Country style

Even though I live in a muddy field with no society save crows and passing men in vans to judge me sartorially, I still dress like I might just end up in a trendy little bar in Soho at the end of the day. It’s a habit, a basic London Lush survival mechanism, so deeply imbedded, that I may never lose, even though I was sure the country would cure me of shallow style concerns, even though my local (it’s two fields down the road, opposite the stables) is more like the bar in Shameless than the beamy rustic nook of my wild pastoral imaginings. I had naturally assumed that as soon as my feet had left the solid concrete of SE15, I’d be floating around like Kiera Knightly and Sienna Miller in that film about Dylan Thomas – wellies, little floral frocks, chunky knit cardigans – which is frankly on a par with Marie Antoinette dressing like little Bo Peep to play a peasant on her mock farm in Versailles. Having attempted this look, it turns out that if you’re over 35, you just look like a mad woman chasing burglars in your nightie. I have also tried to go au naturel and rustic, and avail myself of all the local pastries and ales without a care, but soon recognised the look on my visiting London chums – a look I had given many a friend who had jumped ship and moved to the sticks – a pitying: ‘Oh dear, you’ve gone all fat and frumpy. AND you don’t even know what’s on at The Tate.’ (Suffolk Culture being the next subject of blog rant).

There are two fashion options in Suffolk if one wants to blend in. One, the basic sensible walking boots and fleeces covered in dog hair. Two, gold jewellery, eyebrows plucked until only four hairs remain, tight jeans with studs and the SLAPPER printed on the back pocket – kind of low rent Versace. And that’s just the children.

All through this freezing winter, I went for inoffensive chunky jumpers (roomy, hides the cake abuse) and wellies (mud. Everywhere is mud, even in bed), then had a kind of melt down in Asda (as one does – if Camus were alive, aisle 12 in Asda is surely where he’d set the opening scene of L’Etranger II), panic bought Grazia and Vogue, made plans, drew up wish lists, then set off to the Big Smoke to acquire some outrageous Londonist fashion statements to sport proudly on the school run.

I’m not going to fit in. We’re not like them. We’re Londoners and prahd! I’m thinking open toe chunky ankle boots, cute little mac, big fuck off sunglasses (worn all the time, even indoors like Magenta Devine, clutch bag for iphone (with handy compass and torch app).

As it is, every boutique in London appears to have one recurring theme – Hunter Wellies. They’re bloody everywhere (except in the effing actual countryside)...  

So...where were we?

So anyway, we moved to the countryside. Yup. That’s the reason for Lush Wife’s absence, not – as some have conjectured – due to enforced stay in Priory over The Christmas Period. We’ve moved to Suffolk (it’s the bit that sticks out over Kent). I’m in the middle of nowhere, one mile away from a village that doesn’t even have a shop, just a hairdressers and a farm that sells eggs. I’ve gone from the hub of Western Civilisation to living in a field. A field – as my lovely editor will tell you – without a telephone, an internet connection, or even basic decent reception for a mobile phone. It’s also been snowing for a month. Don’t ask me why I’ve done this – I can’t remember any more myself. At one point I thought I’d had a fatal accident on the A12 and was actually dead, and this snow white place full of old people was in fact the afterlife. Because where else could you not get mobile phone reception? Even before we left London people were acting as though we had died, weeping about our loss (“I’m only going two hours up the road,” I’d point out, while quite enjoying the feeling of being at my own proverbial funeral. Nice to know how popular one is). My mother bought us all Hunter boots for Christmas. Adam at first refused to wear them, assuming that only Wankers from London would wear absurdly expensive wellies, but – result! - Suffolk people don’t make fashion judgement calls. That’s a London thing. No, they just judge you on the fact you don’t go to church and haven’t yet joined the carpet bowls club and don’t know what a Sparrow Hawk looks like (I do now, ok?).  

The Hill behind our house has been called Blood Hill for 400 years (no-one knows why – I’m assuming Wicker Man scenario, full of burning Londoner Tossers). We have renamed it Google Hill, because it’s the only place you can get reception. In two months, I haven’t met a single person like me. My new best friend is a retired policeman called Lawrence, who worked on the Ipswich serial killer case, and now has four acres of land to tame (that’s called a Garden here. Ours is a titchy 1 acre boggy meadow full of rabbit shit). He doesn’t know it yet, but my plan is that he and I will solve crimes together, discussing cases in beamy old pubs over pints of local Adnams ale. I will then turn this into a hit TV series a la Lovejoy (set in Suffolk) meets Midsomer Murders meets Jonathan Creek. Apart from that I’m writing four novels simultaneously, knitting, making log fires, while planning to grow vegetables (despite skill for transforming every healthy green plant to a dried twig in a pot), raise chickens (even though scared of chickens) and something else I’ve forgotten.

