Suffolkwritings

Feeling Tetchy

2009-02-18T09:49:00.003Z

I was catching up with the week’s news this morning and read something that caused me to snort with derision and inelegantly spit out my mouthful of tea. Richard Williamson, the Holocaust-denying Bishop at the centre of the recent wrangle at the heart of the Vatican (don’t you just love him already?) thinks that having ideas of their own causes women to get distracted. Sisters, banish those pesky thoughts that crowd your brain! You won’t be able to concentrate on preparing dinner otherwise. Yes, you blinked and missed a time lapse – it’s circa 1356, not 2009. Frankly, what distracts me is people spouting a load of old b*ll*cks, particularly when they dress it up as spiritual wisdom. I’m not suggesting that his abhorrent views on the Holocaust are any less worthy of choking over your cup of tea – far from it – but I was already aware of his stellar contributions to that debate. I shouldn’t have been surprised at his views on women – after all it’s not often that you hear some spouting anti-Semitism and then coming over all enlightened on other matters. I had a great business idea this morning, too – perhaps I should gratefully pass it on to my husband to deal with. Only no, I can’t, because he’s in Germany all week for work. How will I cope? Funnily enough I’ve been re-reading one of my favourite novels, The Edible Woman, this week; it’s so wittily subversive without ever becoming preachy or hectoring. Maybe I should send a copy to the Bishop.

The other bunch of people who’ve incurred my wrath lately – in a lesser, but still very irritating way - are celebs who are apparently persuaded that what the world needs is more of their spiritual insights, or, perhaps, more practical advice on how we can mange our drab little lives. I’m thinking of Gwyneth and her helpful website Goop, earnestly encouraging us to ‘nourish our inner aspect’, with lots of tips about ‘incredible’ therapies. The word incredible appears a lot in the book reviews, as well - example ‘Tolstoy’s incredible mind amazes me’. Bet he can rest easy in his grave now. I’m also thinking of those otherwise inoffensive people in the domestic sphere who are apparently persuaded that we need their very particular take on bringing up children, or stuffing a Christmas goose for 20 and making your children abandon that silly present opening, (you get the impression that presents are for the lower orders), in order to help you prepare the feast while singing carols in harmonies. I was really disappointed to walk into my local bookshop before Christmas and see that even the apparently sensible Sarah Raven had succumbed. Surely she doesn’t really need the money? Is fame really that corrupting, so that when your publisher/agent/whatever earnestly tells you that the public are gagging for more detail of your perfect domestic life, you actually nod your head seriously? Just tell us how to stuff the bloody goose. Of course, my argument totally collapses here, because I do actually buy this stuff, proving that there is of course a market for it, but then I immediately feel conned, so I’m basically conducting a ‘yeah but no but yeah but’ debate with myself. I do hereby promise, though, that when I become an A-lister (not sure on what basis, exactly, but I’m sure I can think something up), I won’t tell you all how to have the perfect family Christmas without even any staff to help you. Oh, but you’ll be missing out on so much …..

It’s probably just me; I’ve always hated bossiness and can spot it a mile off. Plenty of other people seem to love it; there are many women around in my neck of the woods who, recession or no recession, seem to spend huge amounts of time attending Aga cookery demonstrations, or interior design lectures, etc. I bumped into one of them last week in the chip shop of all places (well, it was Friday). She looked absolutely mortified to be caught out there. The joke was on me though – the chip shop man called me by my first name (how? I don’t remember telling him!), and then helpfully told me, in a ringing voice, that the off licence across the road was doing a great deal on two bottles for the price of one. Great – now I’m outed as a prominent local alcoholic, as well as being on first name terms with the proprietors of the local fast food places and a bad mother with poor nutritional standards.

Which brings me on to say – if you ever drink, and you have children, then stop. Right this minute. Otherwise you risk having a night like mine the other night; weaving my way slowly to bed, then waking at 3.00 am with a pounding head and the sinking realisation that the tooth fairy had gone out on the tiles, the hussy, and had forgotten to put a pound coin under youngest’s pillow. I staggered downstairs, freezing to death of course, only to find that while I had notes and coppers in my purse, there wasn’t a shiny gold coin anywhere. A quick rifle through my husband’s pockets and wallet didn’t bring any to light. I had the bright idea (there I go again, Bishop Richard) of raiding eldest’s money box (sadly not the first time this has happened). But instead of sensibly taking the money box downstairs, I decided to open it in his room, and naturally dropped it. It made an almighty crash, coins dropped everywhere, and the poor boy sat bolt upright in bed. I’ll have to start a savings account to pay for his therapy in years to come; he was slightly taken aback to find his mother breathing alcohol fumes over him and stealing his pocket money in the small hours.

Back with a vengeance (and rambling for too long)

2009-02-06T09:27:00.025Z

I’m blogging again, wow. How did that happen? Why did I ever stop? It’s been about 9 months – perhaps that’s significant in some psychoanalytic way, perhaps I’ve been gestating new writing! So this had better be good then, but don’t get your hopes up. Maybe I just needed a break; life changed quite a lot last year, what with putting my head above the work parapet again and suddenly being inundated (why is my life always so extreme?), along with personal loss (my beloved Grandmother) and other ‘stuff’. I have been hugely busy, but found myself unable to write (creatively) and, more disastrously, unable to read. I kept reading some things – can’t break the habit of a lifetime – but I couldn’t get absorbed in fiction. Newspapers, journals, biographies, business books (yeah I know) – all devoured in the small hours, but I seemed to lose all pleasure in plot and narrative. And the only writing I could do was for work; maybe it’s because to be good at what I do, you have to lose your own voice, and find one for your client. So strategy-speak became, rather scarily, my only means of communicating with the world. Yet in the silence of a cold climate, both literally and metaphorically, I feel, bizarrely, like something’s flowering again. K has been really poorly with a horrible cough, and as I sat up with her late one night and couldn't get back to sleep, I found myself re-reading Coleridge’s Frost at Midnight, and that broke the ice, so to speak. Since then the words have been back, as has my pleasure in reading and losing myself in other people’s stories again.

It’s been quite a winter, not without its beauty. We’ve had days where the sun has shone so brightly that you could imagine yourself in a glittering New England winter, all ice-storms and bright hardness. Days which made me think of Robert Frost’s Birches:

“Such heaps of broken glass to sweep away,
You’d think the inner dome of heaven had fallen”

Other days have been typically English, weak with pale sun if we’re lucky, quiet, dripping and mired in freezing fog if we’re not. I love seeing starkly frozen shapes looming up, and recognising that muffled, muted world that deep winter brings. The stars have been stunning, too. I always find it strangely hard to imagine another season when I’m in the middle of the one I’m in – it seems almost unbelievable to picture the lazy abundance of summer; the hollyhocks and delphiniums out, dog roses shining in the hedges, particularly when survival seems such a struggle for most of nature right now. An old man died in the village last week, but his widow can’t get a slot for the funeral yet; too busy at this time of year, were the chilling words from the funeral parlour. That’s cheerful isn’t it.

Strangely I do feel imbued with a sharp sense of focus and energy at the moment. My hackles have been rising, not for the first time, about how women are pigeonholed and criticised, and basically still told how we should be managing our own lives. Surveys abound, and we’re still caught, as ever, between a rock and a hard place; the few households who ever could afford to live on one salary are decreasing in the recession, yet at the same time we’re bombarded with more information about the unhappiness of our children, our focus on material things, the breakdown of community, all with the implicit criticism of working mothers. It makes me so cross – I know how the media works, but the polarisation of such important issues helps no-one. I feel, stubbornly and perhaps naively, that I want to raise two fingers to the world. People are organic beings, and life should develop organically; what’s right for one family, right now, may not be right for another, and might – gasp – change, too. I was happy to stop work for a while, determined to focus on my children, and I don’t regret it for a moment, it was the best thing I’ve ever done, though I’ve written before about how I hated the invisibility of full time motherhood, the unspoken assumption that I’d left my brain, along with my career prospects, back in the office. Now the children are at school, I’m loving work again and feel a new sense of direction. I need the money, too. It’s impossibly hard, of course it is, to get the balance right, and no wonder so many give up. What are the role models after all – be a corporate slave, outsourcing your children, or else be a Martha Stewart wannabee, with no interest outside the domestic sphere? Why should we have to be either of those things? I happen to love baking, for example. I love being around my kids. At the moment I also love working. I’m damned if I’m going to be told I have to do one or the other, and I really feel the challenge of MAKING opportunities happen so I can try, at least, to fit both in. I know I have to sacrifice pay and status; I don’t want everything, but I’m not going to give up on things that are important to me, either. That’s my first New Year resolution, anyway. I’ve decided put a positive spin on it and recognise that I’m fortunate to have a life that includes so many different experiences.

And of course I AM fortunate; many of these dilemmas are peculiarly middle class. My Mum and Grandma had no such dilemmas; they had to work. And anyone with an ounce of financial sense would have said that my decision to be a full time mother when they were little has cost us dearly. But you know what, I don’t care. It was worth it. Just as right now, working until late at night is worth it, for now. (And long may it continue – having two self employed people in the family isn’t much fun right now).

My next resolution is to stop having unsuitable celebrity crushes (apart from my lifelong passion for Bob Marley, which doesn’t count!) The highlight of late January, for me, was watching the BBC2 series Million Dollar Traders (it was on iPlayer if you missed it, but it might have gone by now); as an ex-City girl myself, though sadly not able to retire with my millions, I found it fascinating. And I wasn’t only concentrating intently on the trades; I don’t think I’m the only one to notice, but Anton Kreil, the Manager, was so incredibly sexy. If all the world’s investment bankers and traders were like him, I’d indulgently forgive all their little foibles, like over selling complex financial instruments which half of them didn’t actually understand. (Sorry to be so flippant, I know it’s not funny at the moment). Though if they were all like him and the fantastically named Lex Van Dam, then I bet we wouldn’t be in this mess. Lex was quite sexy too, in a stern-but-fair kind of way, nice smile, (come on girls, we need all the cheer we can get at this time of year), but the gorgeous Anton triggered some rather impure thoughts. Like, seriously, as he kept saying. I found myself gloomily wondering why I’d never had the good fortune to run into him in the City – oh yeah, it must have been that while I was slowly making my way up the corporate ladder and worrying about my overdraft (and being lucky enough to marry my husband, of course, in case he suddenly decides to break the habit of a lifetime and read my blog), he was being a master of the universe, making huge amounts of money and no doubt going out with supermodels, so wouldn’t have looked at me twice. So the moral of the story is - don’t ever get a stupid crush on anyone (a) younger (b) richer and (c) more successful than you – you come down to earth with a bump.

It was a great show though (total novices having a go at trading, if you didn’t see it). Brilliant, if unforeseen, timing for the programme as well (filmed last summer). Some of them made you want to bang your head slowly and repeatedly against a wall. It highlighted for me how the whole business is as much of an art as a science, how the ones who do actually know what they’re doing use emotional intelligence and self control, and don’t just rely on TA and maths ability. Personally, I wouldn’t last 10 minutes, and I’d probably have plunged the world into an even deeper recession during those 10 minutes, but two things made me actually want to try (in a sitting on the sofa kind of a way). One was when someone said how stocks have no memory. I realised that it must be such a ‘clean’ feeling (when things are going well). There are no personalities involved, only your own demons, no-one else to cock it all up or to blame. Kind of how I feel when I’m running for miles! Also when one of the successful novices said it felt like he was playing chess against the rest of the world. That must be hugely exhilarating. But maybe not quite so exhilarating now.

I seem to have had loads of arguments with friends lately about the show – some people I know were genuinely horrified at what they saw as the aggression and testosterone and what they called ‘bullying tactics’ on display. I didn’t see any of that. Making money – and by extension the financial world – is neither good nor evil. It’s amoral – it is what it is and does what it does. Surely it’s what you do with money that counts? I’m not excusing greed, vastly disproportionate earnings or bad management – anything as single-minded and energetic as that world will turn into a monster without proper control and regulation, but that show wasn’t aiming to spark a debate about ethics – it was showing how you had to operate within that world. If you don’t want to, fine. Actually I had some of the best times of my life working in the City (admittedly before I moved to the country and discovered my inner hippie!) Even for someone like me, who wasn’t involved directly in generating money, there’s something seductive about the energy and ambition and talent that could be found . I know some people who can’t talk about anything other than money – they’re obsessed by it – but I’ve met them in all walks of life. I don’t think everyone who works there can be dismissed as having sold their souls and gone over to the dark side. (Only about half of them).

I did go out with a trader for while, ages ago. He was from a well known investment bank that is no more. The thing I remember most vividly about him is that he had this obsession with Barry White (his music, that is, not the man, which would have been even weirder). I used to get really nervous going to his flat in case he decided to play ‘Don’t Go Changing’ again; I had a sort of dread terror that he might start singing it to me. (Hopefully he’s too busy spending his billions to ever stumble across this blog; I expect we move in slightly different circles these days). Of course, if anyone played that for me now, caught as I am between the stresses of young children and a huge mortgage, I’d probably cry. But when you’re a heartless 22 year old, it was deeply embarrassing. Yet another of life’s little ironies.

Running Away

2008-05-14T11:20:00.006+01:00

The theme of this post is running. Everything in my life seems to be on fast forward at the moment, everywhere I look people and thoughts and ideas are galloping off, over the hills and far away. I seem to have adopted a slightly elegiac mood recently, in contrast to the world around me. May, surely, is the best month of the year, yet all I seem to do is shake my head sadly and contemplate the way the year is running away with itself. All this rampant growth – be over soon, I say, with an air of resignation. The lilac’s on the turn already. The tulips are over for another year. The hedgerows are poised in that delicious moment where they are half-dipped in cream, yet all I can think is that in a blink of an eye everything will be heavy and torpid and the nights will be almost drawing in. Cheerful aren’t I? I need to emulate my grandmother, who at 95 is full of plans for the future. She runs a critical eye over her patio garden and thinks about getting it grassed over and more roses planted for next year. I feel fear stalking me and my heart tightens a little when she says this. Think positive, she says. I want more summers, no reason why I can’t have any more, she says. I should think I can count on a few more summers myself, so let’s hope I shake off my morbid torpor and live in the moment a bit more. What’s not to like about these unexpected long hot days, after all? (Especially as they are apparently about to end).

But my big news is that I’m running. I'm pounding the pavements with all the zeal of the newly converted. Why has it taken me so long? I love that clean, empty feeling I get when I run. I feel like I’m running away from everything. Clients annoying you with their strategy meetings and their need for ‘seamless integration of next-generation services’? Run, run. Kids whingeing? Lengthen your stride. There’s nothing else I can think of that combines that trance-like, meditative quality of mind, with the grim determination of making my body keep going, despite the pain, and the little voice in my head that tells me to stop and have a nice cup of tea instead - childbirth, possibly, though I don’t think I’d be signing up for that three times a week. Like childbirth, with running any pride in your appearance has to go out of the window (though I admit running isn't quite as undignified). Not content with being sweaty and puce in the face, my running mate kindly pointed out that I have this habit of closing my right eye when I run. I don't suppose it's very fetching and I have no idea why I do it.

Meanwhile, in my non-running life, the garden is coming into its full vigour and demanding my attention. I can weave my way lazily through the alliums, the rampant honesty, the self-seeded poppies, and of course, the weeds. Dandelions and buttercups are everywhere, but huge clumps of bluebells and forget me nots have appeared alongside them. My ‘canary bird’ rose is out in all its shining gold glory. The cherry blossom’s over for another year (there I go again) but the willow tree is just taking on it’s deeper tinge of green and the children will soon be able to be lost underneath its canopy again. The herbs and vegetables are growing by the minute, too. The children are blowing bubbles and some land amongst the deep blue and the paler pink geraniums, where they shine like iridescent fairies. Maybe I won’t run away just yet.

On an entirely separate note, I went to stay with an old friend in London at the weekend. I hadn’t seen her in ages and she greeted me with the news that one of the candidates on The Apprentice is someone she knows very well. And she knows the outcome (well the final two, a least). Now, I love The Apprentice. It’s the highlight of my viewing week. But I am such a child that, after downing a substantial quantity of wine, I forced her to tell me what happens. I am soooooo cross with myself. But don’t worry, the secret’s safe with me.

From East to West and Back Again

2008-04-12T11:15:00.003+01:00

We had a great time in Cornwall. It’s one of those places that I always think I have visited quite regularly, although we both realised with a shock that it’s been 9 years since we last went, almost to the day. The last time I was a very new mother, and we’d gone to a tiny cottage on the north coast for a few days to take stock of how much our lives had changed since the arrival, four months previously, of our tiny, squalling son. I remember carrying him in a sling on windswept headlands, his cries competing with the roaring surf. That tiny baby is now a strapping nine year old, obviously with no memories of his earlier trip.

I have no family connections with Cornwall at all, and only holidayed there a couple of times in my childhood, yet I felt as though I were accompanied by my ten year old self throughout the week. We’d spent the long hot summer of ’76 on the north coast, and my memories are vivid. This time we went further west than I’d ever been before, right down by Penzance, and we spent our time hopping from coast to coast across the narrow county. I think I sill love the north coast best, but we loved exploring the Lizard – Kynance won the family vote for beauty – and I loved the rugged, misty, history soaked atmosphere of the far west. We visited stone circle after stone circle, and I loved the sense you get of the land slipping away into the Atlantic; at times I felt like I could have been in the west or Ireland or even Portugal. I got quite carried away with tales of mermaids in Zennor, and I think both me and my daughter half expected to see a few mer-people swimming by the cliffs. And the sea is such a stunning colour; I spent my childhood mainly on north sea beaches and love the east coast, yet to see such a blue-green sea, even in early spring, raises the spirits in a way that the gun-metal chill of the north sea doesn’t normally do.

I love places that have a strong regional identity and culture, even if they are alien to my own experience and roots, and Cornwall, out of season at least, still gives you that. (I guess it must be different in peak season, and in places like Rock I expect the braying must drown the sound of the waves). R always complains that it’s pointless going anywhere in Britain with me, however much I like a place I always make endless comparisons with Northumberland ( to the detriment of the new place, naturally). But apparently I did it less in Cornwall than usual. Of course, Cornwall is all about the sea, and it feels like there’s a sea to suit your every mood. Inland I’m not quite so smitten; apart from the famous high-banked lanes with their colourful hedgerows, there’s nothing that pulls on my heart the way the hills and moors of the north do. But those coasts take some beating. Interestingly we both commented on how much busier it was than we remembered, even in late March, and how much more built up the towns seemed. Then we realised that we hadn’t been since we’d moved to Suffolk, and I think that has a lot to do with it. Our sleepy corner of Suffolk is so quiet, so undisturbed, that I can’t cope with busy traffic and crowds any more.

We arrived in winter and left in spring. The weather got better and better, until by the last day the children were splashing about in the sea on the beach at Porthcurno (spectacularly beautiful) and we were all sweltering. The last day was special for another reason too – we spent the morning with Pipany and two of her daughters, and simply had the best time. She took us to a fabulous garden at Trengwainton, and, much as I love gardens, I felt like I hardly took in a thing, I was so busy talking. Yet now the images of the garden are very clear in my mind, so I must have taken in more than I thought, even while I was leaping around like a puppy who has made a new friend, it was so great to meet her. My children were smitten by her children, too, which added to the perfection of the morning.

The only problem with the whole week was my appetite. It seemed to take on a life of its own and became a beast that I couldn’t control. Most days started with a cooked breakfast, followed by a ‘small snack’ (i.e. a plate-sized pasty or pub lunch), a cream tea and then something light and nutritious such as fish and chips, eaten sitting on a harbour wall. I’d taken banana bread down with us, and R had come up with the brilliant and novel (to us) idea of toasting it and spreading it thickly with butter. We realised things had got a bit out of hand when we found ourselves seriously discussing what it might be like spread with clotted cream. So I waddled back across the country to Suffolk, newly possessed of a few extra rolls and thickened arteries. I blame the sea air.

2008-03-18T10:41:00.003Z

2008-02-26T20:29:00.004Z

2007-12-12T11:58:00.001Z

Bag Lady

2007-11-29T15:37:00.000Z

It’s getting towards that time of year when my head feel like it will explode from all the detail contained within it. It does seem to be the lot of a mother that along with childbirth and breastfeeding, remembering every single detail of your children’s young lives will fall to you and you alone. I have become the repository of the communal family memory. I need to remember presents for class teachers, costume requirements for school plays, evenings when I need to book a babysitter, days when K has to be in school all day, days when she comes home at 12.00, days when J has after-school activities, days when he doesn’t but does need to bring his PE kit home. I need to remember what they wrote on their letters to Father Christmas but have changed their minds about; things I need for packed lunches but I haven’t got in the house, what homework needs to be done and where the library books are and and and …you get the picture. All run-of-the-mill stuff that goes with the territory of having children, and probably sounds positively lightweight to those with more than two, but which at certain times of the year threatens to overload the system in anticipation of an almighty crash.

I was vaguely wondering what it would feel like when I didn’t have to be a walking memory-deposit for other people’s lives, when I glanced in my bag. And was jolted back a few years, to when going out of the house was a military manoeuvre. Time was when my bag had money and make-up. No mobile phone, back then, but usually a card from a mini-cab company, a pen for scribbling down numbers, maybe a couple of Nurofen. Then, instead of things that only I might need, my bag was invaded – and, indeed, had to be upgraded. Bottles. Breast pads. Wipes. Tissues. Nappies. Then it changed again. After a couple of years, I could ditch the huge unwieldy rucksack. But I still had to find room for snacks, for juice cartons, for plasters, for sting relief, for wipes, for tissues, for sachets of Calpol. For hair ties and glittery pencils (her) and mini Thunderbirds figures and light sabres from cereal packets (him). For crayons and drawing pads, if the journey was long. Apples and packets of raisins featured strongly.

My bag is shrinking again now. Apart from a few things that are still essential, I am reclaiming it. There is space around my wallet now, and my keys rattle. It doesn’t feel quite right. For a bag like this was once the preserve of a party girl with no dependants, and she’s long gone now. By the same token, I know my mind will never be entirely free of the minutiae of other people, never left clean and fresh and able to focus only on its own needs and interests again. And I think I quite like it this way. And after all, there will come a day when I will probably cart around a carpet bag worthy of Mary Poppins, from which I will pull boiled sweets and knitting needles and photos, and my mind will be allowed to roam and my stories will ramble and my memories will be like jewels brought out to sparkle in the light.

Remembering

2007-11-12T14:16:00.000Z

11 November

95 years ago today, a baby girl was born in Newcastle. The eldest of eleven children, only four of whom were to survive past infancy, she was born into what we might casually call slum housing today, although the term would have appalled her parents. Her father was always in work at the shipyards (vanished now), and he and her mother considered themselves to be respectable working class. There was a long tradition of working at the shipyards for the men in her family; further back they had been fisherman on the Northumbrian coast, and one of her maternal grandfathers had been a ferryman on the Tyne. There were some hard years ahead for the family, although they didn’t know it in 1912. The little girl celebrated the armistice of 1918, on her sixth birthday, and as a young woman witnessed the Jarrow Marchers, which included one of her uncles by marriage. Her parents believed in education, and she was a clever girl, but she couldn’t stay in school long, with so many other little ones at home to take care of, and less and less money coming in as the 20’s went on. She worked hard, with the spirit and enterprise and determination that she became well known for. She worked at home, of course, looking after infant siblings, so many of whom they had to bury, with few funds available for funerals. She also worked in a milliners and a dressmakers, and learnt good skills; she was a striking figure, apparently, in her neighbourhood, with her long back hair and piecing blue eyes, and a penchant for wearing red. Music was her passion, she had a lovely voice and could play anything by ear. Musical evenings were the norm in her family and she grew up knowing, and singing, all the old border laments. She married a man twenty years older than her, who also worked at the shipyards, a man born in the late Victorian age, who could remember the old Queen dying, and who had fought in the First World War. She had twins, a boy and a girl, followed by two more sons, and carried on working. Mostly domestic work, of course, and hard work it must have been too, with twins, little money and few appliances that we consider essential today. She would never have left her children all day, except occasionally with a neighbour or family member, but needed to ensure that more money came in, so she cleaned pubs in the evening, and began to sing in them too. She and her brother were well known for their voices and apparently the pubs would be packed when they sang.

In due course her daughter passed her 11 plus and she was allowed to go to the grammar school. Permission was tacitly needed; her daughter remembers the stares and comments and – sometimes - jeers she got from many in the community, for she was ‘set apart’ by that; her twin brother, who’d also passed, refused point blank to go back after the first week and went, with all the neighbourhood boys, to the secondary modern. Her daughter remembers with gratitude her mother’s energy and determination, and the way that she would shine in any social situation, however uncomfortable she felt. The headmaster, no doubt appreciating the shining black hair and the inevitable red dress, would always talk to her mother for the longest time. Her husband died early, and she remarried twice, but both subsequent husbands died young as well. Life never got her down, though; she continued to work, and even in her sixties she embraced new opportunities. She learnt to drive at 60; travelled to Australia for the first time at 64, and learnt to swim, in the warm Australian ocean, at 66. At 95 she still reads a couple of newspapers each day and completes the crosswords. She’ll discuss anything, from books to current affairs to Coronation Street, and has amazing recall. She is one of the brightest people I have ever met, with a restless, striving energy which I, too dreamy by far, didn’t inherit, although I see it strongly in my daughter, her namesake. She owns her own little bungalow, bought in her seventies, and is fiercely proud of her acquisition and her independence. Owning her own property was an impossible dream when she was young, and she said she was talking in her head to her parents and dead siblings non-stop on the day she moved in. She felt their astonishment too, she says.

But she is increasingly frail, and often lonely, and reliant on help from carers. Her siblings and eldest son are dead. Her surviving sons live in Australia. Her daughter lives 300 miles away and is in her seventies, with poor health. She has grandchildren scattered across the north east and abroad, but none are in much of a position to offer her a home, although the more local ones do their bit, helping with shopping and cooking and visiting often. She could, conceivably, move in with me, another of her grandchildren. It would be hard on us all, but we could do it, and have offered, but she can’t bear the idea of leaving the area where she has lived all her life. But here’s the rub. If she moves into a home, or sheltered housing, the bungalow will have to go, to pay for her care. And the thought of this tears her apart. To be able to leave something, anything, to her grandchildren is her greatest desire. To be able to leave a house – “look, see what I was able to buy, look what I worked so hard for” – is a given for many people, but has never lost the sheen of a miracle for her. She still can’t believe, sometimes, that she owns it. And we want her to keep it too, if possible. Not because we’re mercenary – even if we were, there are twelve of us grandchildren, a score of great-grandchildren, and the house wouldn’t raise six figures – but because it means so much to her. She remembers her own parents dying, and the indignity of having to borrow money for the funerals. There were few possessions worth keeping, and even those that were kept for sentimental reasons haven’t lasted. That horror has never left her. It doesn’t matter to us – our memories of her are burnt into our DNA – but it matters to her, to leave evidence of a long and hard-working life. Her oldest friend married a man from just across the border, and they went to live in Scotland. Her friend is widowed and also 95, but nursing care is freely available to her, and she doesn’t have to sell her house. Not many miles away, my grandmother sits and worries. An accident of birth and geography ensured she had a tough life, with few opportunities to pursue her talents. It seems that an accident of birth and geography is ensuring she has some tough decisions to make at the end of her life, too. Happy birthday anyway, Grandma. We love you.

Spirits and Places

2007-10-31T11:39:00.000Z

I’ve been suffering lately from blogstipation. Not too dramatic an illness, and one that can be explained away by general ‘busyness’. Yet despite really having been busy, I’ve had a general sense of being sort of, well, stalled in some sense. Maybe it’s a seasonal thing, but despite trying to move things up a gear in all aspects of my life, I feel like I’ve been treading water instead.

