some reason and only wears a wedding ring to affect some strange 1950s notion of ‘respectability’.

Anyway, the children were at least dispatched without further ado – Peter’s teacher is a rather sweet young trainee, but judging by her rather tight and low-cut sweater, there might be a sudden influx of daddies in that class volunteering to take part in school events, and Jane has a new teacher as well – an actual man is teaching in the primary school. Well, I say a man. In truth he is more of a boy – when I saw him in the playground I actually thought he was only slightly taller than an average Year 6.

I suppose this will start happening to me more and more now. First I think the teachers look terribly young, next thing I will be complaining how youthful the policemen are and then insisting I want to see a ‘proper doctor’ as I don’t believe the whippersnapper before me can possibly be properly qualified. Actually, this has almost happened already – the last time I took Judgy to the vet I was unconvinced they had given me a real vet, such was the youth of the Man Child before me. I realised, of course, that clearly he WAS a proper vet, and a highly knowledgeable and skilled one when he exclaimed, ‘Well, that’s a fine wee terrier you’ve got there!’ Anyone who can recognise my dog’s superiority clearly knows his stuff.

Thursday, 8 September

Oh, fuckety fuckety doodah. The interview is tomorrow. TOMORROW. I am not ready for this – what was I thinking? Why would some cool, futuristic, space-age company employ ME? They do not want someone like me who is already complaining that the teachers and doctors and policemen are very young, they want those very young people who should clearly still be at school. At least after much browsing I have found something to wear. I had to go for the stupidly high heels, because I tried a slightly-cropped-pants-with-ankle-boots look in the hope it would make me look like a millennial, but it just made me look like I’d got dressed in the dark and couldn’t find my socks or any pants that fitted. The girls on Pinterest didn’t look like that. Christ, I can’t even pull off dressing as a millennial, so how on earth am I going to pull this off?

I have researched all about the company, and rehearsed my HR-friendly answers, but who knows what people even ask in interviews anymore. Maybe they don’t want to know about my strengths and weaknesses. (I’m a team player, obviously, but sometimes I’m too much of a perfectionist – ha ha! No one tells the truth about their strengths and weaknesses in interviews do they? ‘My biggest strength is actually my ability to sleep at my desk with my eyes open, thus making it appear that I am present and productive, while actually napping, and my main weakness is probably an inability to use the toilet when there is anyone else in there because I am afraid I might inadvertently fart and someone will hear and they will call me FartGirl forever more, so sometimes I end up wasting a lot of time in the bathroom waiting for there to be no one else in there even when I only need a wee.’) But is that what they want to know now? Maybe they’ve gone all ‘blue-sky thinking’ and ‘outside the box’ (Ooooh, another strength – ‘I was the reigning office champion at Buzzword Bingo in my previous job for three years running’), and will ask you ‘zany’ questions about ‘What sort of tree would you be, if you were a tree?’ and ‘Squirrel or raccoon?’ that reveal some hidden psychological depths about you.

Katie across the road came over for a coffee before school pick-up, as her oldest, Lily, has just started school.

‘It feels so strange, Lily being at school,’ said Katie. ‘Just me and Ruby in the house. I don’t know why, because it’s been just Ruby and me while Lily was at nursery, but somehow it feels different. I can’t believe she’s at school. She looked so grown-up going in!’

‘Ha!’ I said. ‘I know. The thing is, you will have thought she looked grown-up now on her first day, but in a couple of years you’ll be looking at the tinies going in and thinking how little they are and are they really big enough for school.’

‘They grow up so fast,’ sighed Katie, before shrieking, ‘RUBY! RUBY! LEAVE THE DOG! I SAID LEAVE JUDGY ALONE! DO NOT PULL JUDGY’S WIENER! FFS, what is WRONG WITH YOU! Oh, Christ, scrap what I said. They don’t grow up fast enough. RUBY! Do NOT pour your juice over Judgy. I said NO! Oh God, why don’t they grow up faster?’

‘Do you think I could pass for a millennial, Katie?’ I asked hopefully.

‘Well, millennial is quite a broad term, isn’t it?’ said Katie kindly.

Friday, 9 September

The Big Day dawned. The day on which it all hinged. I escaped the house without getting anything sticky on me, which frankly was a miracle.

I had carefully factored in time to stop at a suitably artisanal and ethical coffee shop on my way, so I could swish in brandishing my soy chai organic latte, thus demonstrating my hipness and also how caring I am.

I sashayed over to the receptionist and gave my name, and was bidden to stare into a camera and issued with a lanyard with my hastily printed photo on it, which made me look like a serial killer and also made me wonder what the fuck had happened to my hair on the way in from the car park.

A Youth in too-short pants binged out of a shiny elevator to collect me and shook his head in disappointment at my extortionately expensive virtuous coffee. (What is it with the too-short pants, especially on men? And no one seems to wear socks with them either. I wonder if this trend has caused a downturn in the sock industry?)

‘Oh!’ he said in surprise. ‘Did you forget your own cup? I didn’t even know they still did takeout cups.’

‘It’s biodegradable,’ I bleated hopefully. ‘Non-chlorinated cardboard. Recycled.’

‘Mmmm, but do you know how much energy it takes to recycle it?’ he reproved me. ‘Much more than just washing a reuseable cup, you know.’

Fuckety fuckety doodah. I had fallen at the first hurdle. I had been convinced that as long as something could be recycled it would be approved as suitably sustainable and twenty-first-century, but obviously I was wrong. I discreetly abandoned the cup on a window ledge as the Youth whisked me along shiny glass corridors, before depositing me in a white room with artificial grass on the floor.

‘This is our Thinking Space,’ he informed me. ‘We brainstorm and throw concepts around in here. The walls are designed to be wipe-clean, so we can just throw ideas up on them to run past everyone else. I’ll just go and tell Ed and Gabrielle and the others that you’re here.’

I nodded solemnly as the Youth gestured round the extraordinary room, and tried not to notice that the only thing currently drawn on the walls was a large dick and balls. I wondered if I should wipe it off before the interviewers arrived, in case they thought I had done it? But what if they arrived while I was in the process of wiping it off, and then they really thought I had done it? Or what if it was a test, to see how broadminded one was, and wiping it off would reveal one as repressed and bourgeois? But on the other hand, what if it was a test of initiative, to see if one would have the wit to whip the dick and balls off the wall before the officialdom came in? Literally all I could think about now was the dick and balls.

As I stared gloomily at the genitalia on the wall, which seemed to be getting bigger before my eyes, the door opened and four people came in.

‘Hi, Ellen, sorry to keep you waiting,’ said one of the women, who was totally pulling off the cropped trouser and ankle boot look, without a hint of having got dressed in the darkness. ‘I’m Gabrielle from HR. This is Ed, who would be your line manager.’ She gestured to a morose but otherwise perfectly normal-looking man, who more importantly was not young and perky, but rather looked in his late forties, which gave me hope that they might be open to employing someone who was old enough to remember Ozzy Osbourne for something other than his family. ‘And these are Tony and Gail, who’ll be sitting in too, if that’s OK.’