This half term, all our friends from London clearly had a séance because they arrived in droves – 20 of them – demanding to be fed locally killed produce and only be taken to rustic places always bathed in glorious sunshine, just like off the telly. I think we just about pulled it off...            

The One with Freak Child Envy

I’ve always had a really competitive relationship with my best friend from school. I don’t know why this is. I don’t tend to have competitive relationships with anyone else.

She and my other best friend from school and I used to play The Professionals. Competitive Best Friend was Doyle (weirdly, she is also touchy, humourless – the only person I know who didn’t laugh in Life of Brian – and swears by strange faddy diets perpetrated by humourless, posh quacks in North London). Funny Best Friend was Bodie (strangely, now I think of it, she was sexy, cheeky and a bit of a lad). I was The Villain (strangely – well, let’s not go there. Not this week). Basically, they chased me around the school with their finger-guns. If they managed to catch up with me I would not speed up or pull a funky move and dive off a building, or skip onto a passing bus and flick the Vs through the back window. I would curl up in a ball and giggle (how I deal with danger to this day), and they’d get cross because they didn’t know what to do with a giggling ball of schoolgirl (unlike certain chaps have met since…).

Anyway, our friendship is now 30 years old, and the dynamic of it hasn’t changed a bit. Competitive Best Friend still compares herself to everyone else (seemingly unfavourably, but a viz extremely favourably (ie; So-and-so is really successful, but everyone hates her. She makes me feel like a failure.’ ‘But everyone hates her and likes you, so who cares?’). She is passive competitive, if there is such a term), Funny Best Friend tries to defuse everything with humour, and I get the most drunk (as they always point out), do or say something villainous then roll up into a ball and giggle. I know tis terrible thing to say on paper, but really hoped CBF never have a child for the purely selfish reason that her child would be more beautiful and clever than everyone else’s, even if she gave birth to Captain Caveman.

‘Everyone calls her a freak child,’ she told me this week.

(I waited. Surely she’s not going to admit faulty offspring)

‘She’s a genius. She can count to 15 and she’s 20 months old. Oh I know they all develop at different rates, but all the other mothers are sick with jealousy and call her The Freak.’

‘I’m sure it’s fine,’ I say, not really sure what to say. ‘I have lots of friends with freakishly bright kids...’ Realise I’m just saying that to make her see she’s NOT THAT FUCKING SPECIAL, ALRIGHT, NOT EVERYTHING YOU DO IS BETTER THAN EVERYONE ELSE AND THAT INCLUDES PROCREATION. Because I’m the villain, I use Evil Subtext to undermine people.

‘How horrible, calling a toddler The Freak,’ says Bodie Friend, preparing to go up to North London and kick some Yummy Mummy ass.

Bodie’s response is of course fair and just (if a tad Old Testament) and just makes me feel worse. Why couldn’t I have been the wise old man, their boss, Gordon thingy, instead of sneaky tea leaf flicking the Vs from getaway bus?

Quickly divert conversation to Death. CBF insists she will die more horribly than all of us, and lists the ways, which just proves that her acupuncturist and whatever the latest Quack is (pressure healer I think) aren’t doing much good.

Bodie thinks she’ll be punished for having too much sex. Then both offer to help me out with bottle of whisky and hammer if I can’t afford a Swiss Clinic when the time comes. Bless them.Go home whistling the theme tune from Friends….

TNM Alert

Oh the SHAME - just had a Total Neurotic Meltdown in the school playground. So embarrassing. And just when I thought I’d convinced the totally cool parents that I too was sooo laid back and Boho and ‘Yeah, when I was a kid I like DROVE my drunk parents back from the pub WITHOUT A SEATBELT.’ (At least I thought I had, maybe they just keep me around to laugh at me behind my back).

Zee was late coming out of her class. Then she just wasn’t coming at all. The playground started to empty. They’d started locking the school doors. Meanwhile, the other parents hanging about are gassing to me like they’d just met at the Heavenly Social, and I can’t hear them, because I suddenly realise my daughter isn’t there. I start with the frantic head twist (‘Where’s Zelda?’), then the pacing, then the crazy peering through windows, then the proper loony collaring her class-mates.