Anyway, since it’s Hallowe'en, and to stop myself thinking about the dozen or so small children who are going to descend on me at 4.00 pm for ‘fun’ (I’m horribly unprepared, and will no doubt adopt my bad witch persona), I’ve been thinking about hauntings. Not ghosties and ghoulies, but hauntings of place, the sense of presiding spirits or genius loci all around us. I’m reading Sea Room by Adam Nicolson, (I know a blogging friend of mine is reading it too – I’m on the last chapter Mags!) and am captivated by his evocation of a place (the Shiants in the Western Isles) which, to us now, are on the limits of our world, geographically and politically. Of course remoteness is all relative, and for many people these rocks in a turbulent sea have been the centre of the universe. It’s a beautiful and imaginative and passionate book, and as I near the end I’m struck by how strongly the inherent spirit of these particular islands comes through the pages. Nicolson describes it as a tutelary, sometimes frightening, spirit in a place of inherent sanctity. I think we all have an innate sense of the spirit of a place, urban or wild, whether or not we think there is something external and unseen among us, or if we put it down to a sense of history, or a psychological reaction to landscape brought about by our own unconscious memories and feelings.

I remember being very aware of the link between landscape and feelings at an early age. We moved around a lot when I was little, and ending up, for a brief while, in Buckinghamshire, after the north east, I can still vividly remember the greenness and softness. I used to dream of a ‘greeny-white lady’, drifting through fields, something damp and wistful about her. No doubt I’d heard a ghost story which had stuck in my head. Moving on to London, as we did shortly afterwards, was less strange, in a way, as I’d already lived in a city and immediately recognised the pulsing energy, like constantly having a half-tuned radio on in the background. Suffolk is different again; I often think of a ‘Green Man’ here, something half-wild and shy living in the hedgerows, something ancient and fertile and linked to agriculture. On this beautiful green, gold and russet morning, late in the year, I’d love to know what others think, and if they think that a sense of place, a sense of presiding spirit, is important to them, on this day of hauntings. Happy Halloween.

Pets, Partings and Petulance

2007-10-04T11:34:00.000+01:00

It’s been a week of small losses. The sort of week where you hold your breath, cross your fingers, and trust that the planets will re-align themselves, or the wind will change, or that your wicked alter ego, the one that slams doors and swears a lot and has a nice line in acerbic put -downs, will disappear. It started with a death, of a fat and contented and really quite fetching hamster (and I say this as one who hitherto hated all rodents). I guess it’s the lot of hamsters, to spend a really quite short amount of time crazily spinning on their wheels, then to shuffle off this mortal coil and so help our children to come to terms, in a not too horrifying way, with mortality. Well that was our general idea, anyway. We didn’t think he’d inveigle his way into our family, with his pink eyes and plump albino body. (My son chose him. He wouldn’t have won any beauty contests). And as is the way of things, the long expected event was more sad than we’d anticipated. My boy had been telling a friend, with great excitement, about his very own pet, and went to get him from his cage. It’s always a shock to find a little body stiff and cold, and the timing was bad – bravery needed in front of said friend. We gave him a good send-off though – a coffin lined with cotton wool and bedecked with flowers, a cross with dates engraved by my son, a garden candle lit by the grave. I do realise how cosseted my children are, in global terms. How fortunate they are to have only faced the death-of-old-age of family pets, how lucky to be able to give vent to their feelings and come to some sort of an understanding of death (or dull acceptance, which is all any of us really do, I guess), without their parents falling apart too, without the horror of human death leaving indelible marks of grief of their childhoods. Yet of course, as their mother, I wish they didn’t have to face it at all. I know I can’t wrap them in cotton wool, I know I shouldn’t want to, but sometimes I do. And sometimes, when my patience is at a low ebb, I want to stop answering their innocent questions, all too well aware that there will be future occasions when I’ll have to answer them whilst poleaxed with grief myself. My daughter, never one to be fobbed off, was instantly suspicious of my explanations, despite my reading and re-reading of the wonderful story ‘Goodbye Mog’ by Judith Kerr, which helped my son so much when we lost a cat. She wanted to go straight out the next morning and dig up the hamster, to see what had happened to him in the night. I told her that eventually bodies become grass and flowers, whilst the spirits fly off to heaven. She thinks that heaven sounds rubbish, and that the hamster must be bored and cross because he can’t be with her. Oh for the egocentricity of youth. My son just misses a little creature that shared our house for a couple of years. But he’ll probably get another one. And so it goes on. ….

We also lost a car last week, thanks to my husband wrapping it round a tree, and thankfully and miraculously, emerging unscathed. My daughter wanted another funeral for the car. But she didn’t get one. What else was lost? Well, my temper, I’m ashamed to say, on a couple of occasions, and my general joie de vivre, due to a whole host of small and irritating problems raising their annoying little heads. The wind will change though, and the planets will right themselves, and we will all be bouncy and Tigger-ish again. In the meantime, I will cheer myself up by writing down a list of my favourite novels, given that I was tagged by Jan, and haven’t yet responded. For those readers from Purplecoo, it will be very familiar, since we’ve been posting about our top books already, so do look away now, but since I am an inveterate list maker, here is my choice:

1.So many childhood favourites, from Little Grey Rabbit to Enid Blyton to Noel Streatfield and all those school and/or horsey authors. And Lucy M Boston … I’m cheating, I know, and if I have to pick one, I think it will be Teddy Robinson by Joan G Robinson. I still remember the magic of my mother reading me the adventures of this growly, funny, all too human bear, and the gorgeously cosy yet magical world inhabited by him and Deborah. A must for all little girls of about six, I would think, and there’s some really clever writing that made me alert, I think, to a nice turn of phrase.

2.The Owl Service by Alan Garner. I read it as a teenager, and was bewitched by the haunting atmosphere and ghosts of celtic mythology. A great writer.

3.The Catcher in the Rye. Probably my all time favourite. Just love it.

4.To Kill a Mockingbird. Loved the film too. A heartbreaking and heartwarming book, and Scout reminds me increasingly of my own hot tempered girl.

5.Emma. I came relatively late to Jane Austen, thinking it was all a bit mannered and precious for me. How wrong I was – I love the subtlety and humour. There’s something about Emma that gets me every time; so much that isn’t said but that we work out for ourselves.

6.The Code of the Woosters, PG Wodehouse. My Dad first got me into PG Wodehouse – again, I’d thought it was just farce. Well, it is farce, but genius farce. The above book never fails to delight me.

7.The Edible Woman, Margaret Atwood. I love anything and everything that she writes, but this was the first one I read, and it’s one I go back to time and again. She has herself described it as an immature work, and it’s true that some of her later novels have more depth, but it’s so fresh, so funny, and so modern, despite the fact that it was written before I was born.

8. The Great Gatsby, Scott Fitzgerald. Sublime writing.

9.Wuthering Heights. Ditto. I love Jane Eyre too, but in the great debate, I’d choose Wuthering Heights. It’s got it all – the passion, the wildness, the grotesqueness, sometimes, of the characters contrasted with the lyrical and poetic writing – beautiful.

10.Le Grand Meaulnes, Alain Fournier. I did read it once in French, (I’m bragging now) but lately I’m only up to reading it in translation. A haunting tale of youth and dreams and loss.

So many more. I'm bound to think of another five that I should have included the minute I post this. But I'd better stop there.

MeMeMe!

2007-09-24T16:27:00.000+01:00

I have been ‘MeMed’ by the lovely Crystal Jigsaw, and, having been completely floored at first, (never the quickest to catch on), but having eventually worked it out, I think, here is my attempt – and the lesson learnt is, don’t give yourself a long cyber name.

S is for Suffolk, of course. As I’ve probably written before, my love for this unassuming yet beautiful part of the word happened late in my life. I had no connection with East Anglia, or so I thought, and barely knew it before moving here seven years ago. At first I missed London and thought the countryside unexciting and too demure for my tastes, the pace of life too quiet and slow. But then I learnt to slow down, and I looked around me properly. Beyond the vast swathes of corn lay low gentle hills, remnants of ancient forests, and some of the most beautiful medieval towns and churches in the country. Looming out of seas of grain, the vernacular really takes your breath away. I am spoiled now and used to half-timbered, colour-washed houses, empty countryside and villages that time forgot. I love watching my children growing up here and enjoying a rural childhood that seems to be disappearing across swathes of this country. I loved discovering that my great great granddad was born close to where I now live, unbeknown to our family, who’d never known where he’d come from. I love putting down roots.

U is for uplands. At the risk of seeming a little contrary, given what I’ve written above, I still admit that my heart lies with mountains. I can live – and happily, too – in the lowlands, but give me a taste of northern moors and hills and I’m refreshed again. Apart from Northumberland, I love the Lakes, the Scottish highlands, Dartmoor and Ireland. I’m sure I’d love Wales too, if I ever get there. “Up the airy mountain, down the rushy glen” – that’s me on my perfect holiday.

F is for food. I used to be secretly proud of my inability to cook, or to care much about food at all, given that I thought I was a terribly important career girl who existed on diet coke, red wine and restaurant meals. Me and the kitchen eyed each other with suspicion. Then I had children, and realised I wanted to nurture them. What they – and we – put into our bodies suddenly gained the importance it should have had long ago. I can’t say I pureed organic food exclusively, or that I am even now a slave to the Aga. But I try, and I enjoy it, and food has become central to the rituals that we as a family love. The kitchen table is used for chatting, for homework, for drawing, and for arguing, as well as for eating. Please don’t get me wrong – we’re not the Waltons (though I always quite fancied that house). We’re far more like the Simpsons (especially when it comes to Doughnuts). But, just to jump on a passing bandwagon, we do grow a lot of our own food, and we all have a go at cooking it, and plan our meals for big occasions with huge relish. I hope it makes my children healthier then me. And just as greedy.

Another F – this time for family. Not just my husband and children, but the wider lot – and particularly those no longer with us. I’m lucky in that I have always loved the company of my parents and sister and cousins etc. But like most people, and as is entirely natural, I was quite happy to form my own ‘new’ family from friends in my teens and twenties. My closest friends are still hugely important to me. But as I’ve got older, I’ve found that you really can’t escape your family. They turn up in your children, in the expressions that come out of my mouth, and probably the expressions on my face. They’re always there, in the background, the ones in the sepia photographs, and the ones still at the other end of a phone. After all, I wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t for them.

O is for Oak. It’s hard to choose my favourite tree – I love so many, and for so many different reasons. Beeches and willows and rowans and birches and maples leap into my mind, and there is the most beautiful ash tree that I can see swaying in the wind as I write. But I’ll settle for oaks – I am English, after all – on the basis that I live in a timber framed house, made mostly of oak. So I feel extra protected by this most protective and paternal of trees, and marvel daily at the huge thick timbers all around me that creak and shift in a high wind.

L is for Lad’s Love, the old name for the herb Southernwood. My fingers were hesitating over the keyboard, not sure whether this was a bit heavy, a bit maudlin, for a blog post, but I can see its feathery leaves from where I’m sitting, and it won’t leave my mind. For there was someone once who meant the world to me, and who died when he was little more than a lad, and although as far as I can recall he couldn’t tell a herb from a lettuce leaf, I think of him when I see this tall, gentle, beautiful plant, and remember its old name.

K – A hard one this. Kite, kettle, kitten? My daughter, whose name begins with a K? But if I choose her, then what about my boy, who’s initial isn’t in my cybername? Anyway, I’m sure I’ll get them in somewhere. So having talked about old loves, I’ll move onto current loves, and K is for Kent, where my husband comes from. The word brings to mind the North Downs, and apple orchards, and weatherboarded houses, and market gardens and blossom. And of course my husband, who is apparently a Man of Kent, rather than a Kentish man. It matters. It also stands for Kelpie, the old name for a water sprite, because our cottage is bounded by a stream, and even this little, insignificant stretch of water weaves its very own magic.

M is for motherhood (I told you I’d get the children in somewhere). It still amazes me that my identity as a mother, which is so vital, now, to my sense of self, is still so recent. Nine years ago I had no clue, and although I’d always wanted to be a mother, ‘some day’, I didn’t really know why. I just thought I’d have a go, a bit like taking up a new sport. The laugh was on me, of course. In many ways, I am still astonished, when I stop to think about it, that I am somehow old enough to have responsibility for these vibrant things that I helped to create. I mean, of course I know I’m plenty old enough – I was no spring chicken when I had my first. But like most of us, I muddle along, crossing my fingers that I’m doing OK, still feeling about twelve, and constantly bowled over by these beings who I’ve known for such a short time, and who now dominate my life.

Another U – I’m running out of inspiration, but think I’ll plump for Umbria. I’m not sure that I can pinpoint an exact time when my love affair with Italy started, but certainly studying for a few months at the vast university in Perugia didn’t get in the way. Softer and greener than Tuscany, perhaps a bit less endowed with architectural wonders but no less lacking in natural beauty, Umbria doesn’t need me to sell it. But what stays in my mind most of all isn’t the baked earth or the hilltop towns or the sun, or even the food, but the cold winter nights in the town, the smell of roasting chestnuts, wandering through medieval arcades, pressing my face against the most fantastic chocolate shops, Italians muffled elegantly against the cold, steaming cappuccinos in tiny, noisy cafes.

And last, another M – this time for the moon, and mystery, and magic – all the things, along with love, that make my heart beast faster.

Hell, that was hard work. I guess I’m supposed to pass the baton on to some others now, but I’m never sure who’s already done it, or who wants to, so I’ll leave it at this – if you’re reading this, and haven’t yet had a go, be my guest!

We Plough the Fields and Scatter ....

2007-09-11T14:30:00.000+01:00

It’s a bit of a cliché, I suppose, to talk about the first whispers in the air of autumn and the effect it has on me, but since it is by far my favourite season, I’m going to mention it anyway. I just love this time of year. The light is softer, kinder, there’s the merest hint of parting and melancholy, and a blue autumn sky is one of my favourite sights. It feels as if there is a new energy taking hold as the year races on and we strive to catch the last of the light, before the long night falls. I always feel as if I’m in a bit of a race against time, that I have to tidy, sort out, put things to bed. I get far more of an urge to clear out now than I do in the spring. The garden, having reverted to wilderness because of the neglect it always suffers in late summer, teases me with delights hidden behind mountainous weeds – late-flowering roses, borage appearing again, dahlias and nasturtiums peeping out from dense foliage. I don’t even want to think about what needs doing to the house, but inside too I have this pressing, insistent need to organise and sort. I think of it as a late flurry of activity before the desire to hibernate takes hold; I could cheerfully sleep in front of a fire all winter, I’m sure I was a dormouse in a previous life.

Yet for the children it’s a time of new beginnings, a new year far more significant than January 1st. I watch them setting off, my son twice the size of my daughter, calm, protective, dependable. A quiet and thoughtful boy, I get flashes of the man he may become, and almost cry. Seeing my daughter trot alongside him, pleased as punch with her new school uniform, reminds me of the lyrics to one of my favourite Bert Jansch songs: “Fresh as a sweet Sunday morning, like a high-stepping pony, trotting and prancing, ah she’s so full of life, sparkling with tiny red roses”. There’s heartbreak at the classroom door, but smiles at playtime as she’s reunited with her brother, and a beaming face greets me at pick-up. Fourteen more years of going to school every morning; an era is over, for her and for me.

Yesterday I was wiped out with a migraine. Not fun. Blind spots in my vision heralding the agony, then jagged bright lines ripping the world apart. The throbbing pain, when it arrives, is as instantly familiar and unwelcome as the contractions of childbirth, and I’m just as powerless to stop it. No gorgeous babe to suckle at the end of it – although today the pain is reduced to a dull thud, and I have the prospect of pain-free sleep tonight – I told you I was a dormouse.

A long time ago as I was asked to write about the sounds and smells that might reach me, were I to be in a coma. I promptly forgot all about it, and am now, as ever, just about the last to complete the task. I fear mine will be repetitive, but just to ease my conscience, and in no particular order, here goes:

1. Birdsong, preferably the evening chorus which always seems to be more contented, more replete. If I were to pick a favourite bird call, it would probably be the lone cry of a curlew, high on the moors, but I’m also partial to the mellow cooing of a wood pigeon on a summer’s day, and the melancholic hoot of the barn owl on a winter’s evening, as he circuits the house.

2.Possibly a bit of a strange one, this, but I’ve already instructed my husband to play me a tape of the football scores, should I ever be in said coma (cheerful thought). Not because I will particularly want to hear how Newcastle did – I’m not that devoted – but because there’s something reassuringly familiar and cosy about the ritual of reading them all out. It reminds me of being a small child and falling asleep on the sofa late on a Saturday afternoon, with my Mum in the kitchen and the men all gathered round the TV, the printer on the television whirring in the background. I’m not Scottish, but for some reason it was the romantic names of the Scottish teams that penetrated my subconscious – Queen of the South, Heart of Midlothian, Motherwell, Hibernian.

3. Of all the flower smells I love, including lilac, sweet peas and freesias, I think I’d plump for Lily of the valley. The scent of the perfume Diorissimo always gets me right in the solar plexus.

4. The Kinks singing Waterloo Sunset. Reminds me of being young, ambitious and in love with life and London.

5. The scent of Christmas trees. Never fails to inspire me with the magic of Christmas

6. The smell of Rosemary, crushed between my fingers. I love all herbs, but Rosemary can transport me in an instant to star-lit Mediterranean nights, and mountains sweeping down to the sea.

7. The sound of crickets, for the same reasons.

8. The sound of water rushing over stones – so fresh and clean sounding, so joyful and impatient.

9. Either of my children calling Mummy – but preferably in their happy, loving, voices, not the imperious yells that sometime penetrate my subconscious at 4.00 am.

10. The smell of clean sheets. I suppose I ought to say fresh and wind-blown from the line, which is lovely, but actually fresh from the dryer will do just as well, and reminds me of the excitement of going to the launderette with my Mum as a tiny child (we didn’t get out much as toddlers in those days!)

The North Wind Doth Blow ....

2007-09-04T09:16:00.000+01:00

… but brought with it only sunshine. I’ve just spent a happy week in Northumberland, my favourite part of the UK, and my home when I was knee-high to a grasshopper. I could wax lyrical about the beauty and grandeur of Northumberland - those windswept, empty beaches, the haunting calls of the sea birds, the sense of mysticism, of history, of holiness, that permeates those northern shores. Not to mention the river valleys with their rushing water and purple hills, where often your only audible companions are the bleats of sheep and the lonely calls of curlews. But there are other bloggers who make their lives there, who know it all much better than me, and who are perhaps less prone to the romantic view I hold of the North East, as is the wont of exiles.

So what impressions can I share, that won’t make any readers yawn? It’s quite an emotive journey for me, that long drive up the A1, as it brings back so many memories of heading ‘home’ after we’d first moved down south. The mounting excitement felt as roadsigns appear announcing The NORTH. (Funny to think that my children will feel ‘home’ when they see The EAST). The sense of relief at being among people who talked like my sister and me, who said spelk for splinter and clarty for muddy, and who didn’t think my Mum, with her strong Geordie accent, was foreign, and who wouldn’t laugh at my flat ‘a’s (that was before the need to conform took hold of me, though my ‘a’s still change from sentence to sentence). Memories of family gatherings in Newcastle and the villages of the Tyne valley, at Christmas and Easter, then our annual two weeks on the coast in summer. The smell of seaweed and fish and chips. Making sandcastles that mirrored the imposing fortresses that loom over the beaches in this part of the world. Rough grey seas with tiny fishing boats bobbing madly on bad weather days, blue green sea with white sand to rival the Caribbean on good days. Heading back down south, to what eventually became a much loved home, but which for a long time was a foreign land. Listening to my Mum crying at night, when she thought we couldn’t hear, because she was so homesick for the north. Sitting in assembly one day at primary school in the South East, singing Jerusalem, and the headmaster explaining that the line ‘dark satanic mills’ apparently meant the area around Newcastle, where it was ‘grimy’. The other children tittering, and my big sister putting her hand up to explain, politely, that there weren’t any mills there, but being ignored.

But I digress, as ever. Back to the week we just spent, and the pleasure I get in seeing my children playing, each year, where I used to play, discovering the same things, feeling the same wind (sometimes cutting, it must be said, though not this week) on their faces. Seeing them wander around the limekilns at Beadnell, digging with their bucket and spades in the shadow of the castle at Bamburgh, watching and listening for the seals on Holy Island, eating fish and chips at the harbour in Seahouses, flying kites at Alnmouth, hiding in the dunes at Embleton. Playing on the stepping stones at Ingram in the Breamish Valley, and falling in, as I always used to. Taking a picnic to the heart of Coquetdale, and for once not have to wrap up in a fleece. Standing in silence looking out over Whittingham Vale. We didn’t get as far as the Roman Wall this time, my son’s favourite bit of England, but still, a perfect week. And Michael Owen even started scoring again, just for us, it seemed.

But what was different, this time, was making new friends. Meeting people who I’ve got to know from the internet, via blogging. Not something that I would ever have thought I would do, and how weird it feels to write that I did, to have travelled a few hundred miles to meet perfect strangers. And yet strangers were the last thing that they were. It’s funny to think how long it can take us to make new friends, once we’re past our sociable teens and twenties. The first espying of someone who looks like we might like them; the gradual building up of acquaintance, seeking out opportunities to meet, the delight in finding mutual likes and dislikes. On meeting these two Northumbrians, it felt like the groundwork had already been done, that we were just picking up where we’d left off. Fabulous to meet two such warm and friendly people, fantastic to think we might all meet again. Thanks again for your hospitality to me and my children, you two, and my heart soars whenever I think of you both in your beautiful part of the world.

I don’t stay on the A1 all the way to London any more, but turn left and east to get home now. Funny how I’ve made my home by another eastern shore, in another sparsely populated, quiet land, with the same vast, vaulted skies and lonely farms. We have ancient hedgerows instead of dry stone walls, timber-framed houses painted mellow pink instead of fortified stone bastles, and stunning medieval churches soaring from the prairie fields, instead of purple hills. My heart always breaks a little when I leave the hills of the north, but starts to mend as I come back to this gentle, verdant land. It’s good to be back.

Of Four-Year-Olds and Ninety-Four-Year-Olds

2007-08-20T08:50:00.000+01:00

My girl is now all of four years old. For less than fifty months she has existed outside my body; in less than fifty months she has certainly made her mark on this family. So small in some ways, in other ways so grown up, possessed of such assurance and self-belief. I marvel at her bravery in standing up to the world, in frequently taking on both me and her Father, hands on tiny hips, blue eyes glaring. She fell over, on the morning of her birthday, grazing her knees and bruising her dignity. A few hundred miles to the north, her great-grandmother, for whom she’s named, and with whom she shares a feisty nature and an intense appetite for life, has also fallen. She is 94, and my calculator tells me that she has lived for 1,128 months. She is shaken too, and her dignity is also bruised, and her fragile bones are hurting. They talk on the phone, commiserating over their stumbles, and my daughter’s tones become confiding and conspiratorial. Extreme youth, mired in the frustration of waiting for it all to begin, allied to extreme old age, terrified that it’s all about to end.

I don’t know who’s more exhausted by the birthday celebrations, me or my girl. I’m not quite sure when last year’s calm and sunny tea-party in the garden, with little three year olds in floaty dresses, got replaced by this year’s hiring of the village hall, complete with bouncy castle and seemingly half the local pre-school in attendance. But I am probably weird amongst mothers in that I actually enjoy my children’s parties. Don’t get me wrong, I do my fair share of whingeing during the build up. Whining at the cost, at my own inability to be the Mum who stops the ridiculous party-bags charade – what was wrong with a slice of cake and a balloon, for heaven’s sake? I am ashamed of my equally ridiculous charade of chopping up endless carrot and cucumber sticks for the tea – rarely eaten, of course, but presented as an apologetic sop to other Mums – yes, I know its all jammie dodgers and chocolate fingers, but we do really know about healthy eating, don’t we? I groan at the sea of plastic Disney –themed tat that features high on the wish-list of presents, and tell my children, with a grim face and stern voice, my grandmother’s tales of a doll made from a wooden spoon that had to double as a Christmas and birthday present. They don’t listen, of course. On the day, the noise gets to me, as does the spilled juice and the sticky faces and the invariable tears from some little soul. And yet, and yet … I get lost in the moment. The building excitement, the memories of party frocks (long, in my day, though not quite the Victorian pinafores that my son thinks I must have worn) and patent party shoes. Maybe it’s because I know there’s an end in sight to the tears and mayhem – my son has graduated to civilised trips to the cinema, or pizza and bowling.

I think what I love most about birthdays is the sense of anticipation. That feeling that I get from the house, when, dead on my feet with fatigue, I sit up late wrapping presents, and the air tingles with suppressed excitement. The ether seems to thicken, as it does on Christmas Eve, with the memories of other birthdays, other Christmases, and the family ghosts crowd silently around the stairwell, stiff with expectation. And what I always forget, and then always remember on the day, is that it’s not the presents, or the party, or the food that really counts. It’s the ritual; the fact that my daughter, even though she can hold no real memory of previous years, knows with absolute certainty that it is her brother who must wake her on her birthday morning and bring her into our bedroom. It’s the family tradition of that naughty slice of birthday cake in bed, and the knowledge that the presents will be piled high in the dining room – the poky, cold room that is ignored all year, and is, for some reason, chosen by both my children as their venue of choice for the present opening. These are the things that make a birthday, and that I treasure along with their shiny, excited faces, and it is these things, I trust, that she will take with her through her years – until she reaches the stage that I’m at, when she stops asking, with longing, when she’ll be another year older.

One last thing; a picture of a present that truly stood out, placed up at the top right corner of this blog, because I am too dumb to work out how to get it into the main text. A present that was hand-made, with care and attention, by a fellow blogger, and represents true value for money. A present that arrived with beautiful finishing touches - its own night bag, with identifying initial, and exquisitely wrapped. Made by talented Jane of Snapdragon: see http://snapdragongarden.co.uk If you see this, Jane, thanks again, she loved it.

Blogging, Boden and Injured Egos

2007-08-08T11:18:00.000+01:00

I was somewhat disconcerted to be cyber-name-checked in a national newspaper at the weekend, and not in flattering tones. Apparently some of my fellow bloggers and I represent a twee, Boden-esque world full of Cath Kidston prints and pony club picnics. Blimey, news to me. I moved through shock – never expected to see my name, even my blogging name, in lights – through outrage – how could she have got me so wrong? – to a sort of weary humour. I was going to do the mature thing and rise above it, but my inner child was crying to be released and shout ‘not me’ and stamp my foot. I’m far too apologetic a person to do hissy fits well, but I’ll have a go. So my cyber-name is twee. Well, maybe, although I thought it was just boring. I came up with it in a panic, having decided to enter an online writing competition (and no, of course I didn’t win, though that’s a whole other story), and realising at the last moment that I needed an internet alias. My brain was devoid of inspiration, so I went for the logical – well, I live in Suffolk, and I often write about being a Mum. My husband tells me it’s dull, but I’ve got rather fond of my alter-ego, to the extent of almost responding with ‘Suffolkmum’ when asked my name recently. At least it’s fairly short; just as well we didn’t move to Dumfries and Galloway.

Still, that ill-fated writing competition made me a lot of cyber-friends, and with them I began blogging, out in the big world. I don’t think I would ever have had the courage to do it alone. I wonder if professional writers could ever understand how nerve-wracking it is for those of us who love to write but have never shared anything before, and how easy it is to knock us back. The perils of blogging, I guess, though it just makes me want to retreat from the fray. I clearly never had the guts, never mind the talent, to make it as a writer.