I beamed, and mumbled something that hopefully sounded like a greeting.

‘We keep it very informal here,’ said Gabrielle. ‘We don’t like the traditional panel approach of you facing us across a table, so we’ll all just pull up a seat and have a chat.’ She gestured around at the ‘eclectic’ mix of furniture, which I was sorry to see did include the dreaded beanbags, and various squashy-looking cubes and foam shapes that I presumed we were to perch on. As she waved at the ‘seating’ she noticed the drawing on the wall.

‘Oh, for God’s sake, what is THAT doing there?’ she exploded.

‘It wasn’t me, it was there when I came in!’ I put in quickly.

Gabrielle looked at me slightly oddly. ‘I didn’t think it was you,’ she said. ‘I mean, why would you …? Anyway, never mind. Tony, find out who had this room last and have a word, will you? That’s really not acceptable. Anyway, let’s take a seat and get on.’

Cunningly, I grabbed one of the squashy cubes to perch on rather than a beanbag, which I definitely wouldn’t have been able to manoeuvre out of with dignity as my new pants were a bit tight, and I was worried they might split if I had to heave myself up from a beanbag. It didn’t seem the sort of place where flashing your bits in the interview would secure you the position. Unfortunately, that meant that Ed, who would be my boss, should I get the job, was relegated to a beanbag. He didn’t look impressed and muttered something that sounded distinctly like ‘FFS’ as he gingerly lowered himself down. I fear that was possibly not a good first impression to make.

The rest of the interview was all-rightish, I think. I don’t know. Ed asked various questions about my skills and experience, which I answered perfectly well, but he just sort of grunted after each reply and frowned more, so I don’t know if he had already decided he hated me and couldn’t work with me because I had made him sit on a beanbag.

Gabrielle asked the usual HR questions, which I never know how to answer – do you go for bland and generic and try to appear normal, or do you attempt to be quirky and unique to try to stand out from the other candidates? Also, I am never sure which questions are genuine questions about yourself, and which are trick questions designed to tell if you are a psychopath. Tony and Gail didn’t say much at all, but kept making notes during certain questions, which made me suspect that they were the ones doing the psycho-assessing.

No one asked me what sort of tree I would be if I were a tree. I had already decided on a silver birch, as they are shiny and stand out from the crowd, but also birch is a very multipurpose and useful tree. Maybe it was just as well no one cared what sort of tree I would be.

I have blisters from the new shoes, and also there was an unlucky moment when Ed was asking me a complicated question when I realised I had toast crumbs in my bra and they were chafing my nipple. I didn’t even dare try and wriggle discreetly to dislodge them in case Tony and Gail thought I was twitching in a psychopathic way.

I suppose I will find out in due course how it went. It wasn’t completely awful, like an interview someone I was at university with had, where they accidentally set the interviewer’s desk on fire, but it definitely could have gone better. I still suspect the dick and balls was some sort of psychometric test, and I have almost certainly failed it.

Saturday, 10 September

Tonight was the now-traditional pop to the pub for the first week of term debrief with Hannah and Sam. I hoped they might reassure me that it didn’t sound like the interview had gone that badly, but Simon just shook his head and said, ‘Why on earth did you feel the need to tell them you hadn’t drawn on the walls? What had you done that would make them think you had?’

Katie, alas, was unable to join us and listen to our grumbles about homework and packed sodding lunches. (I can’t work out why I hate packed lunches so much, and find them such an utter chore – they take literally five minutes to make, yet they loom over my mornings like doom-laden black clouds of horror. Maybe it’s the tedious inevitability of having to make them every single term-time morning, or maybe it’s just because my precious moppets refuse to deviate from ham sandwiches for Peter and cheese sandwiches for Jane, with salami rolls as a ‘treat’ on the odd Friday when I have lost the will to even make sandwiches, or maybe it’s just that I am a really, really terrible mother?)

Simon seemed to be on top of things, and didn’t annoy me by asking hopeless questions while I was trying to get ready, so I was a good and kind wife and did not ply the children with Gummy Bears before I ran out the door and left him to deal with the fallout (oh, the petty revenges we stoop to when you have been married as long as us), but my calm and serene poise was shattered nonetheless when I popped into the sitting room to say a loving farewell to my handsome husband and adorable children and found Simon and Jane playing on Jane’s phone.

‘What are you doing, darlings?’ I said fondly, as I gave them each a kiss.

‘Nothing!’ snapped Jane, looking shifty. ‘Nothing. Daddy’s just helping me with something. You’ll be late, Mummy, you’d better go.’

Jane has never given a damn about me being late in her life before. In fact, she usually goes out of her way to mess about, annoy me, delay me and generally do everything she can to MAKE me late. Her favourite is to wait until I am literally going out the door with my coat on and then suddenly remember some incredibly important story she has to tell me, question she has to ask me or letter she has to show me right now. So my suspicions were immediately roused.

‘Simon, what are you doing?’ I demanded.

‘Don’t worry, sweetie, I’m just setting up an Instagram account for Jane. She said you said it was OK, but you didn’t have time to do it for her, and she needs an email address for it, so she’s using mine.’

‘JANE! You LYING TOAD!’ I bellowed. ‘I have told you until I am blue in the face that you are NOT having an Instagram account BECAUSE YOU ARE NOT THIRTEEN! How DARE you lie to your father about this?’

Jane looked mutinous and shouted back yet again about HOW UNFAIR I am, because EVERYBODY ELSE had one, and I was ruining her life, and DADDY had said it was OK, so why was I so mean.

‘SIMON!’ I yelled. ‘Why the actual fuck did you agree to this?’

‘I DIDN’T!’ said Simon indignantly. ‘I said if you had said it was all right, then I didn’t have any objection, and Jane said you had said she could have an account.’

‘I SAID SHE COULD HAVE AN ACCOUNT WHEN SHE IS THIRTEEN!’ I howled. ‘I’m so angry with you, Jane. We have been over and over this, and yet you thought you could get one over on me by lying to your father. Did you think I wouldn’t find out? I don’t know what makes me crosser, the blatant disregard for my rules or the lying to your father. Don’t you agree she has behaved very badly, Simon?’

‘Er,’ muttered Simon, ‘I suppose it’s not ideal …’

‘Simon, FFS! Not ideal? Is that all you have to say?’

‘Well, it’s not the end of the world, is it? I think you might be overreacting a tiny bit. It was just a misunderstanding.’

I took a very deep breath and calmly said, ‘Jane, could you please go to your room, while I discuss this with your father?’