Then one of the cool parents comes over and says: ‘Why are you freaking out?’

‘I can’t find Zelda!’ I say (or maybe wail).

‘Really, but … What’s going to happen to her?’

His kid walks to school on her own, she goes to the shops on her own, and he now thinks I’m NUTS.

But he very sweetly goes to look for Zelda, who may be hanging out with the other kids doing football, even though he also gives me a look that says: ‘My God Woman I Had No Idea You’re a LOON’.

‘Maybe her class isn’t out yet,’ he tries to reassure me. ‘Maybe she’s hanging around waiting for Pia.’

‘Her class IS out!’ I realise, and start to freak out properly (which is just sort of freezing with frantic mad eyes, I think. I don’t know. I’ve never seen myself actually have a TNM, but from the look on my face, I must seem alarming-slash-annoying).

I think he wants to slap me.

Especially when Zelda strolls out of her class and I say all the things my mum used to say to me, in Banshee-like tones: ‘Where the HELL have you been? You frightened the LIFE out of me!’ I look at my mobile. She is not even ten minutes late.‘I was waiting for Pia!’ she says with wet eyes.

At which point, I feel like a proper fool. Cool Dad has gone (probably ran as soon as he could). I think of texting him

Sorry, had totally mad freak out…

But then think, that sounds really mental. And besides, he now knows I’m a Daily Mail reading Paedo-paranoid nut job who obviously doesn’t have enough sex, so I don’t really need to tell him. Also, you can admit neuroses to a mum, but not a dad – that sort of thing scares-slash-bores them.

I could go on and blame the full moon, my hormones, slight insomnia (caused by corked wine I think). He’d be thinking ‘Oh crikey, she probably makes art with her menstrual blood or something.’How can I redeem my Bad Girl reputation (without letting my children out of my sight FOR A MICROSECOND)?

Mummy, Scare Us!

It’s that time of year when we have the Hallowe’en freak out.

Adam’s line is: “I refuse to celebrate something that made up by Americans.”  (er, that’s Christmas out then, surely)

But whether it’s stupid, evil capitalist crap or not, the fact is the kids now get more excited about the 31st of October than the 25th December. Not just ours. Our mates’ kids decorated their entire house two weeks ago with spider webs and spooky lanterns. We did trick or treating last year and it was fun, apart from the scary gangster crack head hoodie who tried to run our group of pre-schoolers off the pavement shouting: F***ING HALLOWE’EN! We visited a coven of lesbian witches (I only know they were lesbians because one of the 8-year-old heads on the two headed ghost knew them and told us the whole set up), some pre-warned friends, and a couple of houses where people were either out or hiding, then went back home, because it was genuinely dangerous. Which is how it should be on Hallowe’en I suppose.

I quite like the idea of doing Mexican Day of the Dead instead, because they really go to town with their costumes and carnivals, and there is clearly drink and drugs involved, as well as some freaky deep stuff about genuine dead people. No Mickey Mouse costumes and Pre-ordering Sexual Offenders Lists the way the American’s play it.

But there is something retro-shoddy about the way we Brits do Hallowe’en that makes me fond too; the saggy pumpkins and cheap costumes and frightened old ladies.

Usually we just gate crash other people’s trick or treat gangs at the last minute, but that’s not going to work this year. It’s half term so everyone is either away, or has organised something several months ago in another hood.

What am I going to do? Have our own tragic little party of four – Adam not playing, watching Match of the Day, me dressed as a witch getting maudlin and grumpy on red wine, the kids creating their own nightmare on a sugar high?

My friend’s mother was quite inventive. Her kids were bothering her one Hallows Eve, with their constant: ‘Mummy, mummy, scare us, scare us!’ After the 47th: ‘Go away, I’m trying to watch Shoestring!’ Mummy snapped and said: ‘Right, get your coats and get in the car.’ Then she drove them all to a graveyard, told them to get out and drove away. Naturally, they shat themselves. Knowing her, she probably gave them a good hour to make sure they’d never said the words, ‘Mummy, scare us!’ ever again.

Come to think of it, they’re all a bit strange. Maybe I should start thinking more along the lines of Scar Your Children For Life Eve. Or Create A Phobia Night!I’m sure as hell not baking spider shaped cookies.