And do I live a mellow country life, pinched from the interiors shots of Country Living and Coast? Do I hell, though I have to admit, there are worse looks. My country life is more about the dull thud of my heart hitting the floor as the bills come in, frustration at rural isolation and a glimmer of understanding of the very real problems that face the damaged, last-gasp rural industries. In a sort of parallel association with the rural world at large, money – or lack of it – has been a leitmotif running through our lives since we moved out here. I don’t have the luxury of fretting over school fees, as the journalist in question implies. Ironically it was economic necessity which drove us out of London in the first place, via Hertfordshire, in search of a simpler, cheaper way of life, of a smaller community – a reverse migration to that which my ancestors had taken, from the uplands of Northumberland and Ireland to the coal pits of Tyneside. Country lanes, sadly, aren’t paved with gold, just mud. Like many families opting out of the madness of city living, we seem to have got worse and worse off, though I admit we’ve traded materialistic comfort for quite a lot of other things, and a lot of it has come about through choices we made. But I bet our income wouldn’t cover a London journalist’s expense account. Broke or not, however, I’m rooted here, impecunious not in a shabby-chic sort of a way, more in an oh-my-God-how-are–we-going-to-pay-the-mortgage sort of way. So no, I don’t wear Boden, though my kids do, often, usually in the form of hand-me-downs and presents, and I really like a lot of the children’s clothes – and they don’t shrink, which is a plus in my book. When you live a forty-mile round trip from the nearest children's department of Next or H&M it's convenient, too. Poor old Boden seems to have become shorthand for middle-class fantasy land, for showing your middle-class credentials without making a statement, and despite liking the children's clothes, I suppose I am as guilty as anyone else of rolling my eyes and recognising it as a kind of uniform.

Suffolk also seems to have become one of those places that journalists like to knock, which makes us laugh, since when we moved here 8 years ago people looked blank when we told them where we were going. We don’t live in the fashionable coastal bit of Suffolk, but you know what, I like going there. I have a vivid memory of my husband and I, the first time we went to Aldeburgh, standing in amazement as mothers called out to their offspring – Arabellas, Hugos, and even an Octavius were heard. We didn’t even know, then, that it was so fashionable. It was just our nearest bit of sea. But it’s fashionable because it’s a lovely old place, and, just to re-ignite a little Norfolk/Suffolk rivalry, it’s not nearly as braying as Burnham Market. But you don’t have to travel very far away from those places to see rural deprivation and towns that North London forgot. You can escape the enclaves very easily, although they’re nice for a while – just as when I take my children back to Northumberland, my childhood home, we play on the wide beaches and explore the limitless countryside, rather than trudging round the industrial heritage that their forefathers helped to create. Doesn’t mean we don’t know it’s there.

But maybe I’m protesting too much; it's all relative. After all, I do live in a very ramshackle cottage, which came complete with an Aga, much to the amusement of my city friends, and I have become obsessed with gardening, that apparently most middle-class and middle-aged of pastimes. I grow hollyhocks and old roses, and only lack of space (we didn’t get the rolling country acres, unfortunately) stops me having chickens. I quite like Cath Kidston and Emma Bridgewater, in small doses . And I think The Waltons and Little House On The Prairie shaped my childhood more than I care to admit. Maybe the vision of children in pigtails and smocked dresses running through fields stuck in my subconscious and shaped my future life. My Mother has a deeply embarrassing recollection of my childhood which she likes to share. Apparently when I was eight I announced that when I grew up, all I wanted to do was be on that cult daytime TV show of the seventies – Mr and Mrs (showing my age now). I have a vivid image of my right-on, city-living, liberated twenty-one-year-old self scowling fiercely at both the child I was and the adult I have become. So Boden blogger, my a*se. Derek Batey, anyone?

Trials, Tribulations and Mood-Busters

2007-07-30T09:54:00.000+01:00

The school holidays are so far mimicking the summer; doom and gloom interspersed with bright sunshine and the faint promise of settled days just around the corner. As some of you reading this will know, I have a friend who was seriously injured in a horrible accident last week; a driver going far too fast in atrocious conditions - and having had a fair few drinks – took a corner too quickly and ploughed into her as she was walking towards her car. I feel a sense of outrage – of sheer affront – as I look at my friend – my strong, capable, funny, dear friend – lying broken in a hospital bed. Her brain is slowly starting a long process of recovery, but will have to re-learn how to speak and walk. My throat constricts as her five year old daughter announces that it isn’t Mummy lying there, and as her seven year old boy screws up his face against the world and punches a wall. I hold my outrage in my mind at the same time as I feel sheer relief and gratitude that she is, in fact, lying here alive.

We can feel so many things at the same time; I feel deliciously lazy as I spend all morning in my pyjamas with the children; mild panic as I realise that another precious day of holiday is hurtling past us with little focus or purpose; joy as we come across a young hare, gazing silently into the distance, sitting by the sundial among the herbs. I feel giggly and childish when I take the children roller-skating and my son and I collapse, again and again, in a heap on the floor, while my three year old glides by effortlessly. Our rhythm has slowed, and since picnics and parks and beaches have been a bit of a wash out, so far, we’ve just, to coin a phrase, hung out, and it’s been great.

I did promise a fellow blogger, ages ago, to come up with my top five mood-busters, and having read many other sane and sensible ways to beat the blues, here are my own idiosyncratic, but usually failsafe, ways to come out on top. I’m lucky that I’ve never suffered from deep depression, although I worry for Britain, and anxiety can often catch me unawares.

1. I indulge myself. Shocking, but true. I wallow in my own misery – but with a strict time-limit. When I was younger, and, say, mourning the break up of a relationship, I’d allow myself a whole weekend of sobbing to girlfriends, re-reading love letters, playing sad music. These days if I’m feeling down it’s more like half an hour in the bath and a quick cry before getting the tea. But I always have to acknowledge how I’m feeling and have a short burst of self-pity before I get stern and get on with phase two.

Things that help me get through phase two include:

2. Cleaning, or more often, clearing out. I am a terrible horder and attacking a room or a cupboard helps me re-direct all my negative energy. I am the world’s most inefficient and, frankly, slobby housewife, but cleaning the kitchen floor has the same effect.

3. Reading, by a real fire in winter, or in the garden in summer. If I’m feeling low, I re-read old favourites, particularly children’s books, which instantly transport me back to a safe and cosy world, where there was often someone else to sort out the problem.

4. If I’m feeling low and have that empty, nothing-new-happening feeling, I plan little tiny treats for myself, to give myself little things to look forward to. They’re rarely anything big or expensive, but it’s astonishing how the promise of a new book or a new lipstick or a trip to somewhere I haven’t been before can make me feel rich, and gives me a little marker on the horizon.

5. Gardening. My passion for gardening appeared out of the blue, and has a miraculous effect on my mood. I love walking too, but although I live in a really beautiful part of the country, there aren’t actually many good options for walks nearby – we’re mostly surrounded my farmland. So in lieu of a bracing walk along a beach, I get digging and staking and pruning and planting. I used to suffer from the January blues – now those dreary late-winter days are filled with seed catalogues and plans and promises. Anyone who loves gardening will know what I mean – I feel reconnected to the life-force, to the pulse of the earth, just by digging a little hole in the ground. Magic.

What I Did On My Holidays

2007-07-16T10:45:00.000+01:00

I was asked to write about the above, and, ever the class swot, I of course complied. So what did we do? Nothing different, probably, to millions of other families in the summer months. We stood in long, weary lines at airport security, no-one daring to moan (except littlest, natch) and all grimly aware of why the extra precautions are necessary. I forgot to take my nail scissors out of my make-up bag AGAIN, and lost yet another pair, and we drank too much coffee and got hot and headachy in the weird micro-climate of Stansted. We sat on the plane for an interminable 2 1/2 hours before we were cleared by air traffic control, and quelled those reminders that we should have driven that popped into our heads – we were seduced by the cheap tickets, as ever. The children ate too much chocolate and felt sick; we all got fractious and cross waiting for the air-con to kick in in the hire car, and got lost on the ring road of a strange southern French city. We spent the odd morning driving around aimlessly, having taken the wrong road to some out-of- the- way destination, spent too long stocking up in the Intermarche and keeping the children from their swim. We blew a tyre on a track that forded a stream and while my husband did the manly thing, the children and I counted fishes in the water and watched a heron. We listened to the crickets and drank too much cheap and robust local wine (the adults) and ate too many pain au chocolat (all of us). We swam in rivers that came straight down from the mountains and should have been ice-cold, but were deliciously warmed by the sun and felt like a tepid bath. The children played under a baby waterfall and made dams and spotted lizards. We sat out in restaurant courtyards lit by fairy lights until far too late, and were awakened by warm sun in the morning. We lay in hammocks and read, we took a steam train into the mountains and wandered round markets in fortified renaissance villages. We sat out under the stars, opened another bottle of wine and talked about the property we’d seen in the local estate agents. We watched with pride as J said ‘bonjour’ and ‘merci’ to everyone and even asked for an ice cream with the most perfect accent, and cringed when K announced, with her usual loud 3 year old assurance, that the French were very silly for not speaking English.

One memory won’t leave my head, however, and wasn’t anything that we captured on camera. On the way back from a trip one day, we took a detour down a dusty track, interested to see what the monument was that was signposted from the road. We parked the car in the hamlet and walked off down a path, surrounded by stone garden walls with hollyhocks peeping over. The day was hot and still, though with lengthening shadows, orioles sang in the oak forest around us, inky-blue dragonflies and sulphur-yellow butterflies darted above our heads. We came out into a meadow, fringed by oaks and horse chestnuts, neighboured by olive groves, overlooked by a few ancient stone houses which felt private and watchful. The small monument was in the far corner, with a brass plaque telling us how in 1944, with an SS division quartered in one of the old Mas in the hamlet, a resistance group had tried, and failed, to launch an attack. As a reprisal, the Nazis had taken everyone in the hamlet that day, some 25 people in all, including the children and the old people, and shot them, in the meadow. You couldn’t hear the click of the guns being loaded now, of course, though I’m sure that somewhere, preserved for eternity, the horror of that day is played out over and over. We could only hear the drone of the bees and the sound of my children swishing through the long grass, not really understanding the actions of years ago, intent on the present. The war seemed boring to me as a child, a long way back in the past, the preserve of grainy black and white footage and endless repeats of The Great Escape and Bridge on the River Kwai (which I adore now, of course). Yet now, sixty three years ago seems less than a heartbeat in time.

Tears For An Unborn Child

2007-07-02T09:11:00.000+01:00

I took K along to our local toddler group one day last week. I’ve got lazy with regard to chatting to other parents I barely know, which I suppose it’s inevitable; its hard to enthuse about baby ad toddler milestones when you’ve done it once, and, given that my first child is four and a half years older than his sister, I had an established group of ‘Mum’ friends by the time she came along. There is usually the same old crowd there, anyway; people I’ve known for years now, and with whom I can share a coffee and a biscuit without much need for small talk. Last week, however, my daughter made a new friend. Usually shy, her eyes lit up when she spotted a little girl there, one we’d never seen before. There seemed to be an instant chemical reaction between them, and they were holding hands after two minutes, embracing after three, and, inevitably, squabbling over who got the pink beaker after four. I guess that’s the way friendships are often formed – on the basis of gut reaction, a sense of mutual recognition. I had never seen the girl’s mother, either, and started some desultory chat with her. Within five minutes, I too, had that pleased, excited feeling that I’d found a new friend; although, guarded as we adults are, our thoughts were no doubt laced with ‘maybe’s’ and ‘possibly’s.’ It’s thrilling to connect with someone instantly, and as anyone who’s lived in a deeply rural area will know, new friendships can be a long time coming. They had moved in to a neighbouring village a couple of weeks ago, and were clearly expecting another baby soon – she was visibly and heavily pregnant. She was a little reticent, though, when I asked all the usual questions, and eventually told me that the baby boy she was carrying was very poorly; he has only a 50% chance of surviving the birth, and that, even if he does, his condition is not compatible with life beyond the first year. I won’t go into details, it doesn’t seem appropriate; almost an invasion of her privacy, somehow, but it’s a reasonably well-known condition. It was a strangely shocking thing to hear, amongst all the rumpus of small children and toys, and I was reminded again of how removed we are, in these days of choices and medical interventions, from the raw and savage lottery of childbirth. My eyes filled with easy tears and I fiercely willed myself to stop, to emulate her quiet composure. She wanted everyone to know – her daughter is due to start at the local preschool next week, people will be interested to see the baby, to know where he is if he doesn’t come home. Much better to be open and matter of fact, but horribly hard for this to be your introduction to a community. Horribly hard to be in this position at all. Such a contrast, between her swollen, fertile belly and the talk of imminent death, between the kicking visible beneath her maternity top and the hurt behind her eyes. We all carry an entire life cycle within us when we’re pregnant, but we only celebrate the beginning; few of us expect to even be present at the end. I asked his name, and it felt good to say it out loud, to roll the traditional, solid English name around my mouth. I hope I get to say his name to him, to hold him, to welcome him.

I know the deaths of babies and infants used to be part and parcel of everyday life, and not so long ago, either. My grandmother was one of fourteen, of whom only four survived. I’ve had experience of losing babies in early pregnancy; I wouldn’t seek to minimise the trauma for anyone else, and each loss is a little scar on your heart, but I know that, in my case, what I mourned was in no small part the anticipation of a life. To have to say welcome and goodbye in a small space of time seems unnatural and cruel. I think she’ll need a friend, I thought, as I walked home across our ordinary village, suddenly reminiscent of a Manhattan street with steam rising after another ferocious downpour. I hope I’m up to the job.

A Week In The Life

2007-06-25T10:36:00.000+01:00

It’s been a week or so since I last blogged; nice to take a break, sometimes, but strangely hard to get back into the habit once you pause for breath. I don’t want blogging to become another chore; the guilt at not catching up with all those I love to read becoming bigger each day. I think weekly blogging may be the way forward, but then again who knows; some days the words flow and the desire to communicate is there, other days it isn’t. Anyway, a snapshot of my week lies below.

Thursday 21
A friend came to lunch today, and brought with her a large pack of chocolate cookies for the children, the speciality kind which negates all the benefits of their healthy home-made status by having extra-large chocolate chips – slabs really. I told the children about them when I picked them up from school and pre-school respectively. They arrived home hungry and expectant, and headed for the cupboard. No biscuits. No biscuits anywhere, in fact. The children soon got cross and bored with the game of hunt the biscuit, and I could hear my voice becoming strained and manic with forced jollity as I brightly declared, for the thousandth time, that they must be somewhere. They were, of course. In the bin. I looked there in the end, reluctant to believe I could have put them there, but relieved no the less that they’d turned up and they were still unopened – just a little wipe was all that was required to remove the salad dressing and cat food that stuck to the surface of the packet. They had a biscuit each, then later, after tea, asked if they could have another. I agreed, and off we went again, on what was fast becoming a family ritual of hunt the biscuit. It didn’t take me as long this time – there they were in the bin again. I recognise that look of exasperated irritation mixed with amusement on my children’s faces; I used to give the same look to my mother when I was a teenager. My children aren’t teenagers, though; they’re eight and three.

Later, I found the toothpaste I knew I’d bought …. in the fridge. I called a friend to wish her happy birthday, and chatted away merrily, only remembering when I’d put the phone down that I hadn’t mentioned her birthday. I have memories of my former self, striding be-suited across the City, from power meeting to business lunch. Surely I was mega-organised, always on top of things? Memory can be a false friend. When I probe those memories a little deeper, I suppose I can remember rather a lot of hanging around by the water cooler, too, and holding forth in the office kitchen, making yet another cup of tea to break up the day, and endlessly forgetting where I was supposed to be next. I wasn’t this bad though. I suppose it must be my age. Or the fact that I have, with grim inevitability, turned into my mother.

I did remember, though, that it was the longest day (too often I am like Daisy from The Great Gatsby, only in forgetfulness, sadly, with none of the breathless charm: “Do you always wait for the longest day of the year and then miss it? I always wait for the longest day of the year and then miss it.”) and proudly uncorked my elderflower champagne. I am having a ‘dry’ fortnight before going on holiday next week, in a vain attempt to become fit and healthy and toned before unleashing myself on the beaches on France. The children, ungrateful little wretches that they are, spat it out, but R and I sat in the garden and watched the clouds – heavy and rain-filled though they were.

Saturday 23rd
I didn’t forget, either, to make a picnic for the school midsummer fun day, which had been planned with meticulous care and attention; the only thing not factored in was the British weather. A quick recce in the morning confirmed that the school field was a mudbath, and the bouncy castle people were cutting up rough. Whack the Rat would have been more like whack the puddle, and the tug of war would no doubt have descended into mud wrestling. My friend and I had both made huge picnics, so we decided to have a big, messy indoor picnic at our house instead. Her four and my two were mollified by the thought of eating on the sitting room floor and not being chastised about crumbs, and the grown ups decamped to the kitchen and ate ourselves stupid, and talked too much, and watched the afternoon slip into evening. Much better than standing on a muddy field.

Sunday 24th
I spent the greater part of the day entranced by an old gardening book, dating from the 1930’s, that I’d picked up once in a second hand shop and promptly forgotten all about. It was amazingly informative, with some gorgeous illustrations. It was written in that brisk, military style so redolent of that era, and which seemed to bracket gardening as a patriotic duty, along with keeping a tidy house and being punctual. There were some outrageous comments – apparently the reason that the English (not the British, of course) are so obsessed with gardening is because we have a greater sense of aesthetic pleasure than other nations, who tend to prefer gaudy, bright colours, the poor fools. Never trust a foreigner who doesn’t appreciate a garden, is the stern message, any more than you should trust a man who doesn’t appreciate dogs. Don’t get me wrong –the bigotry and arrogant prejudice makes me gasp. But I sometimes feel the tiniest bit nostalgic for the confident certainty of past times. I know, I know, that need is what dictators prey on. But just occasionally, I’d like to be sure of myself.

Monday 25th
So here we are, the end of June. Wimbledon starts today. I’m going on holiday in a week. I’m freezing. I want the aga back on. In fact, I want the heating on. The garden is ravaged by too much rain and high winds; the plants are bowed and bruised, petals and leaves everywhere. My strawberry crop was a bumper one; now they are rotting before they’re ready to pick. The herb garden looks like a jungle. I’m on lifeguard duty for after-school swimming at the school pool today; no doubt once again the children will leap in, only for a flash of lightening and an ominous rumble to signal the end of the fun. Everything feels dishevelled and streaming. I’m British. I should be used to it. But I’m not.

Overwhelmed Children, Pi**ed Off Mothers

2007-06-15T09:12:00.000+01:00

I’m feeling defensive today. Defensive in the face of my children’s fragility. Why is our society so obsessed with our children becoming independent? Is it so that they can stop hanging onto their mother’s work-jacket tails and allow them to scurry back to the office unencumbered? Is it because, as a nation, we can breathe a collective sigh of relief at not having to deal with the time-consuming little tykes any more? Why is it that the outgoing, confident, striding-forward-hopefully children are applauded and their parents congratulated, while those peeping out from behind their mothers’ legs are somehow seen to be letting the side down? Both my children have struggled with the big bad world at times. Both have had periods of being happiest at home, where they know they’re loved, and both, as babies and young toddlers, were hugely sensitive – to emotions, to noise, to any kind of over-stimulation. I say this not as an over indulgent mother, (‘my precious children are so sensitive, they need special care’), but as a mother who accepts them as they are but who has seen the downside of this; the babies who wouldn’t be left with someone they don’t trust, the toddlers who were terrified of the bigger brasher kids, the children who need extra encouragement, affection, love. My son was an anxious toddler, and I lost count of the people who would exhort me to ‘throw him in at the deep end of life’. I didn’t. I held him close. At eight, he is gregarious and sociable, happy and confident; he looks adults in the eye, he’ll address the whole school quite happily in assembly. My daughter won’t speak to the two new teachers at her pre-school. She’s not sure of them yet – why should she be? One of them told me “She needs to say ‘yes’ to her name at register time instead of putting her hand up. It’s a health and safety requirement. If there was a fire we’d need to know she was there”. I suggested, mildly, that if there was a fire, they’d soon know she was there. I think, at three, that you should reserve the right to speak to whoever the hell you like. I think, at three, that your world should be cosy and familiar, your limits small, your horizons close. I think it’s weird that we’re so keen to push our infants out of the door, yet we’re overprotective and won’t let them out to play when they’re older and ready to explore. Above all, I think that you have to advocate for your children at every opportunity. I don’t think that you should have to apologise for shyness. My dear friend has four independently minded little souls - the sort who charge into school on their first day, who beam at strangers, who never cling. They’re gorgeous children, and I love their fearless feistiness. That’s just the way they are. But children are different. We don’t expect them to all walk at the same time, after all. “I just want to be with you”, my daughter explained, refusing to take her coat off one day when I dropped her at pre-school. “I love you so much, so I want to be where you are”, she added, with touching reasonableness. “She’s manipulating you” said the brash, gum-chewing Mum, whose opinion I hadn’t sought, and who grins in mock exasperation and not-so-secret pride as her offspring push and fight their way through the throng, ‘cos that’s what boys do (if they’re real boys, is the sub-text). “She’ll get a shock when she has to go to school every day”. Oh yes, school every day. At four. SATS at six. (She’s a summer baby). Her path has been carved for her – and she’d better be walking down it alone. Can’t have her holding ME up now, can we?

Eight Things About Me ....

2007-06-11T09:48:00.000+01:00

Having been tagged by @themill, I have been thinking all weekend of eight things to reveal. This was horribly hard – but then perhaps everyone has more interesting lives than me - and I couldn’t start; then when I did, I found I couldn’t stop! I clearly have some sort of compulsion towards disclosure. So here we go:

1. I’m a die-hard and ever-hopeful Newcastle United fan, who by a tragic quirk of fate is married to a Chelsea supporter. My gorgeous son, however, has chosen blood and family loyalty over money and fame, and has probably doomed himself to a life of disappointment.

2. When I was sixteen, for some bizarre and to this day unknown reason, my school was asked to enter the schools version of the European finals of ‘It’s A Knockout’ (remember that, anyone?!). My little ‘gang’ all put ourselves forward, as it involved a five day trip to Belgium, and we duly experienced one of the more surreal episodes of our lives. We were all set to win, but were pipped at the post by the Germans. It was later announced that they’d cheated and we got the trophy, restoring honour to our glorious nation.

3. I fell in love for the first time when I was 15 … with a Spanish waiter called Manuel, from Barcelona. I’m not making it up.

4. I have an inappropriate (given he’s 17 years younger than me) crush on Lee from Any Dream Will Do.

5. I’m sometimes slow on the uptake – I used to have big crushes on George Michael (back in the eighties) and Christopher Eccleston.

6.I speak French, Italian, and Spanish, but probably very badly by now, given that I don’t get out of Suffolk much these days.

7.I won a poetry competition at the age of 11 – unfortunately, I have a horrible feeling that that was the peak of my literary fame – I still write lots of poetry, but generally rip it up the next morning.

8.I would describe myself as outgoing, communicative and open (and hot-tempered, according to my husband) – but am occasionally beset by the most horrible anxiety and ridiculous over-sensitivity. Hence my family and my garden are my greatest refuge.

I’m not sure what to do about passing the tagging baton on, as most people have already been tagged, as far as I can see. If you haven’t, and you’re reading this – then please go ahead!

Prophecies and Playful Birds

2007-06-06T09:51:00.000+01:00

Other people’s dreams are rarely that fascinating, so I’ll try to bear that in mind as I write. I dream vividly, unlike my husband, who claims to remember nothing, apart from the occasional surreal adventure, involving, wouldn’t you know it, car chases and shoot-outs! I remember atmospheres more than incidents – sometimes spooky and disturbing, sometimes joyful. Sometimes I awake with a sense of deep loss, although for what I’m not sure. Recently I’ve been dreaming of kingfishers (well, twice). A stretch of shimmering water, a close-up flash of a bird, all jewel colours and bright eyes. I’ve duly read up on the mythology of the kingfisher, that harbinger of the eponymous Halcyon days, when the bird breeds in the calm waters and the world enjoys respite from winter. I’ve read the myth of the original Alcyone, changed into a Kingfisher and forever swooping plaintively over the waves. I also read with interest that there is a link with my favourite constellation, the Pleiades, as one story has it that the original seven sisters were changed into kingfishers before taking their appointed place in the heavens. Cait O’Connor, (why can't I get a link to appear?), told me that Kingfisher in Welsh is Glas Y Dorlan – blue of the river. How beautiful. Maybe this all has some significance to me; I have been feeling mellow lately, with my husband no longer constantly away from home – I feel like the family is back in shallow waters, after the storms, paddling happily.

Yesterday K and I saw a kingfisher by the shallow stream that runs through the village, as we were walking back from dropping J at school. I saw the sudden, unexpected flash of colour and grabbed K, willing him to reappear. He did, this blue of the river, diving in to catch a fish, showing off. My daughter acknowledged his beauty nonchalantly, but was disapproving; censorious by nature, she thought he shouldn’t have snatched the fish. I just smiled at him in delighted recognition.

Unfortunately, last night I dreamed of a tiger – huge striped flanks appearing through the roses in the garden, a cruel velvety death awaiting us if we dared to step outside. I woke sweating and terrified to the imagined sound of it’s roar. I hope my foray into prophecy isn’t repeated.

School Stories Save The Day (and the half-term)

2007-06-01T08:44:00.000+01:00

What a dismal, dreary, deluge of a half term it’s been. Cubs camp was a wash-out; the picnic planned for Tuesday was too. My daughter lost her voice (I take my blessings where I find them, ashamed though I am to admit it), and I finally succumbed to the full-blown flu bug that I‘d been fighting off for a week. The silver lining in this case was that R was able to take a day off, instead of breezily waving me goodbye, passport in hand, so I did what I haven’t done in years – allowed myself to be ill and went to bed for the day. I wanted to read, but couldn’t face anything that I picked up; I had the concentration span of a gnat and even a paperback felt too heavy. Magazines didn’t work, either; I wanted to be totally taken out of myself, and their focus on celebrities/current affairs/home make-overs smacked too much of the real world. So I lay there feeling sorry for myself, and then suddenly remembered the boxes of books that I’d brought back with me when my parents moved and I had to clear out the cupboards which held the detritus – and treasures - of my childhood. I dug out a pile of puffin paperbacks, whole series of school stories with dazzling, heroic titles full of exclamation marks: “Henrietta Saves The Day!”, “The Best Term Ever!”, “The New Tuck-Shop!” I was lost to a world of lacrosse sticks, butch games mistresses and hopelessly inefficient French Mam’zelles, just as I had been as a 10 year old. The lightest of reads, I was able to get through several in one afternoon, and I marvelled – I really did – at what writers were allowed to get away with over fifty years ago. The plots are predictable and paper thin - though I remember them, of course, as utterly compelling and gripping – and usually centre, in a slightly sadistic way, on some schoolgirl getting above herself, coming an inevitable cropper, and being saved/taught a lesson/reprimanded by the heroine, whose British character and schoolgirl pluck ensure her inevitable triumph. Anyone showing a modicum of originality or talent is slapped down; the girl with a beautiful voice who breaks bounds to enter a singing contest gets pneumonia and loses the beautiful voice – for ever, natch. The girl who’s too good at games and wants to go professional (how very un-British) swims too far against the current and gets her legs dashed on rocks (I know, quite savage, but as a girl I lapped up all this divine retribution). The worst scorn is, of course, reserved for the foreigners; there is often a wild Spanish girl, usually half-gipsy, who’s parents run a circus, but she can never settle down to the rigours of school life and generally runs back to the circus. The French are continually sending their daughters to English boarding schools, it appears, in the vain hope that they may develop the prized English Sense of Honour, but of course they can’t – they’re too French. A direct quote: “But Suzanne was French. She would never have the same sense of responsibility that the British girls had”. They’re universally hopeless at games, too, standing shivering on the side of the pool until a hearty British girl shoves them in – teaching them, of course, to lose their idle foreign ways. The working classes are magnificently ignored, on the whole; wonderfully sweet, with their funny accents and willingness to labour for the school, so long as they know their place. If any of them dare to send their daughters to the school, having got rich quick in some shady scheme, they are destined to failure; the Headmistress will avoid them on speech day or enquire who the funny little man is; the girls usually leave after a term, because of course they can’t learn ways of the British upper class, either.