Jane slouched out, still muttering her favourite mantra about everything being so unfair, and then despite the several additional deep breaths I had taken while she was making her leisurely exit from the room, I could no longer speak calmly, as I shrieked, ‘Simon. It was NOT a misunderstanding; it was a deliberate manipulation of us by Jane. She knows perfectly well I have said she is not to have an account yet. She just thought you were a soft touch and she would get round you while I was out, and I would be none the wiser. And WHY can’t you just bloody back me up with the children? Why the fuck do I always have to be the bad cop, and you get to be the good cop, while I rant and rave and you just refuse to take anything seriously? You ALWAYS DO THIS, and it’s NOT FAIR!’

‘You do realise that you now sound like your eleven-year-old daughter, claiming things aren’t fair?’ said Simon, in his special ‘I’m going to sound annoyingly rational because I think you are hysterical’ voice.

‘But it’s NOT fair!’ I howled. ‘You never punish them, you always leave it up to me, so when they grow up and write their memoirs I will be the Mommie Dearest figure and you will be some sort of fucking saint. Joan Crawford probably wasn’t even that bad a mother. She probably just had a husband who DIDN’T BACK HER UP!’

‘I think she was quite a bad mother …’ remarked Simon.

‘Don’t change the subject,’ I snapped.

‘I do back you up though. I backed you up over Peter’s screen ban last week.’

‘Well, apart from the two of you downloading and watching Guardians of the Galaxy while I was at the supermarket. And letting him play Fortnite! Apart from that, you totally backed me up,’ I said with what was supposed to be a hollow laugh, but sadly came out more as a strangulated snarl.

‘Oh, for fuck’s sake! I DO back you up, you just overreact ALL THE TIME. My God, are you hormonal or something? Is this the start of The Change?’

‘I am not hormonal,’ I said coldly. ‘I resent your assumption that every time I express any emotion, it must just be because I am an irrational … beachball … just swept away on an uncontrollable tide of hormones.’

‘What an image!’ sniggered Simon, who was fiddling with his phone. ‘And actually, darling, according to the period tracker app on my phone, you are due on, actually.’

‘MY FUCKING CYCLE HAS NOTHING TO DO WITH THE FACT THAT YOU ARE AN INCONSIDERATE PRICK! AND THAT APP IS FUCKING CREEPY AND A TOTAL INVASION OF MY PRIVACY!’ I snarled.

‘On the contrary, sweetheart, it’s a useful reminder for when I need to don my Kevlar jacket each month,’ sighed Simon.

‘I am late,’ I responded with as much dignity as I could muster. ‘I am going now. We will talk about this tomorrow. In the meantime, do not let Jane have an Instagram account, if that is not too much to ask!’

I swept out of the house on that parting note, pausing only to pop upstairs and throw some tampons in my bag, as I had a horrible feeling he was right about me being due on. I do hate it when he is right.

All in all, therefore, I was not in the best frame of mind when I arrived at the pub to meet Hannah and Sam, and before we even got onto the subject of this year’s teachers and class groups I indignantly relayed my tale of woe. Sam’s daughter Sophie and Hannah’s daughter Emily are the same age as Jane, although Hannah’s children are at a different school, due to the vagaries of the catchment system, and they at least shared my outrage and concerns, as I hiccupped about pedophiles and sexting, unlike Simon who had made unhelpful suggestions about privacy settings and parental controls when I had raised these concerns.

Nonetheless, despite her sympathetic noises about this, and about my tales of the millennials in short pants with their reuseable cups and their meeting rooms that were more like upmarket soft-plays, and did they think that I had said the right thing in answer to that question, I could not help but feel that Hannah was not wholly concentrating on Instagram or my interview, and indeed was squirming in her seat like a newly potty-trained toddler in need of a pee.

‘Are you all right, Hannah?’ I said. ‘You look a bit odd. Have you got a UTI?’

‘What?’ said Hannah.‘Why would I have a UTI? I do have some news, actually, but I’m not supposed to tell you yet!’

‘Well, you have to tell us now,’ said Sam indignantly. ‘You can’t just say, “I have news” and then refuse to say what it is!’

‘Oh, fuck my life, you’ve got a bun in the oven!’ I gasped. ‘That’s why you’re wriggling around and needing a pee – you have pregnancy bladder. Oh my God! But you’re forty-two! You will have to go to the special unit for the geriatric mothers, with all the other old people who have been shagging. Still, I suppose that’s better than all the retirees who are apparently filling the clap clinics because they are all at it like bunnies and not taking precautions now they’re too old to even worry about being a geriatric mother.’

‘Thank you, Ellen, for your supportive comments,’ said Hannah dryly. ‘Firstly, I don’t think they call them “geriatric mothers” any more. It’s advanced maternal age or something, which isn’t much better, but you are classed as one of them at thirty-five, so it’s not like I’d be the only dried-up husk of a medical miracle if I was pregnant, which I’m not, because as you may have noticed, I’m the best part of the way down a bottle of Cab Sauv! Which I’d hardly be doing if I was fucking pregnant, would I now, Miss Marple?’

‘I suppose not,’ I conceded grudgingly. ‘So what is it then?’

‘Shall we guess? Let’s guess!’ suggested Sam excitedly. ‘We could make a drinking game of it and do shots every time we get it wrong?’

‘Or Hannah could just tell us, because I am her best friend and she tells me everything, like she promised she would when we were eleven,’ I said. ‘Maybe she’ll just tell me, and not you, Sam, because I’m her best friend!’

‘Ah,’ said Sam. ‘But I am her best gay friend, which means, according to the laws of cliché, that actually she tells me everything.’

‘Ha!’ I said. ‘Yes, but according to the laws of cliché, after a Gay Best Friend is told a secret, they have to go shoe shopping with you and then drink Cosmopolitans, and you hate shoe shopping and Cosmos give you heartburn. I WIN!’

‘My God!’ said Hannah. ‘Do you actually WANT to hear my news, or do you just want to squabble between yourselves until I put you on the naughty step?’

‘I know. You’ve won the lottery! Like millions and squillions and you are going to share it with your best friend,’ I squawked.

‘Will you both shut the fuck up? I’m not preggers and I’ve not won the lottery, BUT Charlie has proposed. We haven’t officially announced it yet, because we haven’t told our parents, but I couldn’t keep it a secret. Look, look at my ring!’ said Hannah smugly, fishing a rather swanky little leather box out of her bag.

‘Oh my God! Oh my actual fucking God! You’re getting married! To Charlie. It’s like a fairy story,’ I babbled, only slightly tearfully, because my best friend in the whole wide world was getting married again, and this time to a lovely man, instead of a dickhead goblin troll, like her horrible first husband who had unexpectedly walked out on her three years ago.