The funny thing is, is that I remember seeing all of this as a child – my sister and I used to giggle at the treatment of foreigners, and at the ludicrous and never-changing speeches of the Headmistresses – but I devoured them all the same. In fact I used to beg my parents to send me to boarding school. Perhaps I felt I needed to learn that sense of honour and fit in, too. And what’s even stranger is that I devoured them all over again the other day, too. Maybe it was just the sense of nostalgia that they evoked, the memories of reading them with a torch under the bedclothes, the recognition of their place in my childhood. I had a great afternoon, though, and was immensely cheered up. I’ve got all my old pony stories too, though they will have to wait for another day. Freud would have had a field day with those.

Things That Go Bump In The Night

2007-05-23T12:43:00.000+01:00

I was such a baby before I moved to the country. Terrified by anything remotely ‘supernatural’, unable to watch horror films (I can jump when watching Scooby Doo, to which my children will attest) and secretly still scared of the dark, my worst nightmare was to be on my own at night in an old house, with creaking floorboards, strange rustlings, and owls hooting. Well, guess what? I was obviously meant to overcome those fears, since from day one of moving to the country and living in the old, creaking house with the owls on sentry duty outside, my husband started his mad job involving lots of travelling, which he has only just given up. But because of this, the dark, the owls, the creaking floorboards and me have all slowly, gradually, become friends. Part of my new robust attitude to the middle of the night comes from the mere fact of having young children; as every parent knows to their cost, 2.00 am becomes shockingly familiar once you have a baby. After the first few weeks, when the sense of outrage at actually being expected to get up again and again and DO something at some ungodly hour wears off, the house at night starts to become an old friend. Not one you particularly want to see, admittedly, and one you greet with little enthusiasm, but comfortable and familiar nonetheless. The furniture doesn’t loom out at you in such a menacing way, the mutterings of the house become like the chattering of your family, instead of something vaguely malevolent. Tripping over the cat on a pitch black winter night no longer gives me heart failure (although stepping on something small and squidgy that she invariably brings in still does, but that’s another story). I can wrap the dark around me like a velvet cloak now, and greet my old friend the silvery moon with pleased recognition as her beautiful, spherical face peeps in through the window.

I was surprised, when I first moved here, at the endurance of local legends and superstitions. I’ve lost track of the number of haunted houses that have been pointed out to me in the village. It’s not only old places that can apparently be haunted, of course, but the sense of the past that lingers in these quiet villages, the thatched cottages, the old wool churches, certainly helps to build the atmosphere. As does history itself; Suffolk was prime ‘witch’ country, after all, and has its fair share of trials and burnings. As with many rural areas, there’s something secretive about the hedgerows and fields, too, a sense of something slightly hidden and reluctant to come out into the light. Fanciful imaginings, probably; like most people, I’m quick to disassociate myself from accusations of gullibility, and I always look for the rational explanation first, as when a close friend rented a cottage for a few months while their house was being renovated. The cottage, a picturesque pink-washed dream of a rural retreat, is ‘known’ for being haunted, and my friend was terrified for the four months that she was there. She was the only one who ever felt or saw the presence of a shadowy man, however, and she had very recently lost her baby son, and was obviously in a state of acute emotional distress. Did this distress attract the supernatural, or was the supernatural just a projection of her distress? Who can say, although I’ve always tended towards the latter view.

Yet despite my proclivity for psychological explanations, I think we have a guest in the house – or more probably, it’s us who are the guests. We get a fleeting glance of something in the dining room, a sudden impression on of something flitting past, a change in the texture of the light. It doesn’t always happen, and it’s not in the least scary, yet we’ve both noticed it. We’ve reassured one another that it’s a tick of the light, it’s to do with something passing the window, it’s all reflections and refractions. Maybe. What’s strange is that I really don’t mind - and I never thought I’d hear myself say that. Whatever it is doesn’t bother me at all. This house is my best friend, I love its energy, its 300 year old history, its cheerful shabbiness. Maybe we’re just dreaming – or maybe it’s just the house, not us, that’s dreaming.

Daydreams and Ruby Slippers

2007-05-18T11:47:00.000+01:00

18 May

This week was going to be all about living in the now. You know the kind of thing – recognising the moment, accepting the present, not letting a single moment of life’s rich tapestry pass me by. I was going to really listen when my son speculates – again – on the likely plot of the next Dr Who episode, and not do my own mental time-travelling and wander off into the past. I would really pay attention to my daughter’s games and readily accept the subservient role as patient/café visitor/pupil that is usually assigned to me. I wasn’t going to gaze off into the distance when the small ferocious café lady tells me I can’t have any of my chosen food preferences, but can have cake with an egg on and hot chocolate, except there isn’t any chocolate. I won’t be somewhere else in my mind when the people I love the most are chatting to me, or let my mind form endless associations so that I inevitably leave to long a pause and give too blank a stare before answering a question. But why is it that everything these days reminds me of something else? What will it be like when I’m eighty, when there’s a whole lifetime of connections and memories to assail me, when the dramas of human experience seem to be permanently on rewind? Naturally, my good intentions fell by the wayside this week. There I go again; what lovely imaginings spring to mind as I write the word wayside. Verges rich with scarlet poppies, with campions and cornflowers. Old men with sticks in days gone by, tramping in the moonlight down lanes filled with traveller’s joy. Words of a hymn I thought I’d left behind in early childhood “He paints the wayside flowers, He lights the evening star”.

Yesterday my son told me about his science lesson, and how they’d learnt about oxygen. No helpful discussions about gases, no pouring over the encyclopaedia together for my poor child; just a mother who’d mentally absconded, again, and was trying to remember who’s sung that late seventies hit ‘Love is Like Oxygen’ (got it in the middle of the night – The Sweet). My daughter is currently obsessed with ‘The Wizard of Oz’ and is nursing a huge grudge that we didn’t name her either Dorothy or Glinda. She asked me to find her special ruby slippers this morning, and I was gone again, hit by a powerful memory as I searched fruitlessly under her bed. I remembered working in a company which was headed up by a terrifying and all-powerful boss. (Yes, she was a woman, but no, that wasn’t why we had trouble with her – I’ve loved many of my female bosses). A whole crowd of us young 20-somethings worked there, the social life was brilliant, the office banter exceptional. A new man joined one day. He was Asian and hadn’t been in the country long; quiet and shy by nature, he seemed to struggle sometimes with our colloquialisms and humour. I remember him having to attend an appraisal with the terrifying boss, and the rest of us crowding around him in the office kitchen when he reappeared. “What was it like, what did she say?” we all wanted to know. “Oh, I think it was something like: Gimme the ruby slippers!” he replied in his soft shy voice, giving the most perfect imitation of the wicked witch of the west. He broke through his shyness that day and I like to think he liked working with us. He died a month or so later, killed in a road accident while on holiday in Spain. So in memory of a quiet man I barely knew who really made me laugh one day, in homage to Eden (of Under an Eastern Sky blog) and her red mary-jane’s, and for all of us daydreamers who can never get anything done, I’ve enclosed a picture of my girl’s ruby slippers, scuffed and worn, but still magic to her (and found, luckily, before she left for pre-school). Buying them gave a little girl her heart’s desire, and she didn’t even have to click the heels. Who say’s dreaming is a waste of time?

Frayed Mums and Jagged Edges

2007-05-15T09:58:00.000+01:00

Sunday was a streaming, sodden day which either caused or reflected my mood, I’m not sure which. We went to a christening; it’s a convoluted story as to how we came to be there, since we don’t really know the parents very well, but it’s enough to say that we were obliged to go. I’m usually seduced by the ritual at such events, charmed by the welcoming of a new life, the family celebrations, the future all bouncing and rosy. This time, I felt uncomfortable and out of place; one of those social events where you don’t really belong, can’t relax with accustomed ease into old friendships and family groups. I’m adept at using my children as a shield on such occasions – babies are the most useful, since you can sit and feed them, change them, gurgle at them in privacy, safe in your charmed circle of two. Older children are a bit more tricky – I had no hopes for my eight year old, who was immediately swept into a crowd of children with no nod to the niceties of small talk, but I’d hoped my three year old and I could have a mutual cling. She who snakes herself around my leg whenever I’m feeling chatty and confident, however, had a sudden and unwelcome taste for independence and ran after her brother with a toss of her head, leaving me trailing pathetically behind. R got involved in one of those male conversations that was all about numbers; "how much? how fast? how many?" He normally hates conversation like that – the jostling, the back-slapping, the one-upmanships, the sly digs. But he’d got drawn in, somewhere along the line, and I was confronted by a sea of broad backs in the kitchen, so I headed off towards the cluster of new babies and their Mums in the sitting room. But this was all sharp edges and bright lipstick, the babies all accessorised beautifully, the Mums somehow managing postnatal power dressing. They all seemed so certain, so confident, so seemingly unfazed by these tiny kicking interlopers into their lives, although I know that can’t really be true. I didn’t have a clue, in those early weeks after my first was born, I remember being almost pathetically pleading towards mothers with older children, sucking up reassurances like a drowning man seeks oxygen. Not so these women, although maybe they were still in denial, still confident that they could return their lives to normal by sheer force of will. They were discussing work, all adamant that a four day week would allow a perfect work-life balance until their children were more independent and they would return full-time – when the kids were, say, 2. It doesn’t work like that, I was silently saying, it’s not so cut and dried, it’s all messy and fluid and your tidy compartments will run into one another with alarming frequency. Children have their own rhythms which won’t always fit into a corporate timetable, their needs will be greater than you can yet know. Maybe that was just my experience, and won’t be theirs, although in my defence I have met scores of women who feel that work gave up on them once they had children, not the other way around. And those friends who have managed to stay firmly on the ladder whilst raising their children have had to grip harder than they could ever have imagined.

Occasional words from their conversation gave me a jolt and reminded me that I was once part of this world – not the milky twilight zone of new babies and night feeds, but a world of business trips and meetings, blackberrys (not the picking kind) and laptops. I can join in, I felt like saying, I’ve got office stories too, I thought I was a player, once. But I’ve become invisible, now, to people who don’t know there’s another world out there, and instead of joining in I could feel myself becoming all fluttery around the babies, like a nervous grandmother. I reminded myself that I gave up social visibility for a softer life of depth and richness. I’ve got to put my toe back in the water again, soon, before the black hole of the overdraft swallows us up. But this time I’m prepared for chaos and mess; straight lines and sharp focus and steely ambition are a thing of the past, now. I’ve never been so happy to get home and sink onto our worn and shabby sofa and shut the door. The world’s still out there, waiting. But it will have to take me as I am, slightly frayed and blurred around the edges.

2007-05-11T10:31:00.000+01:00

Ode to Purple
11 May

It’s one of the regrets of my life that I’m rubbish at art. I’ve never been able to draw a thing, and still remember the shame of art lessons at school, still at the stage of drawing stick people while everyone else was producing a still life worthy of Van Gogh. What is particularly irritating is that many people in my family, on my father’s side at least, have the gene. Two cousins went to art school, and both my Dad and Uncle are accomplished amateur painters. Sadly, neither my sister nor I have the eye. It must be about the way you look at things, I guess, as much as the ability to send messages from your eyes to your hand. R is a pretty good draughtsman, and when he looks at things, he sees them in relation to everything else. He sees shapes and forms, structures and geometry. I just see colour, and am often really disappointed when it has to be pointed out to me that an idea I’ve had for the house wouldn’t work, that the dimensions or all wrong, or something similar. Interestingly my passion for gardening is helping with this; I’m starting to see the need for structure, that a swathe of colour needs bare bones behind it. And yet, like most people, it will always be colour that pulls me into the garden. I can’t do minimalist inside, either; our house has lots of strong colours in it, and lots of bright fabrics, and, let’s be honest, lots of mess. I can go into someone else’s house and feel soothed by their off-whites and beiges, but it doesn’t seem to suit me when I try it myself. R is often intrigued by my instinctive preference for dark, masculine colours, and often I have to be reminded to soften things up, to lighten them. I don’t why that should be, since I love dusky pinks, misty blues and sea greens – aquamarine being my favourite colour. But in art I usually find myself drawn to midnight blues and inky violets, and walls of sheer, rich pigments.

I’m constantly amazed by the ingenuity of nature, how with even the most casual planning the colours come together and rarely clash, unless you intrude too much in an effort to stamp your own schemes on the natural world. Being inherently lazy, I’m often happy to just see what happens, and am rarely disappointed. The synchronicity has been a little bit out this year, the hellebores nodding shyly to the roses, the plants startled by the dryness. Yet suddenly, in the flash of an eye, my garden is all about purple. Only a few weeks ago it was all green; so many different shades, so much depth. Then the green was broken up by deep red tulips and early forget-me-nots. But now the alliums have taken over from the tulips, the lavender is out, my lovely deep blue geranium is breaking out beneath the fragrant, heavy lilac, and the sage is about to show off its lovely purple flower heads. Purple brings to my garden its echoes of royalty, nobility and spirituality. All this symbolism makes it important and mysterious – psychedelic purple, deep purple, gracious purple, proud purple (I hope my prose isn’t getting too purple). It seems you can’t explore anything arcane or magical without tripping over purple. I recently learned, (courtesy of an evening out with a telescope which I blogged about a few weeks ago), that one of the pleiades, my favourite constellation, is known as purple pleione, because she has a purple hue. I see her as Queen of her little group of stars, now. My gardening books inform me that purple has both warm and cool properties, which is why, presumably, for a short burst in spring, my garden can look tasteful and decorous, before my love of warm and earthy tones sets in for midsummer. I was gazing out of the window, open mouthed, as usual (never a good look) when my daughter appeared clutching a picture she’d just drawn of me. I tried to ignore the huge gaping mouth she’d given me, the short stumpy legs and enormous feet, and concentrated instead on the wild cloud of hair that she’d taken ages over, blithely disregarding the fact that my hair is straight and blondish. In her picture, it was, of course, purple.

2007-05-08T09:35:00.001+01:00

8th May

Sunday was a mellow day, filled with friends and family, food and drink (too much of both), fires and sunsets. It was the seventh birthday of the daughter of some good friends, and they always manage to combine a child’s party for her with a grown-up party, and like all the occasions which mark their children’s births (they have four), it has become a fixture in our calendar. The girl’s mother, my friend, is one of those really extraordinary cooks who finds it soothing to whip up a dinner for 24 or, as on this occasion, feed about a dozen children and about fourteen adults simultaneously - different menus, moreover. They have a tiny brick and flint Victorian cottage, which looks like something out of Beatrix Potter and has no room to swing a cat, but which does have a large and astonishing garden. The predicted torrents didn’t arrive, so we glued ourselves to garden chairs and just, well, ate. Red lentil and goats cheese puree to start us off, followed by the most gorgeous ham with mango salsa, roast potatoes, salad, fantastic spicy coleslaw. The best apple and almond cake I’ve ever tasted with lashings of jersey cream. The poor children had to make do with hot dogs and pizza, chocolate birthday cake followed by more and more chocolate as the day progressed, but they bore up well. Reading over this, I know it sounds so middle-class country, so perfect, so Cath Kidston, all the things that we know aren’t true about real country living. But sometimes, just sometimes, it really is like that. Only fleetingly, of course, and always punctuated by small irritations - the child who gets stung by one of the first bees of the season (mine), the child who sobs uncontrollably at losing musical statues (mine again), the one who stripped naked and fell into a pile of nettles (at last, not mine). Nothing’s ever really glamorous, is it, when you know the hidden stories; the financial problems, the almost-break-ups, the health worries. There was plenty of baggage, as there is at every social occasion, all safely stacked up somewhere out of sight, but always there to trip you up should you stumble upon it by accident. For once I didn’t stumble, nor did anyone else; we just laughed and ate and lazily watched the children through a haze of wine and cake and sun.

We staggered home, replete and contented, and built a campfire in the garden, down by the stream. The children were up late, but were unusually calm after a frenetic day, and we were all mesmerised by the flames and the quiet, broken only by the evening songs of the birds and the crackle and hiss of the fire. K was particularly tranquil; she has come through a bit of a rough patch, lately. It’s a funny expression, that, it makes me think of the rough patch in the garden, all thorns and spikes, so maybe it’s apt, after all. Storms and dramas have always been meat and drink to my feisty and determined girl at the best of times, without the added complications of being almost four. It’s funny how you know it’s just a phase, how you’ve seen your elder ones come through similar times, and yet when you’re in the thick of it you can’t see the daylight. One of those little developmental milestones swooped down on her, however, and the roses and the sweet-scented things are peeping out now.

I’ve always loved twilight, and have always been glad that I don’t live in one of those tropical places where the darkness descends in a heartbeat. We sat in the gloaming, wrapped up warm, and watched the moths and heard a frog croak. Yet I still always miss that moment when dusk turns to proper darkness – it still catches me unawares, and surprises me every time. Bed called, along with the owls.

2007-05-03T12:22:00.000+01:00

3 May

“It’s like England was 50 years ago.” This is a phrase often used these days to describe our rural idylls, to justify our life-changes, the relocations and ruptures and new starts and beginning-all-overs. You here it said about all those counties on the margins of being fashionable, and sometimes it’s even said about those chi-chi little places that have in reality changed beyond all recognition. It’s said about France, about Ireland, Scotland, Wales, New Zealand. I have no quarrel with the phrase, I’ve used it myself. There IS something quintessentially 1950’s-ish about East Anglia. The trouble is though is that when someone trots it out, I’m never altogether sure what they mean. It’s one of those phrases open to endless meaning and endless interpretation. I have stood in paralysing discomfiture listening to one person rant about the lack of immigrants fifty years ago, or another nod with satisfaction at the memory of the all-white southern English faces around him. I have raised a quizzical eyebrow or stole a surreptitious glance at R when someone has launched into a diatribe about how the summers were hotter then (are you sure about that?), or a reminiscence about the total lack of crime. To some people, fifty years ago means a perpetual rendition of Knees Up Mother Brown in the pub and communal meals on a crime-free (and ethnically pure) village green. I think the majority of us who use the term, however, speak from a broadly similar place; we look back to a slower, calmer way of life, one where we can live simply but live well, hopefully losing some of frenetic elements of two fast-paced careers that are required just to finance a shoe-cupboard in an urban sprawl. We welcome a sense of community, a sense of belonging, a sense of living more closely with nature. Whether or not that time ever actually existed is immaterial; nostalgia is rarely fuelled by facts, after all, but by feelings.

I am all for nostalgia, and all for a slower pace of life, but I am relentlessly twenty-first century with regard to my food and my clothes. I don’t want ‘gastro’ in my local pub necessarily, any more than I want asian-fusion from the local Chinese; I’m rarely happier than when faced with a simple ploughmans or a plate of ham egg and chips. Neither am I a fashionista any more (if I ever was) – I was still in my bootcuts long after the yummy mummies had progressed to skinny fits and boy jeans. But I am grateful that we don’t have to buy olive oil from the chemists any more, and I like a restaurant to give a passing nod to parmesan that doesn’t come in a plastic container, just as I like to know I can get a linen shirt or a pair of kitten heels within a fifty-mile radius, if the mood takes me. One of our neighbours, a man possessed of a quavering voice and a stooping gait, but possessed also of a steely determination to get his point across, blithely ignoring whether or not you have the time to listen, once advised my husband on where he should buy his clothes. We visited the shop once, on a whim when we were in town, and immediately recognised that it was one of those places that either makes you want to laugh, or depresses you, depending on your mood. It did both to me; I giggled at it’s total lack of style and total lack of any stock that you would want to buy, but something about it’s musty interior, the piles of polyester trousers and grey plastic slip-on shoes made me sad too. I’m not being a snob, far from it – the stuff wasn’t even particularly cheap. It was just redolent of an earlier, shabbier time – no retro finds here. It made the Grace Brothers store in ‘Are You Being Served?’ look like the Conran shop.

Our local town is set for development and we will shortly be the recipients of a brand new retail development. Despite the instinctive flutter of excitement as I think about lovely posh shops, I have no doubt the costs will spiral out of control and we will be left with one of those windswept and soulless malls that sit so uncomfortably in the English countryside. The store I mentioned above is set for closure, no doubt along with many other high street shops. Suddenly, I want it to be fifty years ago.

2007-04-30T10:25:00.000+01:00

30 April

I love the word Jumble. It makes me think of the dog in the ‘Just William’ books, of huge piles of clothes, of a rush of thoughts all vying to tumble out of our mouths as speech. It’s such an onomatopoeic word. I do love a good jumble sale too, but I’m not so keen on manning a stall, which is what I found myself doing on Saturday. I’d grudgingly agreed to help out (it was run by the school PTA, I somehow managed to end up being both on the committee and a parent governor, very surprising since I’m usually so adept at lurking in the background when jobs are handed out). Anyway I turned up with a bad grace (I know, I know, but it’s only a few weeks since the Easter Fair, and it’s always the same old crowd helping out), and was stuck there for the best part of the day. We were due to open at 2.00, and by 1.00 a crowd was milling at the gates. By 1.50 there was a long queue snaking down the lane. There was a stampede when the gate opened; a jostle of bulky canvas bags, a heaving of flesh and a stretching of seams as people lunged towards the tables. I’ve never seen anything like it. We are a tiny village and this was just a few stalls. I know shopping rage is very 2007, but it’s more the kind of thing you associate with Kate Moss’s collection hitting Topshop, or Stella McCartney at Hennes. I didn’t really think we had quite the same cachet, but it seems I was wrong. I’d positioned myself on books, a cunning ruse, I’d thought, since I hadn’t expected it to be terribly busy and had envisaged a peaceful afternoon browsing and reading. Wrong, wrong, wrong. Towards the end of the afternoon, my hair sticking to my face, my eyes hollow, my throat hoarse, I asked one lady who had bought 36 (!) paperbacks, why she had been so desperate to get here. “There’s money in this village”, she confided. “Word gets out”. There is? News to me. Not round my gaffe, I felt like telling her, and frankly I couldn’t see much evidence around me, either, among the polyester blouses and elasticated-waist trousers, the chipped mugs and grimy tea towels.

Still, everyone seemed satisfied by the end of the day, some clearly thrilled with their new grimy tea-towels and sweat-stained shirts (sorry, but they were), and the school is now richer by several hundred pounds, so who’s complaining? Only me, of course. I did get a good haul in myself – 8 books, some toys for the children and a pretty hand-made wooden photo frame with painted roses, all for about £5.00, and I like a bargain as much as the next person - but I was yet again reminded of why customer service really isn’t my forte. The grim determination of some of the jumble Queens was astonishing. R, a connoisseur of car-boot sales, had warned me in advance, but I still wasn’t prepared for the onslaught of people who would haggle over an item marked as 10p. Some were lovely and polite, others rude and surly, tipping things onto the floor in their haste. Annoyance was catching in my throat after about ten minutes; it was seeping from my every pore by the end. I staggered out, my feet screaming to be released from their shoe prisons, to be confronted by an argument in front of the school. All of the left-over clothes and linens were being stored in the school, to be collected by a charity. We were still left with several boxes of toys and books, however, and since everyone was exhausted and clearly keen to get home, no-one was volunteering to take them to a charity shop or store them in their sheds. One of the Dads turned up; the sort of man who dresses head-to-toe in camouflage gear each day, and has a burning desire to have the biggest of everything - jeep, wood-pile, tool-kit – (clearly insecure about something, I wonder what?!) and he offered to take all the books and burn them. His eyes filled with a revolutionary zeal as he told us how he could build the biggest bonfire. Everyone else recoiled at the horrible idea of books being burned, and in the end there was a tussle between several of us trying to load up the books, and the burning zealot Dad. Luckily, we won, but the boot of my car is now several boxes heavier.

Sunday was much more relaxing, filled as it was by repetitive, back-breaking but soothing tasks in the garden. I’ve never been one for over neat and manicured gardens, but that slightly wild, blowsy look that I aim for is hard to get just right. If you’re not careful it slides very quickly into seedy and weedy, even in April. Couch grass, nettles and dandelions are everywhere; on a nicer note, welsh poppies and forget-me nots have self-seeded all over the place. Early roses are breaking out, alongside the hellebores which are only just starting to fade. The tulips and the cherry blossom have been ravaged by the wind, but I have a pot azalea that is showing an early flourish, and the lavender is starting to flower. It’ll be autumn by June, at this rate.

2007-04-28T11:19:00.003+01:00

26 April

Had a shouty phone conversation with my Grandmother yesterday. Not shouty in an aggressive sense, I hasten to add, but because she’s a little hard of hearing, which is only to be expected, I guess, at the age of 94. Still full of vigour, her days still filled with living, she is missing having her family around her.

To me, her life has been a series of triumphs; hugely bright, but limited by being born into a large family of few means in the North-East, she has lived a full and enterprising life. She set up her own dressmaking business while raising a family, taught herself to both swim and drive in her fifties, travelled alone to Australia in her sixties. I worry that sometimes, in what must be the last slow years of her life, a life now constricted and narrowed by age, that she may see her life as series of losses – she has after all outlived three husbands, three younger siblings, and one son. Such an influential and dominant figure in my life, in recent years I think she has secretly dwelt with the long departed, despite her mental acuity. Her memories quite naturally grope back towards those people in their sepia tints and strange hats, posing unsmilingly for the camera. Those people who flitted vaguely in and out of my childhood, shadowy forms called Bobby and Billy and Jackie, Doris and Evie and Elsie, are more real to her now perhaps than me. How ironic it is, that we have such little interest in family history when we’re growing up; I could never think what to say to these people at the edge of my family circle when I was growing up, teenage awkwardness and constraint robbing me of my voice – now I yearn for the chance to sit them down and chat.

My parents and I tend to laugh when she says she’s lonely – it’s a family joke that she still has a better social life than any of us, a constant stream of people in and out of the house where she still lives independently – but of course she is. Our extended family has been fractured, like so many families, by distance and opportunity. I read some chatroom comments recently (you know where) about second homes, and, without wishing to relive the whole debate, there was one comment which really stood out for me. You have no birthright to live in the place you were brought up, said this commentator (a second home owner, natch), you have to earn the right to live there. I instinctively disagreed with that, as soon as I read it. No, perhaps you don’t have a right over and above anyone else; but you should at least expect a level playing field, the opportunity to stay put, if you so wish. Family disintegration doesn’t do society much good. My own family is no different to millions of others, our history a tale of small-scale emigration and disruption. My parents left the north-east for the south-east and better opportunities, which they found. Much further back, my ancestors came over from Ireland to Newcastle as a result of the potato famine. R and I, whilst suffering no deprivation and thinking that we had the world at our feet, were still priced out of the south-east where we’d grown up (admittedly, we moved for other reasons too, but who knows, if the large family house in Hampstead had been affordable ….!). No doubt my children will have to leave Suffolk, if house prices – from which we’ve benefited, perhaps to the detriment of some local family - continue to rise. Always moving on, in search of the promised land; sometimes we find it, sometimes we don’t. But how we still mourn for our roots, for that sense of belonging, for our history, for our local land. My grandmother is proud of all her family, those still close to home and those scattered across the globe. But I bet there are days when she wishes we were all living 100 years ago, all in the same street.

I just had a thought; my Grandad wore a flat cap and had a funny accent. How marvellous – I could dash off an amusing little piece about a quaint country character like him; I’m sure he even knew what to do about moles. I might even win something! (Sorry, couldn’t resist).

2007-04-28T11:19:00.001+01:00

24 April

I am marooned of Suffolk today. I have hardly ventured out of the house in two days, since youngest has been quite poorly, and I’m starting to get the wild-eyed, unkempt look of a recluse. I always quite fancied the idea of spending my latter years in splendid isolation somewhere, the madwoman on the hill instead of in the attic, perhaps, but actually I now feel I may be better suited to being in the centre of the action somewhere. I’ve been jumping on the phone, and gazing longingly at delivery vans passing by – you never know, even if they’re not for me, someone might want directions. At least the weather is nice (we finally had rain in the early morning, hurrah!) and I keep popping out into the garden with such regularity that the birds have perfected their alarm calls at my approach – you can hear the rooks teaming up with the blue tits in defiance at my continued presence. I hear the call of housework to be done, bills to be paid, Things To Do all over the place, but reason that I can’t really start anything, because I’m bound to be interrupted as soon as I do. My daughter has perfected both the pleading, little, tug-on- the- heartstrings voice and the imperious and relentless commands and she’ll switch between them according to which she believes will get the best effect. Since my housework avoidance techniques are second to none, (I will truly never be the sort of person who co-ordinates their underwear drawers), I call happily delude myself that a quick flick here, a wipe there, constitutes a good spring clean, and, since I am also bone-tired, sitting in front of the computer once again appears to be the best use of my time. Funny how I am always trying to pull the children away from screens, whilst hunched over the laptop myself. I did promise myself that I would restrict blogging to once or twice a week, so it’s not looking good already.

My mother is coming over for a couple of hours this afternoon, so I can get to the supermarket (oops - hope Chickenix isn’t stalking us). The very idea feels dangerously liberating, I may have a sensory overload (lights! Noise! People!) and start manically filling the trolley with chocolate, ice-cream and wine. Or talk for slightly too long to the cashier, or start up random and pointless conversations in the car park – something that will mark me out as a little mad, no doubt.

2007-04-28T11:18:00.000+01:00

23 April

Saturday night was a blast; dinner with lovely friends, who I always want to describe as old friends, because it seems like we’ve known each other for years, although in fact it’s nothing like that long. We talked for too long, laughed too loudly and drank too much; in fact at one point I noticed that we were all talking at the same time, babbling away to our wine glasses. Ever since I first had children I have known that I cannot do hangovers any more; on Sunday morning I really truly knew it. So by Sunday evening, having spent a gentle pottering day, accompanied by the furies flying around in my head, I felt I deserved to have a long bath. So I had the longest, deepest, hottest bath ever. Alone. (If anyone else has read the Jill Murphy books about the Large family, my attempts to get in the bath without the children are broadly similar). The bathroom right at the top of our narrow cottage is perfect for a solitary soak, having a bath but no shower, the shower room downstairs being the hub of morning activity. Upstairs is more of an evening place, and I certainly turned I my ‘quick bath – can you make sure the children are occupied/asleep/not bothering me’ – into a whole evening. If you twist yourself around at a bizarre angle, head at the uncomfortable tap end (I go for the mermaid look, but fear I’m more of a flounder), you can gaze through the uppermost window, to the treetops and beyond. I watched the birds swooping and diving in the vaulted sky until twilight slowly fell and the stars began to shine. My mind could take in nothing but sky and water, clouds and bubbles. If you keep your eyes trained heavenwards, your thoughts don’t get snagged by the sharp edges of earthly mess; the neighbour’s abandoned caravan, the pile of rubble from his extension; the neglected bit of our garden, all thorns and nettles, the pile of towels and clothes on the bathroom floor.

Peace is so fleeting; today youngest is poorly – pale and wan, she needs my full attention. Nothing like a conflict between my maternal instincts and my irritation at my child-free morning vanishing before my eyes. Back to reality.

2007-04-28T11:17:00.000+01:00

21 April

Sun and serenity in Suffolk this afternoon. What a contrast to yesterday's choppy waters - anger all day, followed by sulks and whining at being left out of the party. I made it in the end though, and now I feel like I'm stationed at the door, welcoming everyone in with a gracious wave and thrusting a glass of red at them, as if I've been here all along. The children have been ignored again, although they don't seem to care; I've been fiddling with my new page, proud as a new Mum, and R, never content to let the day pass by in a relaxing fashion, has decided to create a window seat in the kitchen. Very much pro the window seat - I've always missed the one we had in our last house - but slightly startled to see one wall of the kitchen demolished and gaping. We're going out tonight, and I feel quite sorry for the babysitter who will no doubt be taken aback by spending her evening in half a house - the tarpaulin flapping, the owls hooting, and the chill winds blowing ..... it's spooky in Suffolk, you know. I'll leave the fridge well stocked as penance.

2007-04-28T11:16:00.001+01:00

19 April

I had a friend visiting today, who had driven up from Hertfordshire with her 8 week old baby, and who has only just left. What a surreal day; a very old friend with a brand new baby, and bubbling emotion amongst my new cyber friends. I couldn’t properly give my attention to either, vacillating between talks of broken sleep and routines, and thoughts of competitions and blogs. The moment my poor friend disappeared to change a nappy, there I was, clicking away to see what was going on, rushing red-faced and breathless from the study as soon as she reappeared. God alone knows what she thought I was up to. The baby was soft and downy and fitted snugly into the space between my shoulder and neck, the way they are designed to, her mouth like a rose petal rooting for milk, her eyelids still transparent and veiny, her tiny hands fluttering like a bird. That sweet milky scent, that soft heaviness, the little sighs, that other worldly gaze. I want another one, I thought, I feel cheated. Then I looked properly at my friend. Huge dark circles under her eyes, her face pale and waxy. Her total inability to concentrate or finish a sentence, her thoughts slow, her speech thick and sleepy. Her body still aching and leaky, she still groping blindly back towards adult life, her emotions all jumbled up with the baby. Oh, now I remember. It is her first baby, and I know from my own experience of a mere two that it does get easier. I also know with absolute certainty that she will come through the fog, that she and her daughter will partake in a dance for the rest of their lives, separating and merging, and it will all seem quite normal. At the moment, though, like so many women (myself included), who have their children late in life, compared to previous generations, she feels like she has been in a train wreck. Upside down doesn’t quite manage it; more like spinning frantically in a vortex. She was always the calm one, when we worked together, me the nervy, manic one. Today was different, of course, I was another adult, one who knew, moreover, what to do with a baby, and who could make cups of tea and offer reassuring pats and soothing noises. She sat under the unfurling lilac tree, looking like a weary Madonna, and I felt like her Grandmother. Strange for me, since those days of panic when faced with the fragile limbs and milk-seeking iron will of a new baby aren’t that far behind me. Funny how these markers in our lives change us, transform us into people apparently capable and confident, when inside we still feel ten years old.

She’s only just left, driving off to visit her ill mother in law in Ipswich (which is why she came here, otherwise I would have course driven to visit her, before you all think I’m callous and lazy!). Now I can ignore my own children who are happily engaged in the garden and get back on the site, back to what is increasingly – and worryingly – beginning to seem like Real Life!

2007-04-28T11:15:00.001+01:00

18 April

Yesterday turned out to be a peaceful, mellow kind of day, not at all the insane, hurried, tired sort of time I usually associate with going back to school. K and I picked up J from school as normal, and half the school seemed to gravitate to the village green, where they raced around with a final burst of energy, while the Mums sat lazily in the perky April sunshine. We meandered home and packed up the bag with costumes and towels; Tuesday means swimming lessons, something that I actually enjoy, despite the hot and overcrowded changing rooms, the shrieking mothers (“Arabella! Do hurry – it’s violin and clarinet before dinner”) and swarming wet children. I love sitting in the slightly grotty caff afterwards, watching the children gulping hot chocolate, hair plastered to their faces, and becoming insanely overexcited at the thought of the toxic tea that they are allowed on Tuesdays. (It has to be said that I hover greedily over their plates, hoovering up the chips with alacrity).

We drove to the pool with the windows down, the air humming with activity around us. Blossom everywhere, the fields thrusting up their crops from the ground, apparently overnight. Swathes of vivid yellow rape, which I confess to hating from an aesthetic point of view, let alone the fact that it is such a potent allergen. Too bright, too in-your-face for England, I think, and turn with relief to the cowslips already crowding on the verges. How I love those flowers, so much promise in a simple pale plant. “Where the bee sucks, there suck I, in a cowslip’s bell I lie”. Perfect. It’s ten miles to the pool, on the other side of town from our village, a distance I would have thought completely mad before I moved out to the sticks, but which now seems positively local. As we park the car, J watches other children on their bikes, and suddenly announces he wished he lived in the town and could walk or cycle to the pool. K instantly agrees, although she would no doubt agree if he said he wanted to live in Outer Mongolia. They start up a list of things they could do if they lived in the town – walk to the park, visit the toyshops every day, have dinner at Pizza Express every night (? It is apparently free to all urban-dwellers), walk on pavements to school (how deprived they are, walking across the Green!) and so on. I let them carry on, smug in the knowledge that I can stop them in their tracks. “What about the Pub?” I ask casually, playing my trump card. Both fall silent. They adore the pub, scene of towering orange bonfires and golden summer days. “And our house? And all your friends? And the horses in the field at the bottom of the garden? And the wood and the stream?”

Seems I’ve won the argument, although J still wants to cycle to the pool one day. Ten miles, mostly uphill? Fine by me. He’ll be going alone though.

2007-04-28T11:14:00.001+01:00

16th April

A neighbour called round yesterday evening to show R his new telescope. Inevitably we all ended up out in the garden, crowding round, moongazing like eager hares. The children were once again up late; term hasn’t started yet for us, we have an extra day’s grace for some reason, although R starts his new job today – bizarre for us not be waving him off somewhere. K is still under the misapprehension that “bedtime doesn’t happen until it’s dark, silly Mummy”, so of course she deemed it right and proper that she should be bidding goodnight to the stars. And what stars there were. We are so lucky to live out here, where there are no streetlights, no hazy orange glow from a city. Just sky, huge and arching, and endless stars, holes in the floor of heaven. I am hopeless at spotting constellations, mesmerised by individual stars and planets, missing patterns (although my favourites, the pleiades, lurked slyly at the edge of my vision). The boys, young and old, squawked excitedly (in a gruff, manly fashion, of course) as they ticked them off. J has always been starstuck – when he was tiny, one of his greatest compliments was to tell me that he “loved me more than space”. His head is always filled with comets and constellations, stars and supernovas, his dream to boldly go where no man has gone before, (splitting infinitives all the way). I looked at his absorbed, enraptured face and wished I could bottle the memory and use it like perfume.

K and I just gazed and gazed, the sky wheeling above us, the earth beneath or feet giving the old illusion of being stable and stationary, while the galaxies dance. There’s a lullaby that I used to sing to both of them when they were babies, asking if they wanted the moon to play with, or the stars to run away with. As they grew older, neither could ever decide. The moon, the moon, I’d think silently, don’t leave me for the stars. Not yet.

“Are the stars looking at us?” K asks sleepily. Maybe they are, I answer. I wonder what they’d see on our pretty blue planet; oceans and forests, mountains and valleys? Or the haze of pollution and urban sprawls? “They’d like our house, I think”, says K. Hope so.

2007-04-28T11:13:00.001+01:00

15 April

Well yesterday, was as promised, gloriously and unseasonably hot. And where was I? In bed for most of the day. I managed to get through the entire autumn and winter without so much as a sniffle, only to be felled by something or other on a perfect day in spring. I felt sick, weary and sorry for myself, but these things rarely last and here I am, tottering about again. And at least it’s another lovely day. There’s a blue and white tablecloth on the garden table, under bubblegum pink cherry blossom, all surrounded by frothy creamy-white hawthorn and fat purple tulips. No great swathes of colour, yet, just bright and clashing spots to draw the eye, resplendent against the greenery. For it’s not summer; that heavy languid torpor has not descended yet. The birds sound urgent, chivvying, the sap’s still rising. We’re slowly unfurling, though, both the buds and our winter-weary bones, shyly presenting ourselves to the sun. The bare limbs of the trees are covering up; ours are peeping out. Or maybe I’m wrong and it is summer after all – a big fat bumblebee has just drowsily alighted on my chair as I write this. The children think it’s summer, too, and await in thrilled anticipation for the ice-cream van which appeared, miraculously, once and only once, in our village last year. “I do believe in ice-cream vans, I do I do I do believe in ice-cream vans:” you can almost hear their unspoken thoughts. Maybe the ice-cream seller will think it’s summer too, and appear as if by magic. Who knows.

2007-04-28T11:12:00.001+01:00

13 April

The last couple of days have seen a convergence of East and West. Close friends of ours, who moved a few years ago to Cornwall, came to stay with their two children. I was excited about seeing them, given that they live a looong way from us and the opportunities to visit one another are rare, but I always get so caught up in preparations for visitors, so task-oriented, that I almost forget how nice it is when they actually arrive. Officially the Nicest People in the World, they are impecunious and irrepressibly cheerful, happy as proverbial sandboys in their seaside world.

J and I met at university, too many moons ago, and subsequently shared various grotty flats together. We talk about those days now and our speech is heavy with nostalgia, dripping with allusions to fun, to times of opportunity and lack of responsibility. In truth, it was more of a haze of red wine and tears, but we enjoy colluding in false memory syndrome. Since then, marriage, children and relocation for us both have limited the time we get to spend together, and have added lines to our faces and care to our hearts. It’s so nice to giggle and be irresponsible again, carelessly leaving the childcare to the husbands, the cooking as well in my case. The bigger children are of an age to make dens together, disappear from sight and supervision for a while, immediately picking up their casual acquaintance where they left off, ooh a year or so ago now, without the need for niceties. The little ones are a bit more suspicious, a bit guarded; Cinderella or Thunderbirds? Jammie Dodgers or chocolate fingers? A shared passion for Balamory and Smarties saved the day and they bonded, pressed up close, expressing their emotions through their bodies in true toddler style.

Both families moved out to the country at around the same time, yet our experiences are so different. We have fertile plains, they have windswept beaches. We get grass in our picnics, they get sand. We cycle and recycle, they sail and freecycle (well, we do too). We do cricket on the green, they surf the rollers. Our countryside is gentle and accessible, theirs wild and rocky. Our life is often north-easterly winds and mud, theirs south-westerly gales and salt. But we’re united in our love for our adopted lands, enthusing with all the zeal of the converted. United, too, in our fundamental quest to raise children who can tell a beech tree from an oak, who know that potatoes are dug from the ground, and who will grow up with some understanding of our rich pastoral heritage.

Perhaps the biggest difference is in attitude. Both our families have struggled, sometimes, with the pressures of life in a new environment, the need for a better work/life balance contrasting with the equally pressing need of keeping roofs over our eight heads. Yet they take worry and blow it out to sea, lost to the thundering waves, whereas our cares seem to ferment in this rich and heavy earth. There was a lesson there for us, and I hope we absorbed it.

They left late yesterday afternoon, and the children and I, all equally exhausted from late nights and constant chatter, settled down to my favourite double DVD offering; The Railway Children followed by Swallows and Amazons. Retro bliss. Now all I have to do is catch up with all the blogs.

2007-04-28T11:09:00.000+01:00

11 April

Once upon a time, a couple moved to a small Suffolk village, in search of a better quality of life and a small rural community in which to raise their children. The couple – let’s call them Tom and Mary – quickly became respected and liked, and in due course pillars of their new community; lay figures of the church, active in the village school, dispensing benevolent charity and wisdom wherever they went. He is tall and patrician, kindly with a hint of severity, she is elegant and eternally pleasant; the kind of people who make you feel clumsy and gauche. (Whenever I used to meet them in the village I would morph into a sort of Waynetta Slob figure, screeching at my children, who would invariably lose all hint of charm and become whiny and sullen). Tom and Mary became close friends with another village couple, the same age, the same lifestyle – we’ll call them John and Clare. There was always something a little more louche, a little more cavalier, about John, but with his wife he made the perfect foil for John and Mary, who glowed with sweetness and virtue. Tom and Mary’s son grew up, in the fullness of time, and married John and Clare’s daughter, their lives now bound together irrevocably, quiet and respectable middle-class lives played out against a backdrop of timeless English countryside. Then one day the village – and Clare – reeled with the news of John’s long standing infidelity with another woman in their circle (I’ve forgotten her name, but she doesn’t come into the story much). The people who seemed to take it worst of all were Tom and Mary, particularly Tom. Distraught on behalf of Clare and his daughter in law, he railed against John, publicly and privately, and seemed to feel personally betrayed by this slipping of standards and descent into brutal personal chaos. John eventually left the village with his new woman, but not before the one-time friendship with Tom and Mary had descended into war. It seemed to involve everyone; the vicar, parishioners, neighbours; apparently the Bishop was appealed to at one point, since neither Tom nor John would enter the church if the other was in it. They didn’t have adjoining houses, luckily, but their not inconsiderable gardens were separated only by a shallow stream, the foxgloves in one garden close enough to sneer at the dahlias in the other. When John left, the village sighed with relief; now the whole sorry mess could be a nine-day wonder, and slip back into the annals of local lore. And no-one wanted to make things hard for Clare, either; despite the gossip at the shop, the whisperings behind the prayer-sheets, the raised eyebrows at the font, anyone with a shred of empathy could understand the horror of a fractured life.

Tom and Mary, for some reason I can’t quite fathom, also seemed strangely diminished by the affair. Perhaps it was the shock of the break-up of their little set, or some vague realisation in Tom’s mind that the whole saga had got out of hand, but they seemed suddenly older, more querulous, less glowing with an aura of sanctity. They sold their big house and settled into a cottage nearer the heart of the village. They sold their house to a young couple, Rose and Charles, who had moved here with their toddler son and baby girl. They seemed set, in the fullness of time, to take over the role, vacated by Tom and Mary, of village elders, so perfectly did they reflect the youth of the older couple. Head to toe Boden, confident and genial, they adapted with ease to creeping middle age in the shires. But hubris was lurking just around the corner, beckoning in glee. Tom, at the point of slipping gently into old age, had a very public affair. With Rose, some twenty years his junior. Two more broken families. More shock and gossip for everyone else. Tom, Rose and Charles all, at varying points, moved away. And what of Mary and Clare, the abandoned wives, brought up to smile rigidly in the face of disaster? They sold their respective houses and moved in together (platonically, as far as anyone is aware), in glorious defiance of fate, to this day still pillars of the local community. And they say nothing ever happens in the country.

2007-04-28T11:08:00.002+01:00

10 April

“Excellent herbs had our Fathers of old -
Excellent herbs to ease their pain”

I don’t remember how old I was when I first heard that poem, but I was still a young child, and it captivated me. I wasn’t old enough then to spot the irony in Kipling’s words, it was the names of the herbs that stayed with me; eyebright, elecampane, valerian, rose-of-the-sun. They weren’t the lupins or the pansies that I could identify – what were they then? As I grew older I read about Culpeper and the medieval herbalists, about Tudor knot gardens and apothecaries’ herb plots. Long before I’d developed any interest in gardening, I found herbs and their products fascinating; loved the way that my grandmother would called the hedge her chemist and her patch of cultivated herbs her first-aid box. Even at a young age, I recognised that something had been lost, there was some knowledge there that hadn’t been passed down to me, and I wanted to find it. Herbs are steeped in magic and myth, and I love their poetic and historical associations.

My grandmother died before I could learn her lore, but books helped, as did the re-awakening of interest in the “flowers and sweet scented things,” as the ancient Greeks called them. I used herbal beauty products, bought herbal medicines, and grew my own on windowsills in cramped city flats. I wasn’t a cook, any more than I was a gardener, so although of course I knew about their many culinary uses, my diet was all restaurant dinners interspersed with beans on toast. It was only fairly recently, however, that I gained the gardening confidence to start my own herb garden. If you are thinking elaborate box hedges and monastic-style cloisters, think again. My garden unfortunately isn’t large, and I cleared a smallish patch, about 12 foot square, in a tangled and overgrown patch to the side of the kitchen, overlooking the stream some 12 feet below. It turned out to be fortuitous, though I didn’t know it at the time, since an elder tree overlooks the site, potent magic for our forefathers who believed that the presence of elders would increase the beneficial properties of herbs. Herbs are such beautiful and generous plants to grow organically; they attract bees, birds and butterflies, achieving a high level of pollination and increasing the productivity and health of all the plants. I’ve packed so many into this space; parsley, sage, rosemary and thyme, of course, but also lemon balm, borage and hyssop, feverfew and comfrey, chamomile and lovage, and many more.

I’ve become far more adept, if not yet an expert, at using the plants, as well. As well as storing the flowers for herbal teas, I use aloe vera, comfrey and marigold as ointments, tansy to ward off summer flies, southernwood to deter moths, lavender for pillows, linen and room sprays. I’m no practitioner, but have used feverfew tisanes for headaches, peppermint for digestion, elderflower for colds. I’m a better cook, now too, born out of the necessity to feed my family well, and I can’t imagine cooking without herbs. I feel as if I’m slowly reconnecting to that lost knowledge; when I use herbs, there’s a little pull on the string that connects us to the past.
I’d heard all the sayings about finding God in a garden. I expected to become absorbed, to find peace, but I hadn’t expected to find my family there too, shades among the plants. Without planning it at all, my little herb garden has become a memorial garden. There is a lilac tree next to the elder, leaning protectively over the space, and I stood under the blossom last year, thinking of my grandmother, who loved lilac so much, and wishing ferociously that she were sitting beneath it. I’d planted some rose bushes in amongst the herbs, partly as companion plants to the garlic, partly as a nod to the old monastic tradition of planting apothercaries roses in their herb gardens. One of my grandfathers adored roses, and I felt his presence strongly one day, when I caught their scent drifting over to me where I worked. From then on, the idea snowballed; for my other Grandad, I planted deep red wallflowers along the low bordering wall; mixed with self-seeding forget-me-nots, they make a brilliant splash of colour in the spring. Sweet Williams for my Uncle Billy, my mother’s twin, who died at sea at the age of twenty. Irises edge the path, for my mother-in-law of the same name, who I never know, and Madonna lilies grow by the roses, for her and my unknown father-in-law. I didn’t plant them, but the delicate pink buds that will become fat luscious peonies, remind me of the babies I lost. I think I’ve written before about burying our beloved family cat, Henry, here, under the sundial, with Good King Henry all around. All this bordered by rosemary, for remembrance.

You wouldn’t think it by reading this, but I look forwards more than I look back, and don’t always long to reclaim the past. But I love the little drifts of memories that come to me on the breeze when I’m gathering herbs, the little nudges from familiar figures. “Wonderful tales had our Fathers of old, Wonderful tales of the herbs and the stars.” Starlight and moonshine are the ideal background to my little herb garden; you feel part of a bigger whole, standing at night among the healing plants, listening to the water rushing past below. A life is a cycle, as is a garden; no wonder I never feel alone, out in the herbs.

2007-04-28T11:08:00.001+01:00

7 April

Oh what a day was yesterday. The garden seemed to shimmer in a dream of sunlit ease. We had lunch outside, in a shower of blossom, other buds breaking out around us. The children played happily for once, all loose-limbed and free without the encumbrance of scratchy jumpers or snaggy tights. I even fell asleep in the garden, stretched out like a cat in the sun. Bliss in April, filled with the promise of summertime still to come.

Today is R’s birthday, Easter weekend to boot, so hot cross buns mixed with birthday cake for us. We’re all babies about birthdays in this house, adoring the celebrations, the rituals. The children love to help form family traditions, the best-loved being the winning idea (I take all the credit) of bringing the cake with its halo of candles to the bed of the birthday child/adult, and everyone allowed a slither before breakfast. I am always envious of R for having his birthday at this time of year, all primroses and bleating lambs, (though we have spent plenty years sheltering from hail and sleet). Mine is in the beginning of February, a dank and dreary time of year, when the loss of another year can seem crushing. His, to me at least, are all promise and re-birth.

Given our somewhat pressing need to economise at the moment, today will be frugal compared to some of the birthday extravaganzas we held long ago. Yet bizarrely I have never been better pleased with the presents I bought him (I think he’d agree)., despite their ludicrous cheapness. Good for the venal offspring, as well, to see that it’s the thought that counts, though I’m not sure they’d agree if it were applied to their own festivities. Anyway, what more could he want – home with the family, home-made birthday cake in bed, streaming sun, waited on hand and foot all day?

2007-04-28T11:06:00.002+01:00

5 March
I was thinking about the ipod generation this morning, looking out of my window at a group of teenagers mooching about on the green. They have the usual hunched shoulder, head down appearance of fifteen year olds, the give-away tribe mentality. They also seem to be kicking at the earth (the boys) and shrieking loudly at each other (the girls) in a manner which reminds me of my own teenage years. What do they find to do here, in this sleepy hamlet, I wonder? What will I do when my own children are no longer content to send every waking hour with Mum and Dad? Is it true that country life for teenagers is a nightmare, full of longings for the big city, life as a parent not much better, reduced to acting as a permanent chauffeur and worrying about 17 year old drivers and twisting country lanes? I spent my own teenage years in the London suburbs and seem to recall passing most of my time on the tube. We joked when we moved here that J would be running away to Ipswich when he’s older, and R gloomily prophesises an adolescence filled with drinking special brew and hanging around the phone box on the green for him. Will we give up, as some of our neighbours have done, and decamp to the local market town with our surly offspring?
There is a sizeable population of teenagers here, which always surprises me as I tend to think of our village as being mainly filled with the over 70’s and parents with primary-school age children. It must be because I don’t see the older children so much, given that they don’t wander hand in hand with their Mums picking daisies any more, or go the pub en famille so much. They do appear, under cover of darkness usually, lurking slyly on the corners of the lanes, texting madly, or I sometimes glimpse them early on misty mornings, bent double under the weight of groaning backpacks, waiting for the bus to take them to college or school. Will they get out as soon as possible, I wonder, and groan to their friends about their dreary rural lives, or will they always long to return to their homes, as some of you on this site have done, memories of their little patch of native land always tugging at their hearts, wherever they are? Leave they surely will, for there are no jobs and little, if any, affordable housing here. Staying would mean making a permanent home with Mum and Dad, as some have done, not really having any choice in the matter.

I see the children of the very wealthy even less, given that they would appear to have their own social lives in place, revolving around their not-very-local schools, and they are often more city-savvy too, used to staying alone in their parent’s London crash-pads. Life will offer more opportunities, more possibility of eventually owning a place back home, too. The children I watch this morning are ordinary kids, some smart, some not, some destined for bright lights and yellow brick roads, no doubt, others for a life of bobbing in the water, trying to keep afloat. They always seem younger, shyer, than city kids of a similar age, less confident and self-aware, blushing and backing away like startled fauns when an adult stops to chat. Will community for them mean only an ivillage, packed with cyber relationships (I know, I know, I’m a fine one to talk), rural life the preserve of only the very rich or the very poor? Will the countryside be half manufactured park, half vast agri-business? Or will it still be the place that they will choose to bring up their own children, still a haven for those seeking refuge or an alternative, simpler way of life?

One or two of the girls outside have babysat for us on occasion. (One in particular always answers the phone and says she can’t do it, she has a date that night, only for her mother to ring back half an hour later to say that Lucy WILL be babysitting!). They’re sweet, kind girls, good with my children, and touchingly happy to return, temporarily, to the world of early childhood. Some of the village children, girls and boys, work in the local pub, or serve at the local farmer’s markets. The kids that can look menacing in a group, are polite and self-effacing on their own. The people who run the local youth club speak warmly about them, say they share the same concerns about rural life as the adults do. Much as they may champ at the bit, they’re lucky to be nurtured here, in this small place, and I hope they find a similar community in their future lives, wherever they are.

Our neighbour, a very old man, died recently and I was surprised to see so many teenagers at his funeral. Not seemingly coerced by their parents, they were there of their own volition, because he was a community figure who they’d all known. When one of the old ladies in the village slipped on the ice in the winter and broke her ankle, it was a couple of local youths who were out salting the pavement first, and it was a couple of girls who were first round at her cottage, seeing what they could do. ilike.