‘Oh, babe. That’s amazeballs!’ said Sam, also with suspiciously moist eyes. ‘Oh, wait. I’m trying to stop saying “amazeballs”. Sophie told me it was the lamest thing she had ever heard and she was embarrassed for me.’

‘Ooooh, just look at the rock too!’ I squeaked. ‘Shiny shiny shiny. Put it on. Oh, blissful bling, it’s gorgeous! And can I help you plan the wedding? Please say I can? What about a dress? When is it? Oooh, you should totally have one of those vintage shabby chic weddings in a barn, with hay bales and antique bottles full of wildflowers and wellies under your wedding dress!’

‘Ellen, does it ever occur to you that you spend a tiny bit too much time on Pinterest?’ enquired Sam.

‘No. There is no such thing as spending too much time on Pinterest. And anyway, I am the one who got Hannah and Charlie together, so I should totes be the wedding planner extraordinaire. And the guest of honour. Oh, frabjous day! I can finally buy my dream hat. Oh, I’m so glad you are getting married, Hannah, and I can get a hat.’

‘Firstly, Sophie informs me that “totes” is also one of the things only lame, sad old people say, and secondly, some people might say that getting Hannah and Charlie together now was the least you could do, after breaking his poor heart at university and letting poor Hannah pine after him for all those years, so that they ended up marrying unsuitable other people,’ said Sam, rather unkindly, I thought.

It is true that Hannah and Charlie and I do go back a very long way, and it is also true that I might have once led him on a tiny bit and then made out with Simon instead, and possibly, yes, if I was a better person then maybe Hannah and Charlie would’ve got together twenty years ago, but I did do the right thing in the end when I bumped into Charlie a couple of years ago, and so really I think I do deserve all the credit. And the best hat at the wedding.

‘We are talking about hats, Sam, not past indiscretions,’ I said with dignity, before babbling more at Hannah about my Vision for her elegant, rustic, Pinterest-tastic wedding.

‘I don’t want to get married in a barn with wellies under my dress, though,’ protested Hannah. ‘And anyway, we haven’t even set a date yet, so put down your phone and stop bidding on vintage bottles on eBay, Ellen!’

‘I was just looking!’ I said indignantly. ‘There’s no harm in looking. Ooooh, just think, we can go dress shopping. And get shitfaced again on the free champagne in the posh dress shops.Oh, just think … A wedding dress. An elegant, tasteful one, not a confection of taffeta monstrousness like last time. Can I be a bridesmaid? Can I still wear a hat if I’m a bridesmaid? Emily and Sophie and Jane could be bridesmaids too!’

‘Ellen, I’m forty-two, and we are both getting married for the second time. I’m not having dozens of bridesmaids – this is not the Royal Wedding, you know!’

‘It would be nice,’ I muttered sulkily.

‘I’ve DONE the big wedding, Ellen. And had no control of it, because my mother arranged most of it, and what my mother didn’t take over, my bloody ex-monster-in-law did, as she did her best to make the day all about her, right down to the old hag turning up at the church in what looked suspiciously like a wedding dress herself, before trying to claim that it was “tradition” for her to dance the first dance with my new husband. I want this day to be about Charlie and me. And you are my best friend, and so of course I want you to be involved and help me plan it. Just don’t get carried away!’

‘Can I get carried away with my hat at least?’ I demanded.

‘Do what you like with your bloody hat!’ said Hannah.

Monday, 12 September

Today is my birthday. I am now the grandly depressing age of forty-two. And it is a Monday. There should be a law against having birthdays on Mondays. It is absolutely the worst day of the week to have a birthday on.

My forty-second birthday was not nearly as good as my fortieth. I had been rather in dread of my fortieth, convinced that it was nothing more than the marking of the inexorable slide into cronedom and haghood, that it would be the bringer of sagging and wrinkling and walking into a room only to announce that I couldn’t remember what I had gone in there for (actually, that is happening more and more). But in the event, Simon swept me off to Paris for a gloriously romantic weekend (though I do not recommend having sex after you have been eating croissants in bed, the crumbs get everywhere and are very hard to remove).

We walked hand in hand by the Seine, and Simon grumbled yet again about why I felt the need to buy old postcards (‘Because I just do, OK, Simon, it’s not my fault that you have no soul’), we baulked in horror at the queues for the Eiffel Tower, and Simon was forced to bundle me out the Louvre when I took exception to the crowds of tourists clustered around the Mona Lisa, as I was very hot and rather over people and was remarking loudly that I was not at all impressed and wasn’t it rather small and dingy a painting for people to make such a fuss about, and some of the tourists, having travelled halfway across the world to make a dream come true by seeing the Mona Lisa, were muttering and taking exception to my views on Great Art. Due to the many people in Paris, I also found it necessary to frequently pop into bijou cafés and have my equilibrium restored with delightful pichets of vin rouge, which meant that I largely spent the weekend in a splendidly blurry haze.

There was one quite unfortunate moment, though, when Simon left me alone in the very posh hotel, as I wanted a soak in the bath, and he decided to go down to the bar for a drink. The hotel had the most gloriously huge, deep, wide bathtub I had ever seen – not only that, but it was a Jacuzzi bath! Oh the bliss, I thought! How relaxed and reinvigorated I would be after a good old wallow in that!

I tipped the tiny little bottle of ‘complimentary’ bubble bath into the splendidly deep, hot bath I had run, hopped in and set the Jacuzzi settings to ‘high’, but instead of lying back and enjoying a tranquil moment with lovely warm jets of water soothing my aching muscles, I found myself being spun around into a vortex. The bath was so large, and the Jacuzzi so powerful, I was sucked into a whirlpool in the middle of the bath, unable to reach the controls on the side and turn the bastarding thing off. In addition, the VERY FUCKING TINY bottle of bubble bath had been whipped into a giant foam mountain, obscuring my vision, disorientating me as to where in the bath I was or where the control panel was, and very shortly spilling over the edge of the bath.

Simon, thank God, had got downstairs to the bar, realised he had forgotten his phone and come back upstairs for it. He opened the door to our room to be greeted by bubbles pouring from under the bathroom door, and me screaming for help. When he finally finished laughing he did at least turn off the bath and rescue me, but it is very difficult to attempt to maintain any illusion of poise when one has had to be fished from a killer bath, looking like a drowned rat.

This was also the evening that I insisted we went to a jazz bar in Montmartre so we could be cool and Parisian and sophisticated. Simon had warned me I wouldn’t like it, and sure enough, within about ten minutes I was grumbling that it was just noise and there was no proper tune. Simon looked smug and pretended he was enjoying it, while calling me a philistine. He wouldn’t let us leave till we had finished our drinks, and as I had demanded a Campari and soda, thinking it would make me look very European, as well as being pretty and pink, it took me quite a long time to choke it down. It turned out that Campari and soda actually tastes like very nasty cough syrup and Simon said that he wasn’t buying me another drink if I wasted that one, as it had been the princely sum of €15 in the over-priced jazz bar. Sometimes Simon is very cruel.