2007-04-28T11:06:00.001+01:00

4 April

Some places are haunted, and I think we went to one today. No white ladies or headless men in chains, but something in the ether seeped into our bones, an otherworldly, eerie feeling.
Yesterday was a gloomy, freezing cold day. We knew that spring was lurking somewhere behind the clouds, but the skies were too leaden and we were too cold to summon up any energy. It’s often quite relaxing to have a do-nothing day, the adults pottering, no pressure on the children, but somehow yesterday it didn’t work. I think it was because we felt we ought to be outside, that the days of being cooped up in winter were behind us, but the weather wasn’t co-operating. In the end, the day at risk of descending into frayed nerves and fretful wails, we spent part of the afternoon holed up in J’s treehouse, wrapped up in blankets and drinking hot chocolate. It turned out to be a perfect combination of outdoor activity and comforting indulgence, and calmed tempers which were in danger of unravelling.

Today there was a glimpse of sun, flirting coyly behind the cloud cover, and we felt up to going further afield. We went off to Sutton Hoo, on the river Deben, where the Anglo-Saxon burial ship of one of the earliest English kings was discovered. It truly is one of the most magnificent archaeological finds in our history, and although the main treasures are in the British museum, there are reconstructions and plenty of artefacts to see in the museum. The main draw, though, is to walk out to see the burial mounds themselves, especially on a bluff, slightly raw day like today. Overlooking the tidal estuary of the Deben, on a spur of a hill where the wind howls in straight off the North Sea, sit a group of about twenty earthen mounds, dreaming quietly for hundreds of years among the sandy, rabbit-infested soil.

It’s always been seen as a magical place, on the margin between myth, legend and documented history, and the strangeness surrounding the original excavations adds fuel to the fire of mystery. Although there’s evidence that some mounds were partially excavated (and robbed, of course) as far back as the sixteenth century, for generations the mounds had been little more than a curious feature of the local landscape until the 1930’s. The owner of the land in 1939, a Mrs Edith Pretty, widowed and living alone with her small son, had long been intrigued by the grassy mounds she could see from her drawing room window, and started to have strange and vivid dreams where she saw warriors in what appeared to be a funeral procession. By all accounts a slightly fey lady, interested in spiritualism, she invited friends with similar interests to stay with her, one of whom claimed to have a vision of great treasure, along with the same helmeted warriors. To cut a very long story short (and I’m aware many of you, particularly those also from Suffolk, may know all of this), she persuaded an eccentric local archaeologist, Basil Brown, to help her excavate the mounds. The rest, as they say, is history; helped by the gamekeeper and the gardener, Brown unearthed the huge ghost ship of the 6th century Wuffing dynasty, and the burial artefacts of, it is widely agreed, King Raedwald. His iconic and awe-inspiring bronze helmet, staring spookily out at you from eyeless sockets is rightly famous; for me the location itself is imposing and haunting, the ships of the Anglo-Saxon traders sailing up the wide river still visible, you might think, out of the corner of your eye.

Raedwald was apparently the overload of all the English kings of the period, and played a part in the establishment of Christianity. It has also seemed fitting to many that this illuminating find, symbolic in so many ways of the birth of the English nation, should be discovered right on the eve of the second World War (in fact the excavations were severely held up because of it). There’s no new-age spirituality here, though, no Glastonbury-esque crystal shops, no healing or Tarot offered. Instead there is something solemn and quiet about it, as if we are all still absorbing the enormity of the remains that slept there for so long. As we turned and left the mounds, walking away from the lonely heath back to the bustling modernity of the visitors centre, I felt that we were leaving people behind, layer upon layer of them, their lives recorded in the flinty earth. The café, the children’s play area, and of course, the shop, returned my sense of normality, but the past still overtakes you sometimes and trips you up, often when you least expect it. I thought about other locations imbued with a sense of strangeness, of times colliding. A friend, with whom I occasionally run, won’t ever let us run past a certain copse along an ordinary country lane; she doesn’t know why, and nor do I. I’m fairly robust about haunted houses and spooky woods, but something unsettled me today. Maybe it was just the past, tripping me up again.

2007-04-28T11:05:00.001+01:00

3 April

We went for an impromptu drink last night with some people we know who have recently moved into the village. It felt quite strange to be going to the pub on a Monday night, but I’m making the most of R being home for a couple of weeks before he starts his new job, our friends were free and suggested a drink, the children were shattered after a hard afternoon’s playing and happy to be early to bed with a babysitter installed, so out we went. Our new friends are both German, new to England as well as this area, and pleasingly delighted with their new life. There’s only one problem; both R and I have this awful habit of slipping into whichever accent is around us at the time. It’s not conscious, and we try so hard not to do it, but in the space of a single conversation we can be Welsh, Glaswegian or Mancunian, depending on who we’re talking to. I used to think it was just me, because I have changed accents myself during my life. I had a Geordie one for the first seven years of my life, then we moved to the London suburbs, where my flat ‘a’s’ were mocked, and apparently overnight I started saying ‘barth’ and ‘clarss’ for bath and class, much to the amusement of my parents. In my teenage years my accent morphed into street-cred norf Lunnon, and has now settled into featureless generic south-eastern. R, however, has no such excuses, as he grew up in rural Kent and has never sounded any different. So there we were, chatting to our new friends, and I could hear ourselves coming out with comments such as “Is that wine not very marvellous?” and “For sure, the weather is being pleasant and mild”. I am always horrified in these situations, thinking that the people we are talking to will pick up on it and think we are mocking their English (which is of course, pretty faultless), but luckily it seemed to go unnoticed.

We are very lucky to have our great local pub, just a mere stagger away across the green, and although small children mean we don’t get there in the evenings as often as we might like, it is a great venue for families during the summer. We have been known to while away entire afternoons sitting out on the huge lawn, along with what seems like the rest of the village. It backs onto woods and streams, so is often an essential stop when family walks just happen to take us in that direction, and it has all the requisite inglenooks and beams to make family Sunday lunches mellow and cosy. The children have often startled city-dwelling guests by asking to go over there after tea (it has the best play equipment in the area), and I believe ‘pub’ was one of my daughter’s first words. The annual bonfire night celebrations are held in their field, just behind, and it retains the feel of an old inn at the heart of the community. There are those (my husband included, sometimes) who bemoan the loss of a traditional ‘drinking’ pub, and it’s true that some of the old characters aren’t there any more, although Skinny John (his name’s John, and he’s skinny; we don’t do any of that superfluous verbal badinage round here!) and one or two others still prop up the bar most nights. Me, I never really went for that ‘Slaughtered Lamb’ feeling of all the locals going silent when you go in, and I love to wander in with the children and know I can get nice food if I so wish. They are relaxed about children, and relaxed about people whiling away their afternoons in the garden while nursing a single orange juice and lemonade, as I have occasionally done. I am aware of how packed such a venue would be in a built-up area, and despite its local popularity, I’m still grateful for its ancient, quiet feel.
It felt odd, last night, to be dispensing local wisdom to our friends. Having been incomers here for so long, they were treating us as venerable residents, who could fill them in on village traditions and local history. It felt quite nice, to have people hanging off our every word (doesn’t often happen!) and to feel so settled, so right, so at home.

2007-04-28T11:04:00.001+01:00

2 April

Daniel and his dog are both possessed of dark, limpid eyes, devotion and loyalty. In earlier times, Daniel may have been said to be possessed, full stop. The middle child of three boys, he came into this world turning his head away, seemingly horrified by the world in which he found himself, finding no comfort in his mother’s arms or at her breast. Since then, it is as if he has refused to fully enter our world. Nine now, he is distanced, disconnected, often distraught. His parents, like so many others, have never had a clear diagnosis or explanation for their son’s condition. “Somewhere on the autistic spectrum” is as close as they can get. His mother and I met when her youngest and my eldest were babies, and she was slowly recognising that her withdrawn, obsessive toddler would always remain behind a barrier, would never embrace our world, or indeed, embrace her. Seven years on, he still avoids eye contact, is uneasy around others, and meeting anyone new causes him to gallop away like a frightened colt, stamping the ground as he flees.

I have known him for the bulk of his short life, and can sometimes have a glimpse, the tiniest fraction of understanding, of the frustration and sorrow of his parents, of the devastation his condition has wrought on the family. My friend copes admirably on the outside, but inside a part of her is slowly withering away. Not her love for her boy, never that, she loves him with the same fierce pride that she shows for her other sons, but I sometimes think that faith and hope are dying inside her. Even though I’ve changed names, I feel protective of their privacy and shouldn’t document the family breakdown that has sometimes overshadowed them, but it will suffice to say that she has known some dark nights of the soul.

Daniel and his Mum and brothers are coming for tea today. It probably wasn’t the best day I could have chosen, this first day of the Easter holidays, for my children are tired and not at their most robust after a late night driving back from Kent last night, but if their old friends won’t invite them, who will? Close as they are to the rest of the family, my two are often scared of Daniel, who can fly into silent rages, push others away with force, ruin games, frustration leading to destruction. Regular contact with him helps, though; long absences turn a troubled child into a monster, in their memories, whereas frequent visits shrink the spectre back to ‘just Daniel’.
My friends aren’t wealthy, but by most people’s standards they are comfortably off, and lucky enough to have a big garden behind their cottage, running down to water meadows. The natural world has been Daniel’s salvation, the one thing that calms him. He rarely shows emotion beyond rage and frustration, but if he is outside, whatever the weather, he becomes absorbed. He is a child of fields and woods, hedgerows and streams (though interestingly, not the sea; this overwhelms him; his senses overloaded, he screams and screams on seeing it). He turns into a Pan figure, communicating silently with trees and birds, alone but never lonely. He is an awkward, gangly boy, having left the sweetness of early childhood behind, ill at ease with his limbs and uncoordinated. Yet running through the trees, he is full of grace. Sometimes, I think he may have found his niche more readily in an earlier age, had he been accepted in his community. I could see him as a shepherd, or a hermit, perhaps, living deep in the woods. Perhaps I’m just being romantic; but a life outdoors would suit him so much more than an institution which surely beckons.

My friends bought a dog, last year; it was a gamble, with Daniel around, but they had a hunch that a dog might help. It was spectacularly successful. Charlie, their English setter, has provided Daniel with the friend that he has never had. It sounds sentimental, too perfect, and it’s true that he still won’t integrate with other people, but Charlie has brought hope to this family, and an element of relaxation, and, dare I say it, happiness to Daniel. They roam the woods together, curl up on the mat together (and this a child who hates to be touched). Daniel takes care of him, grooming him, feeding him, crooning to him, seeking him out each early morning and disappearing into the garden with him for hours on end. As Charlie’s natural owner, Daniel has gained status amongst other children; they look forward to seeing Charlie, if not Daniel himself, and Daniel basks, shyly, secretively, in the reflected glory, an indication that he may crave human contact, after all.

Even if dogs were a solution for every child like this, it’s hardly a practical answer. So many children like Daniel aren’t lucky enough to live in the country, with a big garden, and to have a dog. What do I know, anyway, about the education and support for autistic children? Nothing, really, but I remember last summer, when Charlie was a new addition to the family, and we were visiting. Daniel and Charlie were among the trees at the edge of the water meadows, boy and dog hazily outlined in the summer light, seeming to merge into the water and the leaves. Daniel, the boy who hates water, who can’t have a bath, got his feet wet, following Charlie into the marshy shallows, and when Charlie turned and shook, droplets of water flying off him like sparks of light, showering him, he laughed and hugged his dog.

2007-04-28T11:03:00.000+01:00

31 March

“Halston, Gucci, Fiorucci”. Not very Country Living, admittedly, but very much the theme of the party I went to last night. It was a friend’s 40th, she is lucky enough to have an amazing barn next to her house which is the most perfect party venue, and she threw a 70’s party to celebrate, despite the fact that her experience of the early seventies was limited to tartan pinafores and ‘Rainbow’ on the television. Parties are an infrequent event in my life these days; I’m usually in my pyjamas by 9.00 pm, my social life consisting of mellow dinners with friends or lazy lunches with packs of children racing around. But last night was all about being grown-up, yet paradoxically paying homage to our youthful selves. Think Studio 54, think Bianca Jagger’s iconic white trouser suit, think Marie Helvin in gold lame. Actually, think a rather motley collection of us country dwellers, usually to be found in fleeces and wellies, desperately trying to recreate some imagined glamour from an era that definitely had its sartorial and social catastrophes. No memories of gloomy evenings with no electricity, winters of discontent or unrest on the street, last night; no NF marches, skinheads in Doc Martens, or water shortages; just extravagance, glitter balls, and lots and lots of make-up. Some people had gone down the comedy route; joke wigs, catsuits and Alvin-Stardust like platform boots, whilst others, (myself included), too vain to want to raise a laugh but eager to enter into the party spirit, made good use of the current fashion for floaty smock tops and accessorised madly, no doubt overdoing the blue eye shadow and eyeliner.

We ate chilli con carne and black forest gateau; drank snowballs (remember those), or tried to, then turned with gratitude to the wine. It felt as though people were behaving like teenagers at a disco, too; no improper behaviour or a sneaked cigarette behind the bike sheds, I assure you, but people still fell back into their natural roles. There was the life-and-soul group, hogging the dance floor, drinking a little too much, exuberant and showing off. There were the hardened drinkers, rarely leaving the bar or their tables, watching the dancer floor with a critical eye. There were those who seemed not to notice that they were at a party at all, but who immediately struck up conversations with their friends or neighbours as though they had met walking the dogs in a ploughed field, launching straight away into the price of crops, animal husbandry or the weather forecasts. An incongruous sight, this bunch of men (for all were of course male), since some were in their usual no-nonsense attire, others sporting stick-on moustaches, kipper ties and velvet waistcoats, doubtless coerced by wives and girlfriends into’ making an effort’, but deeply uncomfortable and wriggling nonetheless, like schoolboys forced into starched collars. Then there were the group of women who stood in a gaggle by the door most of the evening, husbands at the bar, huddled together next to the escape route for security, eyes darting anxiously around to see who they recognised. They would have been the ones dancing together around their handbags twenty years ago. And me? Oh, floating elegantly, drinking moderately, smiling graciously, of course.

The music; well, I’ll give you a flavour of the great and the OK and the frankly forgettable, to recreate any dormant memories you may have of school discos, or the music your parents used to play. Chic; Donna Summer; Hot Chocolate; The Jackson Five; The Drifters; Alice Cooper; Sister Sledge; Steve Harley and Cockney Rebel; Elton John; The Small Faces; Roxy Music; Bowie; Sparks; Blondie; Boney M; Steely Dan; Mud; Slade; The Sweet; Showadywaddy; KC and the Sunshine Band; T-Rex; Abba; Wizard; The Average White Band; Earth Wind and Fire; Supertramp; Thin Lizzy.

I have a dull ache in my head today, reminiscent of the thumping disco sounds last night, and loud noises jar. It’ll be an early bath and bed for me as well as the children tonight, to which I am already looking forward. A lovely evening though; we called it pure nostalgia, but really it was fantasy. I’ve always said there’s nothing wrong with fairy-tales.

2007-04-28T11:02:00.000+01:00

29 March
Gardens are among my earliest memories. We had a tiny one in the first house I lived in, yet the crazy paving was a gateway to another world for me and my sister. I can still see the bricks in the wall under which we buried our hamsters and gerbils; a holocaust of pets, if memory serves me right, since they seemed to give up the fight the moment we got them home. As I got older, the gardens got bigger, yet it some ways that first one was the biggest of them all, because I was so small, and my imagination so huge. I have always loved gardens; dreamed of them, read about them, pined in my flat-dwelling days to have one of own. From my first reading of The Secret Garden, I’ve been aware of the magical and secretive natures of gardens. Big expanses of lawn don’t really do it for me, although I’ve often wished ours was a bit bigger. I like enclosed spaces, walls and hedges, twists and turns and sudden surprises. I like a garden to slowly unveil its delights.
Despite my delight in being in a garden, despite my very definite tastes and preferences, I never actually gardened until very recently. I told myself it was because I didn’t have time, because I was too impatient by nature, because I didn’t enjoy physical hard work. Yet really it was because I had no confidence; I didn’t know where to start, I was daunted by the volumes of information, the terrifying know-how of everyone else. I think I was rebelling against my Father, too, who was and is an obsessive gardener. My teenage years were spent bringing home boyfriends, and having to sulkily submit to a tour of the garden by Dad. We’d both be dying to go to the pub, but would be out there for ages, the boyfriend usually desperate to impress and trying to dredge up something – anything – to say about plants, while I would stamp my kitten heels in the gravel and pout. My sister and I must have been such a disappointment to my Dad in our teenage years; he worked so hard to be able to afford to move us out to a leafy suburb and provide us with a lovely big garden, but all we could do was yearn for the dives of London and stare out moodily at the fields.

When I did finally get my own garden, I dutifully made a few lists of what I wanted, bought a few things, then sat back and watched my husband do the work. He knows his stuff, but his heart isn’t really in it; although he is obsessed by trees and woodland, flower gardening doesn’t do it for him. Several gardens later, I suddenly stopped being a spectator, an appreciator, and found my place in the garden. It really was sudden; a friend bought me a plant, R was away, I had to do something with it. So I planted it, gingerly and full of trepidation. The smell of the wet earth overwhelmed me; it really was a Proust and the madeleines moment – my childhood came flooding back. I was hooked. This was only a couple of years ago, and I have since become as obsessive as my father. R was suspicious at first, knowing my propensity for sudden passions, and knowing also that they often don’t last long. This has me gripped though, and if I’m not outside with the children, I’m searching fervently through books of gardening lore and plant encyclopedias. The garden and I are still shy with one another, however; I’m still learning, still not entirely sure of myself, still making a mistake here, a faux pas there. I’m discovering it’s secrets, what grows best where, what’s beautiful but not very showy, what starts out with a great display but turns out to be all fur coat and no knickers, as my Gran would say. And slowly, slowly, I’m creating a garden. My Dad is with me, of course, occasionally in person, often in spirit. I’m amazed, actually, at how much I already knew, how much I must have absorbed sub-consciously whilst stroppily following my Dad around his garden. It felt like coming home, handling that first patch of wet earth. My Grandad is in my garden too, whispering in my ear at odd moments, reminding me of plants I’d long forgotten. My Grandad’s garden … that stole my heart at the tender age of four or five. I dream of it often, and try to recreate it, although my garden resolutely goes its own way. It wasn’t big, just a typical cottage garden, flowers and produce all jumbled up together, at the back of an ordinary miner’s house in a pit village. Those plants were the sun and air to my Grandad, and I caught fragments of that love as a small child, not understanding devotion, but recognising it nevertheless.

I will probably outgrow this garden, at some point. It’s never been quite big enough for the house, and it already annoys me that there isn’t room for a decent vegetable patch. I grow some garlic and onions, a few carrots, and tomatoes and strawberries all mixed up with the flowers, as my Grandad would have done, but it would be nice to have more. I’ll save my herb garden for another blog; herbs have always been a passion of mine, I always had some in pots, long before I started ‘proper’ gardening, and they come first in this garden too. They’re slightly separate from the main garden, for me, though, bound up as they are with medicinal and culinary uses, and occupying a different place n my heart.

There have been times recently when I’ve stood out in my garden on a summer’s night, under a slither of moon, bathed in fragrance, and thought that maybe I’m creating an earth poem in honour of my Dad and my Grandad, both of whom, oddly, also took suddenly to gardening in their middle years, having shown no interest before. Other times I’ve thought I’m doing it simply for myself, because my life was ready for this passion. I’m still jealous, sometimes, of other people’s knowledge, and shy when talking about successes. I’m too aware of my own inexperience, and get frustrated and impatient with reversals, or lack of progress. But I’m still in the first flush of new love, and I’m already planning our future.

2007-04-28T11:01:00.000+01:00

28 March

This blog is about good and bad. I feel in the mood to make severe moral judgements, none of this prizes-for-all political correctness from me today. Yesterday the countryside was pouring forth sweetness and light; cerulean blue skies, sparkling hedgerows, everything washed by that colour peculiar to the time of year that is neither yellow nor green. I felt the energy around me, the sap rising, but I got myself all worked up over the injustices of the world. Nothing on too big a scale, mind you, I wasn’t on a one-woman mission to end global poverty or imprisonment without trial. It just annoys me, for want of a better word at the moment, that even our tiny community, off the scale in terms of even local importance, can have its fair share of winners and losers, and that it should be quite so unjust. I know that even the smallest group of people will contain the usual stereotypes; the gossip, the control freak, the pedant, and that it will also contain those who try to work for the common good, and those only concerned for themselves.
Take Richard, a local small farmer who lives down a tiny lane quite close to me. His parents farmed the same land before him, his grandparents before that. He and his family are permanently poised on the brink of catastrophe, fearing each month for the news that will tip them over the edge. I walk past their farmhouse regularly as one of our favourite walks crosses by their land. It always makes me think of “a little crooked house with a little crooked stile” – it’s small and dilapidated and uneven, looking as if it’s slowly sinking back into the rich earth. The scene reminds me of a child’s drawing; chickens clucking in the yard, ducks on the pond, green fields which are all managed by one man. It’s no longer a sustainable life, although Richard and his wife have diversified. She is artistic and crafty, like so many of you talented souls on this site, and sells what she makes when she can. They have also started an organic vegetable box scheme, that bastion of middle-class rural life. We took his boxes, and as well as the treat of the vegetables, satisfyingly earthy and misshapen, I looked forward to the weekly ritual of the chats I had with Richard or Helen. They always seemed to bring a breath of peace with them, as we stood chatting in the porch, something timeless and relaxing. Such, quiet, gentle, people, old hippies, you might think, if you saw them in the pub one night, not knowing how hard they worked, how the effort to keep afloat is weighing them down. Not that they could afford a pint in the pub, anyway, less still the pottering, artisan life they look as though they might lead, all baggy jumpers and slightly unkempt hair. They play such an active role in the village life; their daughter has left the village school now, but they’re still always there with fundraising ideas, popping in on the elderly, concerned and attentive.

There was a huge problem for me though; their veg wasn’t really up to much. It was reasonably priced, as far as organic boxes go, but there was never anything we wanted to cook with. I know the idea is that you make do with what is in season, and I understand that, and tried hard, but there is a limit to my creativity as a cook. Given that we have young children, our favourite meals tend to be those staples of family cooking, for which I need endless amounts of onions, garlic, carrots, broccoli and leeks, with a couple of interesting additions, according to the season. We would get week after week of turnips and sprouts. We did talk to them about this, but there wasn’t much improvement. A few weeks ago, mindful of our need to economize at the moment, we decided we couldn’t continue. There’s a greengrocer in a neighbouring large village who supplies good quality organic veg and is cheaper. I felt terrible, but the words stumbled out in the end. Richard seemed even more insubstantial than ever, is if he were fading around the edges. I nearly cried. (We were reminded of a time in London, when R used to buy his morning capuccino from a tiny family run Italian café, outside the tube station closest to his work. Unfortunately a Costa coffee opened up even closer to the tube, and he started going in there, as they were quicker. One day he was walking down the road, Costa cup in hand, to see the Italian man coming towards him. “It’s all over, Sir, it’s all over, I’m closing down, not enough business”, he said, pumping R’s hand in grateful thanks for his custom. R has never been able to drink Costa’s coffee since).

The ‘bad’ man in this tale is another neighbour, a man who made his pile of money and came to live the good life in the country. Nothing wrong with that; we’re all buying into the dream, after all, and I’m an incomer too. He bought a large house with a huge garden that adjoins the school field. It’s a tiny school of around eighty pupils, aged 4-9; as a parent I think the behaviour is exemplary. As soon as he moved in, the letters started. Fired off in all directions, they usually included complaints about the ‘students’ littering the paths and being noisy. He complained about noise from the village hall, opposite his house. Large notices appeared on all his boundaries asking for his privacy to be respected (?). Our pre-school (part-time play sessions for two-and-a-half to four year olds) was housed for a while in the village hall while we raised funds to finance purpose-built accommodation on the school site. This was a huge community effort for a small village and we raised all the funds ourselves. This nearly sent him into apoplexy. He held up the planning proposals at every available stage, objecting to the potentially unruly behaviour, and the likelihood of ‘bottles being left lying around’. Bottles of what - milk? His objections were all thrown out, and building is currently underway, hurrah. His house went straight on the market.

What has all this got to do with yesterday? Well ,yesterday I heard he’s moving out, to somewhere more ‘congenial’, with electric gates. It may have its own police force to arrest unruly toddlers for all I know. And Richard? Well, it’s back to the recipe books for me. I popped round yesterday evening and told him I wanted the boxes again. It’ll cost us a bit more, but economics was never my forte; my conscience will be salved.

2007-04-28T10:57:00.002+01:00

27 March

I heard about a death in the village this morning. There are two old ladies, twin sisters, who live with their younger brother, the three of them unmarried and crammed in together in their shabby cottage. The brother has mental health issues, which I believe is the right way of putting it these days. He shambles amiably through the village, chatting to anyone he sees, his trousers baggy, his eyes curiously vacant. He is a harmless and genial soul, and I’m often grateful that he lives in this day and age, where he has a roof over his head, and no-one points and calls in the street. Or maybe he would always have been looked after, part of the community, everyone’s responsibility. I would like to think so. His sisters must be in their late seventies, identical only in their papery, powdered faces and faded gentian-blue eyes. Maisie is shorter than her sister, forceful, bullish in figure and attitude. She’s certain of herself, opinionated and bossy; the three of them are scions of the oldest and wealthiest local family (I’m not quite sure what the relationship is, but clearly this branch have fallen on hard times) and she doesn’t want you to forget it. She adjudicates at village shows, shooting stick in place, barking orders and intimidating people with her sheer force of personality. She is the antithesis of everything that I normally warm to in people, yet there’s something curiously touching about her refusal to be cowed by anything or anyone, her spirit indominitable despite the setbacks life has thrown at her. Her sister Barbara, taller and thinner, is gentler, softer, all trailing scarves and wispy hair, something pleading and mournful about her, all fluidity in contrast to her sister’s force. She always longed for marriage and children, yet neither came her way. She carries this regret around with her like an injured baby, holding it out for everyone to see. Maisie would have loved children too, she feels the loss keenly, she says. But you take what life throws at you and you get on with it, she told me once. It’s hard for me, such a product of the late twentieth century, my life abounding with choices, to recognise how circumscribed were the young lives of Maisie and Barbara. So little was expected of them in some ways, yet when the prepared-for life didn’t happen, they felt abandoned by their little world, marooned in isolation. “I was disappointed in love”, says Barbara, making me think of star-crossed lovers, of shotgun-wielding fathers and aborted assignations, or of fiancées who maybe left for war and didn’t return. “We never met anyone, stuck out here and with Robbie to take care of” is the forthright Maisie’s take on it. Maisie stared her loss in the face and put it to one side. Her life is busy, full of committees and societies and causes and people. Barbara’s isn’t. The strange thing is is that Barbara, who makes such a fuss of children, doesn’t connect with them. I’ve watched my own and other children stare unmoved as she clucks and fusses over them, patting their heads and marvelling at their growth. Yet Maisie they like – direct, slightly scary and too busy to take too much notice of them, they respond to her natural authority and rather gruff kindness. My daughter calls her the jewel lady, an oddly exotic name for such an unadorned woman, because the few times we have called at their tiny cottage, Maisie has chucked an old jewel box, complete with garnet necklaces, at her, and told her to play. She did.

It was Barbara who died yesterday, Barbara who never came to terms with the way her life turned out, who expected so much but got so little.

I’ve been thinking of another old lady today, one who I saw at a children’s party on Saturday. Some of the birthday girl’s extended family was there, and there was a very old lady sitting motionless in the centre of the festivities, presumably someone’s great granny or great aunt. When the children were playing pass the parcel, she suddenly reached out, grabbed the parcel and began to unwrap it greedily. The children were horrified; one or two cried. The adults were taken aback and took a moment or two to respond. Eventually the hostess gently took it off her and gave it back to the children. It wasn’t without its funny side, and my friends and I giggled afterwards, albeit with nervous laughter. But the look on the old lady’s face as the present was taken away from her stayed with me, and I thought of it today when I heard about Barbara. Maybe it is disappointment that does for us, in the end.