Anyway, now I am forty-two. Quite irretrievably into the realms of the fortysomethings, which is even worse than when I turned thirty-one and had histrionics because I was now a thirty-something (mainly because I remembered watching Thirty-something in my teens and thinking how terribly old they all were, and now I was a fucking thirtysomethinger myself, and I was afraid of turning into Hope, who always seemed so boring and sanctimonious, even though everyone found her inexplicably fanciable, a bit like Monica in Friends). My forty-second birthday was celebrated by vacuuming, doing the laundry, shouting at the children that they were not even to look at each other, much less speak to each other since they did not seem able to say a single word to their sibling without winding them up, and eating an indifferent takeout when I insisted I wasn’t cooking on my birthday, as Simon had huffed and puffed about going out because he had an early meeting the next day, and ‘It is Monday night, darling, and it’s not like it’s actually a special birthday, is it?’

No, no, he’s quite right, it’s not a special birthday, because it’s only my birthday. Everyone else in this house gets special birthdays every year, because I bloody well make sure they are special, but no one ever thinks to repay the favour for me.

Tuesday, 13 September

Well, I don’t know what the significance of the dick and balls in the interview room was, but whatever it was there for, I passed the test (either that or the other candidates reacted to it even worse than I did – perhaps they added spurting cum and pubic hairs?). Anyway, the whys are not important. What is important is that I got a SECOND INTERVIEW. It’s next Monday, which should give me plenty of time to prepare, and even better, it’s with their head of development who is in currently in California, so it’s a phone interview and I don’t have to worry about what to wear! There was a horrible moment when I thought it might be a video call, and I would have to find a non-scabby corner of my house to sit in and look executivey, but they said just an ordinary conference call with the Very Important Man and Morose Ed would be fine, so I don’t even have to put make-up on and can fish crumbs out of my bra mid-conversation if need be! Happy belated birthday to me! Maybe my family is indifferent to me, but at least the universe or karma or something is on my side.

Wednesday, 14 September

Oh buggering bollocking arseholing twatbums. Tonight was ‘Meet the Teacher Night’. Everyone knows that even if your child has had the same teacher for the last three years, you have to go along to Meet the Teacher Night (although you don’t actually get to Meet the Teacher – you get to sit on a tiny chair and watch a PowerPoint presentation about the curriculum that will in fact bear no resemblance whatsoever to what your child will really learn about over the coming year), because if you don’t you are Judged, both by the Unmet Teacher and by the other parents, who will notice your absence. And of course, despite the fact that most people have more sense than to shell out for a babysitter to enable them both to go to the Meet the Teacher Night, there is always at least one extremely smug and enthusiastic couple there together, who hold up all the proceedings by asking inane questions about how the teacher might deal with completely hypothetical situations. Meanwhile the rest of us attempt not to roll our eyes or face palm because these idiots are causing tedious delays until the moment when we can pop home and sink face first into a large gin.

I thought I was being nice by giving Katie a lift to Meet the Teacher Night, so she didn’t feel daunted walking into the school by herself, but it turned out that this was a foolish thing to do, because although Katie is very lovely, and also a kindred spirit, which is nice to have living across the road, she is also a much better person than me, as well as still being naive and innocent in matters of playground politics.

Thus it was that when we walked into the school foyer together and found Fiona Montague and Perfect Lucy Atkinson’s Perfect Mummy standing there, brandishing clipboards menacingly as they attempted to sign people up for the PTA, instead of sidling past with a feeble excuse and trying not to make eye contact, Katie stopped and said she would LOVE to hear more about the PTA.

‘Oh, that sounds marvellous!’ said Katie with enthusiasm. ‘I mean, who wouldn’t want to help raise funds for the school? And I expect it is also a really good way to meet other parents, isn’t it?’

Lucy’s Mummy and Fiona brightly assured Katie that yes, indeed, it was an excellent way for someone new to the school to meet other parents, probably much the best way there was.

‘And what about you, Ellen?’ suggested Katie, ‘You’ll join too, won’t you, and keep me on the right track, stop me making any terrible playground-politics faux pas? I don’t really know how all this works, but you must be an old hand by now.’

‘Errr,’ I said desperately. ‘Well, the thing is …’

‘What’s wrong, Ellen? Don’t you want to help raise money for the school?’ asked Katie with wide-eyed innocence.

‘Yes, of course I do,’ I protested indignantly. ‘And I am already on the list of people who have agreed to help at actual events. I’m just not totally sure that I’m really a committee person, that’s all!’

‘Oh, there’s nothing to it!’ said Lucy’s Mummy.

‘It really takes hardly any time at all!’ chirped Fiona.

‘Think of the children!’ begged Katie.

And so somehow, after seven years of cunningly avoiding joining the PTA, I found myself agreeing to go along to the AGM and even to consider a committee role, as long as it wasn’t Treasurer, in case I accidently embezzled the money and had to go to prison while the children featured in a Sad Face article in the Daily Mail.

Simon laughed like a drain when I told him of this when I got home, and reminded me of how, when Jane first started school, I had been so terrified of being forced to join the PTA that I had had a series of distressing dreams in which I was attending PTA coffee mornings or committee meetings, only to find that I was stark naked. Sometimes I fear that Simon is not as supportive a husband as he could be. I also really hope that there was nothing prophetic about all my naked PTA dreams – no strangers need to see a woman of my age naked, no matter what Trinny and Susannah on TV used to claim as they made those poor unlucky women strip off while they jiggled their boobs. Thinking about it, that was such a weird programme. Who thought going on it would be a good idea? ‘I know, I’m not very confident, and I don’t like my clothes, so I’ll go on national television and let a pair of poshos grab my tits, before advising me that a nice scarf will be the end to all my woes!’ It was probably the thin end of the wedge that led to programmes like Embarrassing Bodies, when people who claim they are too ashamed to go to the doctors are quite happy to whip their suppurating dicks out on camera (I once made the mistake of watching a clap special of Embarrassing Bodies. On the plus side, I lost three pounds, as it put me off my dinner for days).

Monday, 19 September

Aaaargh! Today is my second interview, by phone, and oh happy days, Simon is sick. Really sick. Not just with a sniffle, or a cold, or a bit of cough. He is terribly, dreadfully debilitated, and it is touch and go whether he will make it. He sits hunched over his laptop, wrapped in his nastiest and most synthetic fleece, googling and googling his symptoms, finding ever more terminal diagnoses and wondering aloud every five minutes whether he should call the doctor or an ambulance. In between he groans dramatically, or coughs feebly.

‘You have man flu!’ I said unsympathetically.

Simon moaned pathetically. ‘I think it might be Zika virus,’ he whimpered.

‘How can you have Zika virus? You haven’t been anywhere with Zika!’ I pointed out briskly.

‘I was in London last week. There was a woman on the Underground who kept coughing. That could be where I caught it.’

‘No, darling, you did not catch Zika on the Undergound, because it is not an airborne virus. It is spread by the special Zika mosquitoes. And anyway, Zika is only serious if you are a pregnant woman, and last time I looked, my love, you were neither a woman nor pregnant! So I think perhaps you might be malingering a little and making something of a meal out of the fact that you are suffering from a common fucking cold!’

‘I’m sure I have a fever,’ Simon mewed, still tapping away at Dr Google. ‘Can you take my temperature? Ebola is airborne. Maybe I’ve got Ebola. The first symptoms are a fever, a headache, joint and muscle pain, a sore throat and severe muscle weakness. I have all of them! Oh God, I have Ebola. I’m going to die. Don’t you even care? You are so unfeeling. Please take my temperature.’

‘If you did have Ebola, why would I want to come anywhere near you?’ I said. ‘But you don’t. You have a severe case of hypo-fucking-chondria, that’s all.’

‘My poor nose is so sore,’ sniffed Simon. ‘Why don’t we have any of the special Balsam Kleenex?’

‘Because they cost twice as much as ordinary Kleenex.’

‘Why are you so unsympathetic?’ he whimpered.

‘Because you have a cold. A fucking cold! Man the fuck up!’ I snapped brusquely.

‘But I feel so ill. It must be more than a cold. Please take my temperature.’

‘You know the most reliable way to take a temperature is rectally …’ I said evilly.

‘What? No! You’re not putting it up my butt! Just put it under my arm or something.’

‘That gives very inaccurate results …’

‘I just want a bit of love and sympathy from my wife. Is that too much to ask for? Just a little bit of nurturing, but instead you are threatening to violate me with a thermometer. Why are you so cruel?’

‘I am sympathetic. I made you a cup of tea when I got home from picking up the kids and made no comment whatsoever on the bloody mess you made in the kitchen while I was gone, while apparently being too sick to get off the sofa!’

‘I was just trying to keep my strength up,’ whispered Simon feebly.

‘Well, now you have fortified yourself, you need to look after the children and keep them QUIET, because I have this phone interview at 5.30 p.m. Do you think you can do that?’

‘What? Who has a phone interview at that time?’ scoffed Simon.

‘One of them’s in America.’

‘So?’

‘The time difference? I can take the call upstairs, if you can just keep the kids down here and out of my hair so I can actually concentrate and hear myself think. Please, Simon, this is important!’

‘But I feel awful,’ groaned Simon. ‘What am I supposed to do with them? Can’t you just tell them to play quietly or something?’

‘NO! Someone needs to be supervising them, because otherwise, the minute I am on the phone their radar pricks up and they immediately start causing havoc and barging in and screaming and bellowing. Don’t you remember a couple of years ago when I tried to have a work call at home and we ended up in the ER because Peter managed to get a pea stuck up his nose?’

Simon looked blank. ‘Did he?’

I sighed. ‘No, of course you don’t remember. You weren’t here. You were on yet another trip, which was why I was dealing with everything by myself, yet again, which is why it would be nice if just for once you could help me out and keep the kids out of the way.’

‘I’m just saying, I’m not well,’ complained Simon. ‘Yet I’m supposed to look after the kids. You know, my mother would never have expected my father to look after us.’

‘What the fuck does that have to do with it?’ I snapped. ‘You are not your father and I am not your mother and this is the twenty-first fucking century, so just get with the programme and LOOK AFTER YOUR CHILDREN because I am going to get ready for my call!’

‘But what about dinner?’ Simon wailed plaintively after me. ‘Am I expected to do that too?’

‘I’ll make dinner when I’ve finished,’ I shouted over my shoulder. ‘Just keep the kids QUIET!’

The call started well. Max, the very important boss man, turned out to be American as well as being in America, so he did that lovely American thing of being very jolly and positive and polite. Ed still did not say much, and mostly was a slightly disturbing heavy-breathing presence on the line while Max and I chatted. After about twenty minutes there was a screech from downstairs. I tensed. Shortly afterwards there were thunder footsteps on the stairs, and I braced myself, while seething with fury. Then the hammering on the door and the bellowing began.

‘Is everything OK, Ellen?’ asked Max kindly. ‘There seems to be kinda a funny noise coming from your end?’

‘Yes,’ I said desperately. ‘It’s, err, it’s a crossed line, I think.’

‘A crossed line?’ said Max in confusion. ‘Isn’t this your cell phone though? I didn’t think you could get crossed lines on a cell. Heck, I didn’t think you still got crossed lines at all!’

‘It’s, um, it’s a British thing,’ I improvised as the screaming increased, and I thanked my lucky stars that at least the bedroom door had a lock so the little fuckers couldn’t get in. ‘We still get them because our networks … errr … the war … you know?’

Ed made what could have been a snort of derision, or possibly just a snore because he had fallen asleep, having not said anything for the last fifteen minutes, and Max said, ‘The war? Um, OK, I didn’t know that, that’s interesting.’

I tried desperately to concentrate and sound calm and professional for the brief remnants of the rest of the conversation, but I think the damage was done by my frantic babblings about the war. Everyone knows you Don’t Mention the War. I know almost every episode of Fawlty Towers off by heart, so why the FUCK would I mention the war instead of just apologising and explaining that it was my delinquent hell-fiend children?

I stormed downstairs afterwards to find Simon sauntering out of the bathroom with a self-satisfied expression on his face.

‘What the fuck do you think you were doing?’ I yelled. ‘You just had to keep the kids quiet for a bit. That was all. Where were you?’

‘I had to go for a shit,’ said Simon indignantly. ‘I TOLD you I wasn’t well. I’m all out of sorts. Usually I only shit in the mornings – I’m very regular – but clearly the Ebola has affected my digestion.’

‘And you couldn’t wait? You couldn’t hang on till I was off the phone, so I could actually have what is possibly the most important call of my life in peace without the children fighting outside the door because apparently Peter has taken some fucking keyring of Jane’s and so her honour was impugned and she had to scream the house down about it, despite neither of them having a key to put on it? You couldn’t have just left it for a FEW BASTARDING MINUTES?’

‘When you have to shit, you have to shit!’ said Simon. ‘So, what’s for dinner?’

‘Oh, go fuck yourself!’ I snarled.