2007-04-28T10:57:00.001+01:00

26 March

Given that we have an eight year old boy in the house, any conversation seems to turn magically to Doctor Who. After we’d listen to a loooong discussion between J and our friends’ sons on the benefits of time travel yesterday, we started idly discussing where we’d like to go, if we had our own Tardis. The main question we decided upon was, if we could only go either into the future or back to the past, which would you choose? You could travel as often as you wanted, but could only go in the one direction. Obviously everyone wants to do both, but given this choice, I chose to go back. My husband, without a shred of nostalgia in his bones, chose the future. So did our friends. The boys, their lives stretching before them like the Yellow Brick Road, are amazed to even be asked. They want nothing but the future; their brief pasts just a hazy milky memory. I’d love to see what lies in store, but the past wins every time for me. I would hate to be stranded, uncomprehending, in the future, like a 21st century Catweazle (showing my age here!), with no points of reference to cling to. Maybe I’m just unadventurous. I’d love to revisit the past, both the personal and the public. Think of the people I could see again, and think of the questions that could be answered. I’ve always loved history, but often felt dissatisfied with the interpretation of historians. So easy to remake history according to your own standards and culture, and so beyond the realms of the possible to ever know for sure. I’m not sure what my ‘favourite’ history period is; if I had to choose one, I’d probably pick the early medieval period, through Britain around the time of the Roman conquest would come pretty close. And world history – think of where you could go, what you could see.

I’d like to get back close to home, too. See my house as it was when it was first constructed, in the eighteenth century. It was originally two houses, in fact, although dwellings may be a more appropriate word – the smaller half would have been a one-up, one down, tiny rooms at that. I could find out who ‘Bess’ really was (I wrote an earlier blog about the name scratched on a beam in my daughter’s room). I don’t think I have a romantic view of the past; I know how hard life would have been for cottagers in those days; I know about the grinding poverty, the meagre survival rates for infants, the threat of starvation. Great to pop in, though, like the benevolent Doctor, dispensing wisdom and handy survival tips. I look at our sleepy village on this clear blue spring morning, and think what I’d have seen a couple of hundred years ago. More activity, more life, more people, for sure. We don’t do badly for a rural parish of a few hundred souls, well off the beaten track; we have a pub, a school, a doctor’s surgery, a butchers shop. But there used to be so much more here, truly a butcher, a baker and a candlestick maker. And a rope maker. And a corn chandler, blacksmith, cartmaker, washerwoman, dairy maids. Even as recently as the 1970’s there was a chip shop and a delicatessen, (both ends of the market catered for!) now vanished along with the post office and general stores. So many of the village houses have names telling of their former use; the Old Stores, the Old Bakers, the Old Post Office. I don’t want us to be preserved in aspic, a charming reconstruction. And the village is fighting back, campaigning for more facilities, fewer closures, more affordable housing. But the yearning, nostalgic part of me misses a past I never knew. I think about the noises, too; one of the things we love about living here is the silence. No major roads are near, although traffic does of course pass through the village, so thre’s plenty of birdsong, the nights silent apart from the hooting of the owls. Daily life a hundred years ago must have been far noisier, although lovely not to hear the jets overhead or the background hum of cars. The sound of horses’ hooves must have been a constant (I was surprised to read, once, in a book about 12th century England, that market towns had ‘cart parks’). The strange thing is, is that in our little lane, I often hear the sound of hooves, even when there’s no horse to seen. It’s probably the acoustics of the green, or something; there are certainly a lot of riders about. But maybe the past is all around us, after all.

2007-04-28T10:55:00.001+01:00

24 March

A small shallow river encircles our village like a silver necklace. Called the Box, a name I love because it reminds me of box hedges and topiary, it’s a river of absolutely no significance, a stream that is a tributary of another stream, unusual only in that causes our village layout to be circular. This is rare in our part of Suffolk; most of the surrounding villages are long and straggly, with meandering streets which gently peter out into water meadows or farmland. Our village, set in a valley surrounded by rolling hills, is clustered around a traditional green, with the 12th church and Georgian rectory at one end, the Victorian Institute (village hall) at the other, and a couple of small but nonetheless curious standing stones (circular, not menhirs) dotted about. We loved the place when we first saw it, loved the fact that it had a tiny but good school, an excellent pub, a doctor’s surgery and a 1920’s garage. We bemoaned the fact that it had two good butchers, but no shop. Coming from a house that was isolated, I loved the way that the dwellings huddled together, facing inwards, protected by the natural boundary of the river. Most of the houses in the centre of the village have the river at the back; it’s the usual conversation opener here, mentioned even before the weather. It’s at the back of ours, but at the foot of a steep slope, some ten feet below the main garden. The old lady next door told me that in the 1930’s the level had risen so high that our garden was flooded, but that the water course had deviated slightly since then, and it hadn’t happened since. I love our little slice of stream; it rages like a torrent after winter rains, a swift brown rush that silences the children as it sweeps past, a mere paddling trickle in summer, perfect for cooling ankles and catching sticklebacks. Shiny stepping stones are revealed, and a tiny patch of shingly sand, or own four foot square ‘beach’. When the level’s fairly low, it’s possible to walk through the river in an almost perfect circle around the village, apart from a few tricky bits where you need to scramble up the muddy banks, or put the children on your shoulders.

It’s been a dreary drizzle of a day here, and the children, cooped up inside and waiting with mounting excitement for a party that both of them have been invited to later this afternoon, have been fractious and squabbling. In the end we hauled them out, still quarrelling gently, for a river walk, to splash the bad humour away. My son looks for big sticks, seemingly essential for any male, regardless of their age, and unusual stones. I remember him at four looking for pirates; his sister, at almost four, is convinced she can hear the siren songs of mermaids. They make no distinction between sea and river; water is water, after all, and carries their imaginations along with it on it’s bubbling journey. The day is still and cold and grey; I get impatient with spring, on days like this, when we seem to be waiting for that final flourish, the fanfare of birdsong and blooms that is just around the corner. It’s hard to remember doing this same walk in summer, the banks filled with purple loosestrife, the air heavy with midges and the scent of meadowsweet.

As we encircle the village, we pass by the gardens and houses of neighbours, friends, and acquaintances. R and I notice who’s doing what to their garden, what looks good, what doesn’t, who’s extending, who’s going to need to if it’s true that a fourth is on the way – without speaking we can sense each other’s approval or disapproval, a raised eyebrow sufficing as we pass the house of the local ‘Asbo family’, their garden awash with rusty bikes, bright plastic and old cars. I remember when they moved in and the youngest son started at the village school; on his first morning he accidentally blocked the headmistress’s way, and was admonished by his mother to “shift your a*se, you little s*d”. The hands of the yummy mummy contingent flew to their mouths in one graceful, slow-motion movement. The children see different things, though. They notice the clashing pansies planted outside the kitchen window, in defiance of the joyless chaos all around. They’re jealous of the broken down caravan, parked at the side, and wave with excitement to the children inside. We pass the ordered and soulless garden of the village busybody, who with her expressionless voice and officious manner is avoided by us; the children remember her kindness when James fell down outside school and cut his knee, and the sweetie she pressed into his hand. We pass houses where we don’t know the occupants but they do; one elderly man, a retired teacher, apparently listens to the children reading once a week at the school; a teenage occupant of another house is studying childcare at the local college and has helped out at the pre-school, we are informed. We think we know everything there is to know about this place, the feuds and the affairs, the illnesses and broken lives. Turns out the children know a different village, after all.

2007-04-28T10:54:00.001+01:00

22 March
I had to go to London today, for a meeting about some potential work from a company I used to work for, many moons ago. I set off early, prising small children off me, lists of instructions tumbling out of my mouth. It must be so nice to just pick up a briefcase and go. My daughter was cross and pouty; having fully recovered from her bout of illness, in that miraculous way that small children do, she sensed my attention wandering from her, along with my physical presence. “Work’s stupid”, she announced, with all the assurance of Paris Hilton. “I won’t do it when I’m a big lady”. “Let’s hope you do a better job of landing a sugar Daddy than I did, honeybunch”, I muttered. I hadn’t particularly wanted to go as it’s a long and expensive trip, just for a brief meeting which may or may not come to anything. See and be seen is a fine motto for office life, but not so convenient when you’re making a round trip of 150 miles. I didn’t have anyone to look after the children for more than part of the day, so couldn’t make a day and night of it. Once I was on the train, though, I let the pleasure of unaccustomed solitude wash over me. I’m one of those people who loves to travel. Arriving in London, my mood changed. I seem to have lost that ability to adapt quickly to my surroundings that I had when I was younger; maybe we all lose, it, at some point. The barrage of noise and the rush and hum all around me seemed too much. Everything too bright, too loud, too brash. Sensory overload; I wanted to hunker down like a toddler and bury my face in my Mother’s skirt. God, I hate London, I thought. Some twenty minutes later, I was walking through the City, passing restaurants and bars I once knew too well, remembering ambition, celebrations, intense friendships with colleagues who have long since pulled up the drawbridges and retreated to their families, like me. I felt the familiar energy return, I walked faster, felt confident, striding out. These boots were sure made for walking. God, I love London.

I was plunged back into the abyss a few minutes later. My meeting was with a fairly senior guy in the company, someone who joined long after my time, but to my surprise he was twelve. Or maybe fourteen, at a push. It was a relatively informal chat, but to my horror I could feel myself coming over all bossy and maternal, not at all the smart, confident girl-about-town image I’d expected to snap into. Hell, I thought, maybe I’ve only got two personas now; bossy Mum, or frantic blogger, fingers aching, eyes bulging, making a bee line for the computer at strange times of day, and only able to relate to cyber friends. Thanks the Lord he didn’t ask me about any hobbies; I’d have got him on the site before he could say ‘financial remuneration’; maybe he could have started a London blog to rival Frances’s NY tales, “Life as a teenage mover and shaker”.

Anyway, I came, I saw, I probably failed to conquer, but it was OK. The best part of my day was going for a coffee in Soho, to one of my favourite places in the world (see photo). R and I went for coffee there when we bumped into one another one Saturday, a couple of days after we’d first met, through work; I suppose it was our first date. They made our wedding cake for us. Of course, as soon as I sat down, I started wondering about the children, and what they were up to, and what sticky concoctions they would have chosen, had they been with me. Such are the contradictions of motherhood.

Coming home is always the best bit of a journey. Coming home in the late afternoon, especially, feels naughty, as if I’m playing truant, slipping away from a life as a city ghost, to my real, substantial self. I feel the pull of home while we’re still hurtling through the dreary suburbs, long before the view changes to a spare, watery landscape. As I pull up outside the house, desperate to get out of the boots I’d been striding about in so confidently only hours before, I hear the call of the owls who live in the tree by the house. One screeches and the other instantly replies. It’s not dark yet, and I can see them clearly. They are vividly coloured, all bright russets and ochres, and something in their self-important, enquiring stares reminds me of my children, just on the other side of the door. God, I love home.

2007-04-28T10:53:00.001+01:00

21 March

This is a tale of two houses. The first sat well back from the village street, with no near neighbours. It had a wild and tangled garden, with rambling roses everywhere, and a small orchard with fruit trees and a huge walnut tree. Inside were layers of dust, and crumbling plaster, and big reception rooms. Upstairs were eaves bedrooms with creaking floors that made you teeter and skid. It was an impulse view, an impulse buy. We were excited and confident; but something niggled. The house ticked all the boxes, though, and I admit I bought to impress. Not because it had any grandeur or gave us any great status; it was a cottage needing renovation, that’s all. But it summed up the dream so perfectly; our children (one baby, then) could run barefoot through the long grass, while I cooked on the Rayburn and friends sat on the window seat as the scent of the sweet peas wafted in. I’ve learned since then to trust my instincts, not my desires.

The house wasn’t for us. At least, maybe it was, just to show us that we weren’t infallible, for we made every mistake in the book. Some could have been avoided; we took on a huge restoration project, whilst moving to an isolated place where we knew no-one, we had a small baby with all the work and exhaustion that that brings, and I was already mourning the loss of my city life and close friends. We didn’t listen when people said that everyone overspends on their budget; we were already stretched to our financial limits. Some things were just bad luck; work from my husband’s key clients, for whom he could often work from home or in London, dried up, and most new work coming in meant working abroad for weeks on end, leaving me struggling with rural motherhood and a renovation project, and a rapidly dwindling pot of money. For months my kitchen consisted of a microwave in the dining room, and water had to be accessed by going round the outside of the house to the building site of a kitchen. Keeping a one year old out of said building site was fun, too. In my memory it rained all the time, yet logic tells me it can’t have done; we were there for three summers, after all. When I probe my buried memories, or tease them up by looking through the photo albums, other pictures come into view. Lying in a hammock under the oak tree with my son; the ‘Canary Bird’ rosebush which flowered each year on the 1st May; deer crunching on old apples in the front garden; collecting plums and walnuts; the jewel colours of the oriental poppies in the overgrown and blowsy borders. We have a photo of a spectacular snowman we built one year, pipe in his mouth, and of Christmas trees lit up with real candles (placed, high, naturally). There were good times, I think, no real tragedy befell us. My boy spent three years of his life there. Yet my memories are mostly of trying to push water uphill; of trying to coax a country idyll out of something that just wouldn’t yield. However much we put our stamp on it, the house didn’t feel like ours. When we finished a project, we couldn’t seem to rejoice, or relax; we could only see the blood, sweat and tears. And the other babies, the ones that were meant to run, barefoot and long-limbed, among the apple trees, didn’t come. Or they came, but only fleetingly, and wouldn’t stay with me. The more I try to remember, the more my mind hits a blank wall.

In the end, the bulk of the renovation complete but lacking the cash to take it to the next level, we decided to sell. We could have stuck it out for a year or two, got back on our feet financially, seen it through. But we couldn’t love the house – or rather, we felt it didn’t love us. It didn’t seem to want to give an inch. I spent long amounts of time alone there with a baby, and I can’t ever say that I felt scared or that there was any malevolent presence, or anything like that. I’m not sure how much I believe in the supernatural. But if pressed, we would both say we felt – well – jeered at somehow, scorned in some way. How ridiculous it sounds, now I write it down. We sold to a lovely couple who had fallen in love with it and wanted to raise a family there. I was adamant that I wanted a smaller house, with a large garden, on the outskirts of our local town. Something newer, Victoran maybe. I’d had enough, knew my place. I didn’t want to stay in the immediate locality, and we needed to be settled before my son started school. We took a short cut through a neighbouring village one day, and fell in love. Deeply and irrevocably. The house was unsuitable on so many levels. It was the same period, the to-do list too long for our weary hearts. The garden wasn’t really big enough, and was north-facing. There were plenty of spacious rooms upstairs, but the downstairs rooms were small and dark – surely the wrong way round? It was right in the centre of the village and jammed in by neighbours. But it was crazy and quirky and full of surprises, and it felt like falling in love after leaving an arranged marriage.
The day we accepted the offer on the first house, I discovered I was pregnant. By the time we moved in to our new house, the baby was kicking. The lady who’d lived here left us a carved owl and a print of some hares, which she felt belonged here; they have become our talismans. We bumped into the couple we’d sold to from time to time. They seemed content, and loved the house, but we couldn’t fail to notice that they were still only two. No family seemed to be coming along. We then saw the house was on the market, and we ran into them again last week. They’ve had a turbulent time, lately. He was made redundant, and money has been tight. They’ve sold the house. Things are looking up, though, now. He’s got another job, and they’ve found out she’s pregnant. They were both glowing. But they told us something else; they’d done a little research into the history of the house, and for a period in it’s life it was the village poor house. Explains a lot.

2007-04-28T10:52:00.000+01:00

20 March

What a night. I should have expected it, of course, since my son brought up the subject of camping yesterday evening. A soon as the evenings get lighter, his thoughts stray to sleeping under canvas, and this despite the Arctic conditions we’ve all been plunged into this week. Me and camping just don’t go. I’m happy for him to sleep out every night under the stars in the garden, if he so chooses, and his dad and his sister can go too – ‘wha’ever’ is my inner response. I camped quite a bit as a teenager, inter-railing my way intrepidly around Europe, sleeping on beaches with my boyfriend … but I was 18 then. I was seduced from my sulks last year by R, who persuaded me that camping was the way forward for family holidays. He was helped by the proliferation of articles last year extolling the virtues of Cath Kidston tents, of Mongolian Yurts, of discovering your inner happy camper. So we booked a couple of nights in North Norfolk, during the June half-term. All anybody seems to remember now about last summer was the often intense heat; but let me remind you, readers, that summer came late last year – June was a wash-out, in East Anglia, at least, and night frosts persisted. We duly froze, along with the grass. I’d booked the campsite on the internet, at the last minute and therefore in a panic – and it was terrible. Truly awful, a windswept, flinty field with no view and the most basic facilities. It’s only for two nights, I thought, in a stoic way, I can do it. That was before R got ill. I diagnosed man flu and left him too it, sulky at having to entertain the children while he lay groaning in the tent. Then on the second night I got it. Clearly not man flu, but a life-threatening disease. We decided we could last the night, as we were heading home in the morning anyway. I managed to get to sleep at about one in the morning, a child wedging me in on each side. Just as I was dozing, James sat up, said “Oh dear Mummy” and threw up all over me, and all over the bedding. Freezing, ill, and soaked in vomit, I gamely carried a carrier bag full of sick across the crunchy white grass to find a bin. We packed up, somehow got the tent down without divorcing, and were home by 4.30 am. Lovely. So my heart froze over when my son brought up camping again last night. I should have known it was an omen.

K woke about 3.00, having been sick in her bed. I got her to the bathroom, waited until I thought she’d finished (ha!), bundled the sheets into a pile and put her into our bed. She was sick again. I changed the sheets. R went of to sleep in the spare room, not unreasonably, since he had to drive to the airport early this morning. I suddenly remembered that I hadn’t put clean sheets back on the bed after guests had left the other weekend, so listened for a while, with as much amusement as I could muster at 4.00 am, to my husband making Basil Fawlty noises from next door. Then K was sick again. I had no more clean sheets that would fit our bed, and it was pretty much everywhere. So, just as he had sunk gratefully into a clean bed, R was turfed out by me and K and banished to the sofa. I spent the next couple of hours grimly praying that she wouldn’t do it again, and she didn’t, but her whimpering, boiling hot little body, pressed right up against me, meant that even the most fitful of dozes was an expectation too far.Apologies to Milla, who has already brought up (excuse the pun) the subject of vomiting children, but my brain is so sleep-deprived that I can’t write about anything else. I feel as if I’m moving underwater.

2007-04-28T10:51:00.000+01:00

19 March

My first introduction to the countryside was made through books. When I was tiny, my mother read me the Little Grey Rabbit books by Alison Uttley and opened my childish eyes to a world of frozen ponds with skating squirrels and hedgehog milkmen. When I was around four, I adored the Mrs Pepperpot books. As some of you may remember, Mrs Pepperpot lived in a house which was really a vinegar bottle (surreal in a Doctor Seuss kind of way) right in the middle of a field. I was born in a city centre; when I was five we moved to a nearby market town, ‘in the country’, my parents explained. I still vividly recall my excitement at the thought of going to live in a vinegar bottle in the middle of a field; imagine my disappointment when we arrived at a 30’s semi on a tree-lined avenue. Visiting my grandparents would have given me a taste of real countryside, but your world is so small in those early years that in truth I don’t remember much beyond their garden and the small patch of wild land where we played with the local children. At seven I moved again, this time to the south-east, where the little I saw of the countryside was soft and green and cosy; easy to believe that animals had little houses and skating parties, and that nature was smiling and benevolent. Like many bookish children, as I grew up many of my experiences were first derived from stories, and books about adventurous children galloping on their ponies were, to me, the height of sophistication. Books have been my companions all my life, and I had a stash of books about the countryside, without ever having lived there. I didn’t read them all just for their rural visions, of course, but images burn deeply into your brain; Heathcliff on the moors, Hardy’s Woodlanders or Heath-dwellers, poets and authors galore whose characters still roam the fields and woods, whose dreams still linger on the uplands.

You don’t need to be a master of logic to know that you can’t experience something without actually living through it. Reading about the countryside no more prepared me for actually living in it than books about pregnancy and childbirth prepare you for the real thing. There I was, of course, pregnant and smug, having a whole shelf of books to refer to at every twinge or flutter. Be prepared was my motto, and there was no doubt that I was. Fat lot of good it did me of course, come the shock of the primitive bloodbath of childbirth. There I was again, though, when my baby cried, weighing up Penelope Leach versus Miriam Stoppard, or whoever else was in favour that year. At least I could feel like I had some control, for the brief minutes when I was reading, rather like today, where on a day where I have absolutely no intention of going in the garden, I am reading up on old roses and smelling a promise of summer, though whether I will actually get around to planting them is a different matter. I can live on a dream.

Moving here was nothing like reading about rural life. You can have roses around the door, sure, but you’ll also get murder and mayhem, as anyone who has kept chickens will know. Wake up and smell the de-caff latte, as my city friends might say. Only here it’s not the smell of coffee beans but manure that seeps through the windows. I admit that I hadn’t thought much about rural poverty until fairly recently. Deprivation to me was miners with no livelihood, the urban homeless, the desperation of immigrants. The countryside was a place of dreams, where the rich retired at weekends, where you could return to the rhythms of nature. A refuge, a retreat. I’d read Akenfield, by Ronald Blythe, but it wasn’t until I lived here that I met country people who’d experienced the most grinding and desperate poverty. It is, for me, still a retreat, still a dream come true, a blessing. But for so many others, it is still a world of mass emigration, of failed dreams, of a dying way of life.

Books may not help you much with the real business of living, but they’ll always open doors to worlds. I was chatting idly to a Mum at the school gates today, not someone I know very well, just passing the time of day. She announced that she’d been cleaning over the weekend, then her husband had bought a few books, and she’d had to ask him to put them away. They’re so messy and untidy, she explained, I’d just got the house sorted, I hate to see them lying around. She might as well have told me she was running away with Roman Abramovich. I was stunned. I hope she never comes to my house; we have books in the living room, in the bedrooms, in the loo, stacked untidily on the landing, groaning on shelves in the kitchen, stored in trunks upstairs. I remember staying with some friend’s of R’s, years ago, who must have subscribed to the same philosophy as the school gate Mum, for there was no reading matter anywhere in their house. No books, no magazines, no children’s stories that I could see. I even went in desperation to the kitchen to find a cookery book, but to no avail. They were quite wealthy people, but the house felt poor because of it. If books are messy, then anarchy rules OK.

2007-04-28T10:49:00.001+01:00

18 March

Friends told us not to go. Snow is coming, they said, winds are coming in from the arctic. You’ll freeze. But it has become something of a Mother’s Day tradition for us, to go to the coast on this blowy Sunday in March and eat fish and chips. So off we went, with the clouds scudding across an azure sky, the car seeming to drive itself, blown eastward by the Wind God with his puffed out cheeks. We must have misjudged our timing, today, because the queues for fish and chips, or outside any of the chi-chi little cafes that line the main street of this resort, are horrendous. This town, tired and forgotten not so very long ago, is newly fashionable, and the squeals of weekenders vie with the screams of the seagulls. We go to a farm shop and buy bread and cheese and apples, and to a garage for crisps and chocolate, and hunker down behind the sea wall on the beach, wrapped in hats and fleeces, a wild north wind whipping hair across our eyes and stinging our skin. We walk unsteadily across the beach, our ankles aching in the shingle, a slate sea growling along beside us. There is little visible drama on this coast, none of the coves and cliffs and rock pools of the west, nor the miles of dunes and golden sands of the northern beaches of my childhood. There is romance and history, here, though; the cold North Sea distinctly menacing in its insistent march to eat up the land, the marshes and creeks eerie and empty. We walk along a dyke across the top of the salt marshes, making slow progress against the wind; one step forward, two steps back, the breath sucked out of us, our voices lost. On one side wild fowl arch into the sky and soar above this haunted march, where a village once stood, on the other we hear the sloop and clink of tethered boats, some filling with choppy sea water as we pass.

This stretch of coast is schizophrenic; it starts off full of kiss-me-quick resorts with fun fairs and candy floss, those places so beloved of small children, to the consternation of their parents. Further north old fashioned fishing villages emerge at well spaced intervals, miles of heath and salt marsh between them. Some are prosperous, now, popular with London families seeking a more ‘authentic’ way of life (are they trying to survive against the odds on profits from fishing, or watching the sea erode the farming land, I wonder?), but I concede that there is something reassuringly old-fashioned and Enid Blyton-esque about the place. The fisherman’s cottages and Victorian terraces are colour–washed in sea-blues and the traditional Suffolk pink, the shops catering for the demands of Londoners.

Other places have been bypassed by fashion, for no reason that I can see, and still sport their hairdresser’s salons with French names and peeling paint, empty shops and rows of pebble-dashed bungalows. All these Saxon thorpes and tons and hams still have their ancient tithe barns and moot halls, some newly thatched, others sunk so deeply into the earth they have half-disappeared.

We drive back, half-frozen but exhilarated, trying to reach home before the sky darkens and the promised hailstones arrive. We do, just, but part of us has stayed behind, listening to the song of the sea.

2007-04-28T10:47:00.001+01:00

17 March

An Italian friend of mine, Maria Rosaria, has announced that she is coming to stay, which has put the fear of God into me. I have friends in France and Italy who curl their lip at the thought of living in the country. Maria Rosaria, in particular, is an urban creature – a Siamese cat, if I had to allocate her an animal counterpart – and affects a haughty disdain for anything remotely bucolic. She grew up in a tiny, impoverished backwater in the heel of Italy (Puglia), and fled to the city as soon as she was old enough, the countryside to her a memory of boredom and isolation. I’ve been there, and for me, the tourist, it is an enchanting landscape of times whitewashed houses, village squares with dozing dogs and sonorous church bells, of afternoons spent drinking limoncello in the shade. For my friend, it’s just a stifling backwater, representative of a Europe that bears no relation to her life now. For her, urban life is wonderful. Of course, she does live in Verona, which makes a difference, I guess. I was thinking about the contrast between continental and British urban life today, as I did my usual Saturday schlepp around the toyshops of our local market town (and the obligatory quick dash into Waitrose to get ‘a couple of things’ which always seem to cost me around £60.00). Admittedly, our town (a large-ish market town) is hardly Beirut. It has a great deal of charm, which we weren’t blind to when we came to the area. We loved the fact that it had a dated, quirky air, plenty of specialist shops (ironmongers, haberdashers), which are slowly disappearing elsewhere, and seemed very sure of itself as a local farming centre, with livestock markets still being regularly held. Go into town on a Wednesday, and you will still see many pensioners in their finery, the men in their best brown suits, the women in tweed skirts or nylon dresses, tipping their hats or nodding their heads to acquaintances, all making the slow journey into town, often with difficulty, for this important day. It is, I suppose, a British version of the evening passegiata that Italians take daily. The same need to see and be seen, an honouring of an ancient ritual. Annoying, admittedly, if you are trying to negotiate the pavements with toddlers and/or a buggy, or in a hurry to pay for something in a shop, but I do at least try to check the impatience that rises in my throat. There are a still a couple of old men in my village who are proud to boast that they’ve never been to another town; although one did marry a girl from a village several miles north, and had to go to meet the in-laws there. A foreign land, where they built out of brick and flint instead of timber and reed, the shock of which queered him for travel for ever more.