Thursday, 22 September

Well, I went to the PTA AGM. I dragged Sam with me too, on the basis that if I was going down, I was taking as many people as I could with me. He objected strenuously to this, pointing out that I should really have known better than to have succumbed to the pressure of Perfect Lucy Atkinson’s Perfect Mummy and Fiona Montague, even though everyone knows how hard it is to resist them, especially when they are holding their Very Important Official-Looking Clipboards. He tried to wriggle out of it by sighing that sadly, as he was a single parent, he had no childcare. But I was prepared for that and had already told Simon that he would be looking after Sophie and Toby, as well as his own darling poppets, and so, finding himself outmanoeuvred, poor Sam had little choice but to accompany Katie and me to the school hall, down the corridors scented with an eternity of school dinners – that heady whiff of cabbage and the stale fat from fries – to find Lucy Atkinson’s Mummy and Fiona Montague presiding over a hall containing a grand total of eleven people, out of the approximately seven hundred parents at the school. I felt very bad about never coming along before – I had always assumed these meetings were brimming over with enthusiastic voluntary-type people who had filofaxes and liked organising things and knew how to use glue guns. I had never realised how poorly attended they were, which certainly shed some light on why Lucy’s Mummy and Fiona could be slightly militant when trying to drum up PTA support.

Lucy Atkinson’s Mummy kicked off proceedings by tendering her resignation as Chair and inviting someone to come forward to take her place. A deafening silence met her words.

Cara Cartwright was sitting beside me and whispered, ‘Don’t worry. She resigns every year, and no one has yet dared try and replace her. She just likes to feel needed.’

Lucy’s Mummy, however, shouted, ‘Come ON! Someone must be willing to replace me. I DON’T WANT TO DO THIS ANYMORE. If no one will step up and replace me, there will be no PTA. There will be no Halloween disco, no Christmas Fayre, no Summer Fete, AND NO FUCKING MONEY FOR SCHOOL TRIPS, NEW WHITEBOARDS OR ANY OTHER BASTARDING THING! This is my daughter’s last year at primary school and all I really want to do is spend ONE school event with her. Actually WITH her, not throwing another pound coin at her to go and have a few more shots on the tombola because I’m too busy running the event to do anything with her. Is that so much to ask?’

The silence was really quite awkward now.

‘RIGHT!’ bellowed Lucy’s Mummy, slamming her Important Clipboard down on the table. ‘FUCK THIS SHIT! I am out of here. Hell mend the lot of you!’

‘Me too!’ said Fiona Montague.

Ohhhhhh, this was MEGA awkward. I do hate a pregnant pause, and so before I really knew what I was doing, just to end the tense atmosphere, I somehow found myself putting my hand up and mumbling, ‘Errrr, I’ll do it. If no one else wants to, that is?’

Fuck it, I thought to myself. I clearly had blown all chance of the Dream Job and so I might as well do something useful with my time in between the eating cookies and inventing abortive apps.

‘Will you, Ellen?’ said Lucy’s Mummy, a slightly manic look in her eye. ‘Oh, that’s marvellous news! Now we just need a treasurer to replace Fiona, and a secretary.’

‘Umm, Sam?’ I hissed, nudging him in the ribs. ‘And Katie, you got me into this.’

Sam sighed. ‘I’ll be the treasurer then.’

‘And I’ll be the secretary!’ said Katie.

‘Oh wonderful!’ cried Lucy’s Mummy. ‘We’re FREE. I mean, that’s marvellous of you to offer. Technically you should be proposed and seconded, etc, but to be honest it’s so hard to get people to volunteer in the first place that we haven’t bothered about that in years. Now, would anyone else like to join the committee?’

‘Oh, go on then,’ said Cara Cartwright. ‘In for a penny, in for a pound!’

‘I’d like to join as well,’ said a new voice from the back of the hall. Everyone craned round to see who it was. A tall woman with immaculate hair and full make-up had walked in, with two very clean children in tow.

‘Sorry we’re late,’ said the new woman. ‘I’m Kiki. I was just taking some photos of Lalabelle and Trixierose playing outside. Yes, I would like to join. I think there’s a lot of things that could be improved.’

Lucy’s Mummy had looked nonplussed for a moment, but she ralled enough to interrupt. ‘Errr,’ she said, ‘I just need to stop you there. The thing is … sorry, was it Coco?’

‘Kiki. With two Ks.’

‘Right. Kiki. This is the PTA. We only deal with fundraising for the school, not school policies. You want the Parent Council for that.’

‘Oh,’ said Kiki with two Ks (it’s hardly Anne with a bloody E, is it? Also, isn’t Kiki a parrot’s name?). ‘Well, I’m here now, so I might as well stay, as I’m interested to see what the PTA funds are used for. I’m sure there are better ways of spending the money – for example, the playground is very grey. It’s really hard to get a decent photo of the girls out there. If some money could be spent on some nice paving, maybe some plants, and obviously a mural wall is a MUST.’

‘Why?’ asked Lucy’s Mummy.

‘Because everyone loves a mural wall as an Instagram backdrop!’ cried Kiki. ‘Instagram is the future. Schools really need to get on board with this.’

Lucy’s Mummy turned puce at this, as Fiona Montague nudged her, and I distinctly heard her whisper, ‘Let it go. Not our circus, not our monkey anymore! Let’s wrap things up quickly and go to the pub. She’s Ellen’s problem now.’

Kiki ploughed on oblivious. ‘While we’re on the subject, why isn’t the school on Instagram? Maybe I could help with that. I’m actually a social media influencer, with over 300 followers. I’m @kikiloveandlife if anyone wants to follow me – it’s about children and lifestyle and travel. People tell me I’m an aspirational inspiration, which is humbling!’

The first icy realisation of what I may have done began to dawn on me.

The rest of the meeting mainly consisted of the outgoing committee handing over to us, the new, slightly daunted committee, with proceedings only minimally held up by Kiki interrupting to tell us her latest Instagram stats, and asking for another pause while she took more photos of her daughters colouring in and then suggested a group selfie, which everyone politely declined, and reminding us again that we all really should follow her, as a lot of people have told her she is inspirational.

The only saving grace was that Kiki didn’t actually seem interested in volunteering for any position within the PTA other than starting an Instagram page, which I am pretty sure the school will veto.

When I got home and ’fessed up to Simon about how I was not only on the PTA committee, but was in fact the new Chair, he looked at me in disbelief.

‘So what you are telling me is that Perfect Lucy Atkinson’s Perfect Mummy actually gave her resignation by publicly shouting “FUCK THIS SHIT” and that was the point at which you decided it would be a good idea to take on the role that had reduced her to that?’

‘Ummm, well, it was such a very awkward silence. Someone had to say something. I panicked! I hate silences.’

‘Usually you fill any perceived awkward silences by babbling hysterically about how otters have opposable thumbs, not by volunteering for what appears to be the most thankless task in the history of humanity.’

‘I did consider my otter soliloquy, but it didn’t really seem appropriate. And how bad can it be, when I have Sam and Katie helping me? And Cara, she seems perfectly nice, and normal. It will be fine, Simon, I don’t know what you are worrying about. We have already agreed that it would be a much better idea to hold our meetings in the pub – I bet that will get lots of people along!’

‘Hmmmm,’ said Simon doubtfully. ‘Well, I will try not to say “I told you so” when it all goes belly up.’

Friday, 30 September

I GOT THE JOB! I don’t know HOW, but I got the job. Gabrielle just said that Max had found me very ‘creative’ (Gabrielle didn’t sound totally convinced by this). Maybe being able to make up bullshit on the spot is a positive life skill now, instead of being frowned upon? And because I don’t have to hand in my notice anywhere else, they want me to start a week on Monday, which, oh fuck, is just over a week away.

Obviously I am now totally totally panicking about everything. Am I up to the job? Can I actually do it? How am I going to manage juggling being the Chair of the PTA with working full-time and everything else? Will my children now be emotionally stunted and traumatised for life? And most importantly, what if I can’t find the toilets in the new office? I spend a lot of time worrying about toilets; toilets are important to me. If I can’t find them it will be distressing. I still recall my first job, where everything was fine for the first six months because I knew where the toilets were, but then they moved me to another department, a department with no obvious toilets, where everyone else was male and I didn’t like to ask anyone where the ladies’ were, so I spent the next six months trailing back and forth to my old department so I could have a pee, until I had the smart idea of following another woman who worked on the same floor as me, and finding the toilets like that. It’s not just me who has toilet issues; Hannah once went so far as to turn down a job because she was worried the building was too big and she would never find the toilets (I mean, there were other factors too, obviously, but the toilets were definitely a part of it). Also, they are a modern and innovative company, so what if they have gone all Ally McBeal and have unisex toilets? I don’t want unisex toilets, I don’t want to listen to Brian from Marketing grunting as he shits out last night’s curry while I’m trying to change a tampon, and what if they talk about wanking while I’m trying to put my lip gloss on? Do men talk about wanking in the toilets? I have no idea. How would I possibly know what men talk about in the toilets, and that’s the way I like it! And if I can’t even pee while there are other women in the ladies, how on earth am I going to be able to ‘go’ if there are men in there? (Although I would at least be able to blame the farting on them, should I accidentally let one rip.)

I felt rather nostalgic for the familiar, comforting surroundings of the toilets in my old office, the toilets I knew the exact location of, where Brenda the cleaning lady would leave the cupboard with the spare loo rolls unlocked for me because she knew I got anxious if we were down to less than half a roll in the holder. You couldn’t do that in a unisex loo, with Brian and his curries. Everyone knows men would not respect such toilet-roll privileges. But then I cheered up. I had got the Dream Job! In the face of everything, including the dick and balls on the wall, Simon’s general lack of enthusiasm, the wrong sort of coffee cup, the feral screaming children and the toast crumbs in my bra, I HAD GOT THE FUCKING JOB! Obviously I would need a smart new capsule work wardrobe. Hopefully they wouldn’t expect me to wear those stupid heels all the time, and maybe I will finally master how to wear the cropped pants with funky boots without looking like a dork.

OCTOBER

Saturday, 1 October

I got an email from my father today, suggesting we all ‘get together’ for lunch soon, which was quite unexpected as I thought he was still living in Portugal. Apparently he has a ‘surprise’ for me. I am dubious about this, because although part of me is an eternal optimist and thus immediately thinks perhaps he is coming to tell me that he has decided to transfer a large sum of money to me, or that he has put his house in Portugal into my name now to avoid death duties and because I need it more than my sister, no good ever comes of his ‘surprises’, as they inevitably take the form of his announcing that he is either getting married again or divorced again.

If one were feeling generous, Daddy could be described as something of an aging roué, but really as he gets older, his habit of getting married and divorced on what seems like an almost annual basis is getting rather embarrassing. We did think that his last wife, Caroline, had finally got him to settle down, and she did stick it out a remarkable seven years, before throwing in the towel when she caught him in bed with her cleaner, at which point he decamped to Portugal, claiming that it was for the golf, and not, as Mummy waspishly suggested, that he had run out of shags in Sunningdale, since he was reduced to bedding the staff at the golf club.

My fears over his latest ‘surprise’ were confirmed with a call from my dear sister Jessica, who had received a similar email, also summonsing her to the meet-up. Jessica, trying as ever to be the condescending elder sister, poo-pooed my concerns that we were about to be introduced to our latest stepmother.

‘For heaven’s sake, Ellen. He’s seventy-five years old. Why on earth would he want to get married again at his age? Surely he’s learned by now.’

‘Maybe not. Remember Carrie Barker? Her granddad got married three times after his first wife died when he was seventy-five!’

‘Yes, but his wives kept dying of old age, so he had to get another one because he’d never washed his own underwear. That’s hardly the same as Daddy. He’s spent enough time between wives to be reasonably self-sufficient.’

‘Well, what do you think he wants then?’

‘How should I know? Maybe he’s decided to move back to the UK so he can spend more time with his grandchildren.’

‘He hates children. He didn’t even really like us that much when we were little, and pretty much went out of his way to avoid us. He is immensely proud of the fact that he has never changed a diaper, and still complains about the time Jane vommed on him when she was a newborn. That’s been the only saving grace in the revolving door of wives. At least his general dislike of children meant that there were no new brothers and sisters to take a share of our inheritance!’

‘He likes Persephone and Gulliver.’ said Jessica, with the indignation of a mother’s love. ‘Everyone likes Persephone and Gulliver – I’m constantly told how charming they are. Maybe it’s just your children he doesn’t like!’

‘He does not like your children!’

‘HE DOES!’

‘NOT!’

‘STOP being so petty!’

‘SHAN’T!’

‘Ellen, I will hang up if you can’t conduct a civilised conversation like a normal adult.’

‘Oh, all right!’ I grumbled. I honestly don’t know what it is about Jessica. She is my only sister and I love her, I honestly do, but I don’t really like her very much. She always rubs me up the wrong way, usually by being so bloody superior, and then I find myself just fighting the urge to kick her in the shins, or push her over in a muddy puddle and laugh at her. Our ability to still squabble like children at the ages of forty-two and forty-five does not give me much hope that the magical day will ever dawn when Peter and Jane will stop fighting and be friends and get on without one or the other trying to brutally murder their sibling. And anyway, Jessica’s children are monsters of hot-housed over-achievement and will doubtless be running the country before they are out of their teens, if Jessica has anything to do with it. (I still cringe, though, every time I remember that I have a niece and nephew called Persephone and Gulliver, but Jessica is immensely smug that nobody else she knows, not even any of the children of the other parents’ group mummies from either of her pregnancies, has the same names as her offspring, and in fact since records began neither ‘Persephone’ nor ‘Gulliver’ has ever appeared on a list of ‘Most Popular’ names. She was mildly less smug when after a brief googling I was able to inform her they did both appear on a list of the Most Pretentious Middle-Class Children’s Names. That was a very good day …)

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