Our town, hugely rich in the middle ages though in gentle decline for several hundred years, does boast a beautiful medieval core and wide open spaces, thanks to the town planning capabilities of the solid burghers of the middle ages. There is something about it that is resistant to change, something fixed and stubborn and rebellious; something very English about its character. It has an inspiring history of independent thinking; the townspeople destroyed it several times in the 14th century, in revolt at the riches of the Abbey, and the barons first met to plot what were the bare bones of the Magna Carta there, just outside the cloisters. The layout of the monk’s herb garden can still be seen, amongst the Abbey ruins. It has Georgian assembly halls and a regency theatre. Not a bad local centre, after all. Yet something does seem to be slowly dying. We laughed at the lack of big-name shops and the 50’s décor (not in an ‘amusingly retro’ way – think brown formica) of the local coffee shops when we first came; a year ago we got our first Starbucks. The flea-pit cinema of the 30’s has been replaced with a multi-screen complex. We used to have old-style trattorias with candles in Chianti bottles; now we have Pizza Express and Strada (although I admit I do frequent those). The voices are changing too; far fewer Suffolk burrs, far more estuary English and posh London. Men are far more likely to be addressed as ‘Mate’ now, instead of the traditional ‘Boy’. I’m not really reactionary; I can see how some of these things might stop you going slowly insane if you’re a teenager (or a mother with small children), like my friend did in her Italian backwater. But pride in our civic spaces seems to be in retreat, unlike in Italy (or at least, what I remember of Italy), where since ancient times they’ve celebrated the concept of urban life, rather than trying to escape it, and where towns are individual.

Maria Rosaria has only been here once before; she used to love visiting me in London, but I fear she only came out of politeness, last time. Not a woman for antique shops or long walks, she seems to waft in on a breath of summer and style. She’s funny and warm and bright and I love her, yet I’d be the first to admit that she is a somewhat high-maintenance. Last time she was here we spent the whole time in Cambridge (our nearest City) in an effort to tire her of the charms of retail therapy. Didn’t work. This time, though, might be different. She is bringing someone else, a new man, who is both an Anglophile and a historian. And she, my demanding career girl, wants a bambino. And they think it might be better for him or her to grow up in the country, enjoying the benefits of a more traditional way of life. I sense a worm on the turn.

2007-04-28T10:46:00.001+01:00

16 March

Late yesterday evening we took the children up to the wood. Not our exclusive wood, you understand, but partly ours, in a way. Back in 1999, the villagers and all the schoolchildren planted up a native broad-leaved wood to commemorate and celebrate the millennium. Although it was supported by the Greenlight Trust, the whole project was truly community led, with the villagers finding the site, carrying out all the fundraising, designing and planting, and taking on the maintenance of the wood. The field chosen for the site slopes gently to the east, above the village, and from the clearings you get great views of the village and the rolling arable farmlands. Prior to the wood being planted, it was a meadow where horses grazed, and was owned by my irascible old farmer who I’ve mentioned in a previous blog. To the west, south and east the wood is surrounded by farmland. To the north are some farm buildings and grazing pasture. An old track, bearing the name of my farmer, leads from the centre of the village up to the entrance of the wood. What marks this little piece of woodland, (only 1.21 hectares), as special is that the wood has been planted as a model of the village. Around 200 oak trees were planted, representing each village house. Wide grassy rides represent the roads. A beautiful thicket of yew and holly – already tangled and magical, like a miniature version of Sleeping Beauty’s forest -marks the site of the church. Bell Stay Bottom is an ash coppice planted to provide future stays for the church bells. Everything planted here is native; sweet chestnut, hornbeam, field maple, white willow, black poplar, lime, hazel, blackthorn, hawthorn, dogwood and spindle. Wild flowers carpet the tracks and verges in the early summer; celandines and heartsease, meadowsweet, dog rose, poppies and columbine.

We come here in all seasons. We help on the ‘maintenance weekends’; sharing a thermos of coffee with people who we don’t see for the rest of the year, children playing all around us. We picnic in the summer, when there’s no breath of wind to stir the leaves, and the swallows swoop and slice far above. We come blackberrying in the autumn, and high kick through the leaves. In winter we come to find the berried holly and mistletoe and shiny sloes, along with most of the village, and take our sledges to the steep slope just outside the boundary. We come in spring just to look, really, and outdo each other with our observations: “Look, the first cowslips! The first bluebells! I saw it first – no I did!” (And that’s just us parents). We rarely come in the evening, but yesterday was too perfect a day to resist. The children are like frisky lambs, racing as ever to find the tree that is our house, in this parallel sylvan world. James sometimes lets his sister get their first, but the urge to win is sometimes overpowering at eight, and today his long limbs glide towards the tree, Katherine’s plump little legs staggering along behind. The fates smile on us today, however; the indignation of losing doesn’t result in storms of tears, but in beams of triumph; “I winned Mummy, I came second!”

Right in the heart of the wood, in the clearing that doubles as the village green, stands a sculpture. Or a satute, as the children are wont to call it. We are lucky to have a sculptor of some renown in the village, a Royal Academician, no less and he designed and donated it to form the centrepiece of the wood. ‘The Gift’, on it’s granite plinth, is abstract; people mostly see it as symbolising the protection and comfort of dwellings and communities, with a tall bronze form leaning paternally over a group of huddled, smaller shapes. For James, it’s always been God and us. For Katherine, it’s a mother with her children. For both, it’s something to climb up and picnic beneath, since none of the trees are venerable enough as yet to take this role.

Although we know that the wood is well used, we always arrive to a watchful silence. Never a soul visible. Hence we have a slightly proprietary feeling about the whole place. Once we decide to head home, however, then people emerge. Dog walkers, families out strolling. They edge tentatively through the hedges, like shy fauns. Maybe they’ve been here all the while; for a small place, it stretches magically to allow everyone their space.

The long term intention is to let the trees develop naturally and become high forest, with minimal human intervention. The possible effects of global warming aside, it’s not too hard to imagine it in the future, the trees gnarled and ancient, the forest leaves a dense canopy, the paths overgrown. I’ve often marvelled at the unselfish foresight of those long-dead people who planted stately avenues and arboretums in the past, knowing that they would never see them as they intended them to be seen. I feel long-sighted myself, sometimes, in this wood; it’s surely a gift from our village to the future.

2007-04-28T10:45:00.005+01:00

14 March

Feeling blue today. No one major reason, more a million tiny things, pressing together to make a bruise. So I took refuge this morning in my daughter’s room, while she pottered about, disciplining her dolls and admonishing her teddies. I’m not quite sure where the scary shouty tactics come from; certainly not from me, I’m a pushover. Just occasionally, she will change to mock concern when tending a ‘poorly child’, and then her voice sounds like an anxious bird beating the air. I love to just sit, sometimes, in a child’s room, even when chaos is crashing around me and I’m knee deep in mess. There’s something so soothing in the atmosphere, the light softer. When I’m in a fanciful mood, I like to imagine other children’s voices, like a jumble of chords from the past, just discernible behind the more strident tones of my daughter. In her room, scratched on a beam above her bed, just low enough for a child to reach, is marked the name ‘Bess’. It looks as if it has been scratched by a penknife, etched firm, the letters big and well spaced. The ‘B’ in particular is a proud capital; a confident hand scratched this. It was one of the first things I noticed when we first came to look around the house, my own girl but a heavy promise inside me. The room was empty, and I’d stood where I imagined a cot might go, and seen the name immediately. I hadn’t known we were having a girl; this baby had been a long time coming, and I didn’t really want anything to break the spell of hope. A baby was enough, at last; the gender a sort of optional add-on. Still, I knew immediately that this would be the baby’s room, just as I could picture my boy in the little room that gets the morning sun. I suppose it was auspicious, looking back, that K turned out to be a girl, this space, even empty, feeling so much like a girl’s room. Or perhaps I knew, really, deep in my subconscious. I thought about Bess, sometimes, as we prepared the room and made the million and one adjustments involved in changing from three to four. I have no idea, of course, if she was a real live girl who scratched her name there. The house dates from about 1770, and the timbers could be older. Maybe it was a boy who wrote it, dreaming of his sweetheart one hot summer night. In my mind’s eye, though, I always see a dark curly-haired girl, leaning out of the window and counting the stars which crowd together so densely in the huge Suffolk sky.

My fair-haired girl looks out of that window now, and used to hold her tiny hands up to reach the stars. Her cupped palms seemed to catch the light. In the blink of an eye she has gone from a curled question mark to a bold exclamation. The house was waiting for her, I felt, a hum of expectation in the room. My son slept through for the first time without a night light when he came to this house; his room faces out over the village green, and a tawny owl keeps a watchful eye on him from the tree outside his window. K’s room looks out over the fruit trees and the garden. She was born in the late summer, at the tail end of a heatwave; a heavy, torpid time of year which burst into fecundity when she arrived. The trees seemed to bring their fruit just for her; my apple girl, I called her privately.

We walked up to Playgroup together, and saw a hare on the verge of the lane. The three of us gazed at each other for some time. He lifted my spirits, as always. Then at playgroup something else happened. A friend of mine is expecting her third daughter this summer. She has a penchant for old and ‘unfashionable’ names, and tells me that one of the names they are considering for their new daughter is Bess. She will no doubt have dark curly hair, like her sisters. So maybe she will lean out of the window in my house and gaze at the stars, after all.

2007-04-28T10:45:00.003+01:00

13 March

Dear Country Living Bloggers old and new, I need you all to sit in a metaphorical circle, hands linked, eyes closed, and concentrate very hard on the image of a small white hamster, returned to the bosom of his family. Yes, I’ve lost my son’s dear pet, white prince amongst hamsters, pearl of the rodents, Snowy (my James shares the trait of imaginative pet naming with exmoorjane’s James). I gave him his evening run -around, fed him carrots and apple, and presumably left the cage open when I put him back. James is supposed to feed him but he was home so late last night after Hitler Youth (Cubs) that we both forgot and I ended up doing it. See how fate intervenes. Luckily, James was in too much of a rush this morning to notice the open cage, or the fact that his mother, heart pumping, was staring crazily around the room and being very careful where she put her feet.

I know I am supposed to be ‘talking’ about country matters, and, however hard I try, a hamster doesn’t really count as a country animal. Chickens, dogs, horses, yes. Pigs, sheep, goats, even stoats and weasels. But hamsters are just a bit, well, suburban, somehow. Not even as much fun as guinea pigs, but surely further up the pet pecking order than stick insects, or am I being too partial? Anyway, our super-size hamster with his pink eyes, always looking like he’s had a night on the town, with a few pies on the way home, has managed to worm his way into my affections. I have always hated rodents. It may be something to do with the fact that my sister and I once brought the class gerbils home over half-term, and they promptly died on us. Both of them. The shame I felt at returning the empty cage to school still stays with me; my Mum did subsequently buy another pair for the school, but they died too. See what I mean? Anyway, I caved in, as usual, to James’s demands that he have a pet of his very own. Never mind the fact that we have two cats, used to have a dog and have promised him another one this year, and also have some chickens and ducks. No, it transpires that no self-respecting country boy’s life would be complete without a hamster. Who’s going to clean out the cage, each week, I demanded. “I will, Mummy, I absolutely promise I will, I’ll take care of him myself, I’ll do everything, I promise please please please”. I tried to tell myself I believed him, but in my heart of hearts I didn’t, really. I knew it would be me. So anyway he chose Snowy, possibly the strangest looking hamster in the world; he’s an albino. We also seem to have got the only hamster in the world who doesn’t think he’s a hamster. We have bought him every gadget available in an attempt to entertain him; he has wheels, houses, acres (seemingly) of tubing providing endless hours of fun, if only he would avail himself of them. We let him out each evening for a long run around an enclosed room, we give him buckets of soil to burrow in, we tease and tempt him by hiding his food around his cage, to keep him alert. He seemed lethargic a few weeks ago; I (the rodent hater) was to be found feeding him grapes. My daughter sings him lullabies. But all he does is fix us with a menacing (pink) eye and hangs upside down on the top bars of his cage, gnawing away, day and night. We tend to take a highly anthropomorphic view of domestic animals in this house; we know it’s madness, but we can’t seem to help ourselves. We joke about him being so alert and ready for action, our guerrilla hamster, and some of this seems to have rubbed off on him; I’m sure he thinks he’s human. What am I doing in this cage, he seems to be asking, let me out! I want to sit on the sofa with you and have a take-away Indian and a bottle of wine. Well, he got his wish last night. Not the curry and the wine, of course, but freedom. He’s off, into a house full of loose floorboards, nooks and crannies, and two cats. The guilt, the guilt. I locked the cats out last night, but I can’t keep them out forever. I’ve left the cage open, with a little pile of food just inside, and keep running backwards and forwards to see if he’s back yet. I remember my sister having two hamsters (I was still traumatised by the gerbils and didn’t want anything to do with them), and one escaped. My mum, not wishing to upset my sister, secretly bought another identical one, but forgot to mention it to my Dad. He was sitting up late one night with a glass of whiskey, and looked down to see a hamster by the skirting board. He picked it up and returned it to the cage, only to find there were already two in there. I think he stopped drinking whiskey for a while after that. That would be just my luck – buy a replacement and then find the original returns. I’m most worried about the cats; a hamster lost in the recesses of the house is one thing – we could make up stories about the wild, adventurous life he’s now having – but a mangled corpse laid reverently before the children is quite another.

I’ll let you know, no doubt you will all be on the edge of your seats all day.

2007-04-28T10:44:00.001+01:00

12 March

We have near neighbours who pass, these days for the local gentry. Mere yeomen farmers a couple of centuries ago, fortune has smiled kindly on them and their wealth has grown, unlike so many farming families. The other local farmers I know are Conference Division to their Champions League. They seem to own pretty much all of the land around the village; there are fields, footpaths, woods and church pews all bearing their name. It must give you such a sense of place, to grow up around such constant reminders of your genetic dominance, but possibly a rather arrogant sense of ownership too. The farmer and his wife are getting on now, with four grown-up girls all in London, and although they are scarily active in village life (even walking your dog seems to need their permission), I’ve never had much to do with them (avoided them like the plague, to be frank). I had to go and see the farmer this morning, however, after school drop-off, due to a school matter relating to access and rights of way. I’d been warned he could be difficult. He used to be a governor at the village school, but retired before I came on board; I would have been, ahem, challenged by the fact that he apparently vetoed everything, yet none of his girls were educated there. Anyway, the Jacobean manor (farmhouse doesn’t work, in this instance) is beautiful and imposing, but inside was unkempt and pitiful. There was literally nowhere to sit; every available surface crammed with mildewing newspapers, bits of odd material, plates (!) or coats . The damp, musty smell of loneliness and old age seeped through the timbers. Faint echoes of happier times came through as he mentioned one of his daughters, but something – just time? – has stiffened both his joints and his outlook.

He was a surly and cantankerous host; clearly not very comfortable talking to young(ish) women. He interrupted me, harrumphed and spluttered, kept his back towards me. His questions were too direct, to the point of rudeness, and he didn’t listen to the answers. Like most people, I cherish an illusion that I can chat to anybody. He shattered that illusion, cutting off my attempts at small talk and leaving me marooned in a sea of discomfort. I could feel myself starting to gabble. At one point, when the business side of things was coming to an end, (he was surprisingly reasonable), I asked him if he knew what our cottage had been called years back (we know it’s had it’s name changed many times). He stared at me in amazement and said “If I could remember, which I can’t, it would have just been named after whichever labourer lived there at the time”. That was me told. I have never felt so much like an irritation and an interruption. As I was leaving, he started shouting names at me, names of people in the wider area who he assumed I knew. I haven’t a clue who these people are, you irascible old man, I thought to myself, and made some quip about having only recently been accepted into the village community; I hadn’t branched out any wider, as yet. He suddenly put his arm around my shoulders, a gesture of surprising gentleness, and told me a joke, a pun, so unexpected and human that I snorted with laughter in an inelegant and embarrassing way. “We locals have a name, you know, for incomers like you who get absorbed into the village” he said, his rheumy old eyes shining with tears of mirth. “Suffolk-ated”.

2007-04-28T10:41:00.002+01:00

10 March

A wearisome morning of chores and ferrying the children about lay in front of me today. It clearly wasn’t going to be a garden day for me; every time I tried to sneak out of the back door, I was caught and pulled gently back into family life. So I tried to grab a bit of ‘me’ time in the house, but again was caught as soon as I’d got the computer switched on. The creak of the stairs gave me away when I tried to slip upstairs to read a few pages. Fair enough, really, on a weekend, so I tried to swallow my irritation. This afternoon my husband pulled the complaining children away from the television and computer, and announced we were going for a walk. I stood sheepishly on one foot, trying to get out of it, thinking of the peace I could have by myself, but in the end I decided I’d feel left out if they all went out without me (I’m pathetic, I know).

We headed off down one of the old straight tracks that criss-cross the country and were probably once drovers’ ways. This one crosses the village green, hence is called, in typical prosaic Suffolk way, Cross Green. On old maps, however, it is marked as Pilgrim’s Way, and I like to think of those devoted souls, seeking healing or blessings, trudging the ten mile or so to the soaring Abbey. The track is a claustrophobic tunnel of green in high summer; now the canopy is still quite bare, allowing huge tracts of sky through, flirtatious buds and catkins peeping out. R and I talk of scary, grown–up things like re-mortgaging and job schedules. When did this happen, I think, I want to be engrossed in the here and now, like the children. I watch them seeing trying to get the mud over the tops of their wellies, and lines from ee cummings pop into my head: “in just-spring when the world is mud-luscious… when the world is puddle-wonderful.” We have to stop talking as we dredge our way slowly through the mud and the track leads uphill. The exertion makes us hot and thirsty and negotiating the viscous mud takes all our concentration. Thick, oozy mud, as our children call it, remembering the lines from the ‘Going on a Bear Hunt’ story. The track is flattening out now and we’ve got our breath back. But clear air and wet earth have worked their magic, as ever, and now we don’t want to talk about the daily grind any more. We’re walkers, travellers, pushing through the thickets. We’re on a bear hunt. We’re about to reach the promised land. And suddenly – we do. We live in an area known as ‘High Suffolk’; those of you in the Welsh Mountains or Cumbria would probably consider this a bit of a misnomer. We’ve hardly got peaks and mountains, after all. But the hills that we do have take on an almost mystical significance, rising up as they do out of the wheat fields. We step out onto the crest of ‘our’ hill and we are truly the kings of the castle, looking down upon a wide and moated world. The sky and the earth and the water all merge and meet on the horizon. Far below us, we can just make out swans gliding effortlessly on the water meadows. Are they real or magic, my daughter wants to know. Both, I say.

2007-04-28T10:41:00.001+01:00

9 March

I have just been to a parent’s assembly and have a horrible feeling that I have been breathing fumes of garlic and wine over half the school. I had a lunch with some lovely friends, which cheered up my Friday and made me immensely grateful for the little community that we have built up here. Many of us sitting round the table at lunch are incomers, and were lonely and in need of friends when we first planted ourselves in the country. Others have been here all their lives. All of us have been blown off course, one way or another, by the arrival of children, or by the unexpected twists and turns of life. All of us were looking for something to help oil the wheels of our lives, so clogged with minutiae, and we’ve found it in our friendships, helped, of course, by the odd bottle of wine and the occasional birthday lunch. Looking round that table, I am aware of so much talent, which I am sure could apply to any group of women. So many varied abilities and backgrounds; actress-turned-chef, entrepreneur, teacher, museum curator, doctor, artist. Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy (I’d probably be the beggar woman). Not all are working, many are raising families, some are starting small enterprises or nurturing talents and interests. Not all of us had glamorous jobs and many are glad to be pottering quietly in the country; others regretful that opportunities have passed them by and still looking for their place. Being women, we all tell stories against ourselves; we tell of our failures and disappointments with humour, but we feel them nevertheless. There is no-one overselling their talents, or attempting to stride the world like a colossus, as so many men feel compelled to do. We have our faults, though, and before long we ease contendedly into gossip; nothing too malicious or unkind, of course, just a satisfying reminder that while the rest of the world has it’s shortcomings, we, of course, tight in our charmed circle, are perfect. In my working life, I often worked in a ‘man’s world’. I love male company and don’t always thrive in women-only situations. I’m aware of the exclusivity of circles, and of the segments within them. But times like this remind me of the strengths of our friendships and that female communities, somehow, always spring up when you most need them.

We drive away from town down old green lanes to the school. It still surprises me, even after years of country living, how quickly and easily you leave the town behind and plunge back into nature, down roads that have been tracks and lanes for centuries, maybe millennia. For once I’m not driving (I’ve only had two glasses but am hopeless at lunchtime drinking) and I’m rarely a passenger, without responsibilities in the back seats, able to gaze out of the window. We cross ancient (flooded) fords, driving through countryside in all its washed and sparkling glory. The verges, streaming after rain, are crowded with aconites, snowdrops and early crocuses. Coltsfoot explodes in a sulphur-yellow frenzy under trees. Winter jasmine climbs onto the roofs of cottages. Amazingly, the hawthorn is out, with its promise of May. There are fat ruby buds on the black branches of the lime trees which form an avenue on the village green. You can almost hear the buds breaking open. I rush to greet my own buds, who are breaking into their lives with such vigour. Unfortunately for them, even a small amount of alcohol makes me gushingly, and embarrassingly, affectionate. At exmoorjane’s cyber party, I’d be the one weeping in the corner, telling you all I loved you. They’re both in mellow moods, luckily, and my daughter is waiting for me to finish on the computer so she can curl up on the sofa and have the ‘Owl and The Pussycat’ read to her. Perfect. I hope she doesn’t notice if I slur the words.

2007-04-28T10:39:00.001+01:00

8 March

I was shaken awake this morning by my daughter asking if she could PLEASE go to heaven. Not the sort of thing a doting mother wants to hear, or indeed, deal with first thing in the morning. I had been thinking about Milla’s sad tale of a couple of days ago, about the Mum who died, and didn’t really want to think about death again on a bright March morning. But K has a macabre fascination with mortality, completely normal for her age, but hard to cope with nevertheless. She is a stubborn and persistent little soul, and talks constantly about her dead grandparents, who she never knew. My husband’s parents both died far too young, and I have tried hard to ensure that my children know about them and that they are included in our family tales. Unfortunately, I never knew them either, so I have few resources with which to answer their questions. Their photographs are slowly fading in the albums, and there’s only my husband left to make them smile and wave, like the magic pictures in the Harry Potter books. K is cross and frustrated by concepts far too big for her – or any of us, in fact – to understand. She senses that something has been taken from her, but she doesn’t know what. She has a formidable will, and would rip down the veil, if only she could see it. My son, more introverted and having grown out of the immediacy and storms of toddlerhood, is, at eight, slowly facing his own mortality, and that of his parents and surviving grandparents. My heart aches as I watch him
mull it all over in his head, his worries occasionally bursting out with questions like “How long do people generally live?” I remember the fears of eight. I remember him, at four, facing the loss of our most beloved family cat, with the same thoughtfulness. Henry was a huge cat, almost the size of a spaniel, but with the most gentle heart. He is buried under the sundial in the garden, amongst the rosemary (for remembrance) and the Good King Henry I’ve planted around him. James gathered shells and flowers to put with him, like grave goods, and studied a book I’d bought which had pictures of the spirit of a dead cat flying up to the sun (Goodbye Mog, by Judith Kerr – I would recommend it). I remember the illumination and joy on his face as he realised that the spirit had gone somewhere, just nowhere he could see. My daughter won’t be fobbed off with mysteries or maybes; she can’t remember Henry – he died the week before she was born – but often demands that we dig him up so she can see that he’s dead. We adults recoil at the gruesome idea, but it is of course entirely natural for her to ask. James, as a proper country boy, may now deal with the deaths of animals in a matter of fact and practical manner, but I know he walks quickly past the house next door, empty and lonely since our neighbour died a couple of months ago. He was a very old, gentle and courteous man who had lost his wife to cancer and both his girls, in a cruel twist of fate, to multiple sclerosis. For years he had run the Butchers shop in the village, always up at 5.00 am, until he retired, in his late eighties, and within six weeks could no longer walk unaided. Within four months he died, his purpose in life gone, along with his family. James was subdued over his death; Katherine cross that he was no longer waving to her.

On a beautiful morning like today, we often walk to school through the churchyard, green and ancient and slumbering. Primroses and anemones peep through the long grass. My boy, his head stuffed with times tables, football and absorbed with the demands of his busy life, does not look around much. K is singing, lost in being three. It is only me, anxious and adult, who tiptoes through, my heart constricting as always as I see the tiny mound for my friend’s days-old son. Our neighbour is buried here too, alongside many generations of his family. Their name is on the war memorial on the green, too, and when I pass them there I feel the familiar frisson of horror to think of those boys, ripped from their world of ploughs and harvests, lying among the poppy fields.

My girl, so vivid in her pink coat and full of fresh spring air, has no thought for the dead lying so close. She only has time for life now, and claps with delight to see the single purple crocus flowering on the baby’s grave.

2007-04-28T10:38:00.001+01:00

7 March

I’ve just had the window cleaner round. Actually, I may as well have written that the window cleaner has moved in. Sorry to disappoint you, but there’s no steamy scene with an open bedroom window coming up (you haven’t seen him; I have). He just wouldn’t go. He’s only been once before, having recently taken over the round and was a bit over-friendly then, but this was ridiculous. And before you rush to judge me, I’m not coming over all Margot-from-the-Good-Life and thinking that the tradesmen are getting uppity. I have no problem with being friends with the window cleaner at all; it’s just that he’s odd. Very odd. Last time we met he did strike me then as a bit of a stereotype of himself, an archetypal cheekie-chappie with a ladder and bucket. I was dashing out at the time, however, so didn’t have much of a chance to chat. Today, however, he was in the mood to talk and I was the captive audience. He came in while I tried to find some cash to pay him (I’m ashamed to say that this once again involved rooting through my son’s piggy bank), and he was immediately off, wandering through the house and commenting on the bits he liked and the bits he didn’t. I ended up following him around the house, lamely holding out his money and hoping that I could eventually steer him, like a sheep dog with a stray lamb, towards the front door. It didn’t work; he had found my son’s bedroom and spent an inordinate amount of time looking at the Star Wars toys and rambling incoherently about the films. Why am I so hopeless in these situations? I had a fixed rictus grin on my face as I tried desperately to interrupt him. I eventually managed it and explained that I was a bit pushed for time and had to go out. I was terribly polite and apologetic but he still reacted as if I’d been brusque and rude and was ejecting him from a dinner party or something. It does amaze me that mutual dependency in the countryside can mean these really quite intense relationships develop between virtual strangers. Not that I’m all that dependent on the window cleaner; I could always, I suppose, do them myself, but it is true that my life has become entwined with so many others since I’ve been here. I don’t think it’s just that I am home full-time now, because after my son was born and we still living in town, I was on maternity leave whilst we were renovating our tiny house, and I didn’t strike up these relationships then. Although in some ways we found it hard to break in to local life, people being fairly reserved in this area, get them into your house and you’re a goner. There always comes a point at which I’m fixed with a steely eye and a long story emerges; anything from the drama of lost loves and broken marriages, to more prosaic tales of medical complaints and sometimes, if I’m lucky, tantalising shreds of gossip. There are often some quite personal and brazen remarks about what we’re planning to do, our foolishness for taking it all on, etc. We’ve had people come round to give us an estimate for something and fall about laughing for the amount that we paid for the house (at least, what they know it was on the market for), or comment on the paint colours we’ve chosen. My husband and I aren’t good at coming back with robust remarks and generally stand around awkwardly while our home and lifestyle is inspected, and invariably comes up short.

I must admit, though, that when we first moved here, for a while we thought we’d accidentally moved to Toytown. The builder who was doing some work for us was called Mr Strong. We had a bit of a giggle about that and made some feeble jokes, only to then be introduced to the chimney sweep. He is called - and I promise you I’m not making this up - Mr Bristles. I suppose he couldn’t really have become anything other than a chimney sweep. The electrician, however, who helped rewire the house, let us down and in moment of rebellion had obviously veered from his ordained path. He was Mr Joiner.

2007-04-28T10:37:00.000+01:00

6 March

Today I fell over. A real comedy fall, one that would have been mortifying had I done it in public. As it was, it was just really painful. I was full of verve and vigour this morning and determined to clear about the detritus littering the house (I’m sure you all know what I mean; Barbies with one shoe missing, a couple of plastic knives, a hallowe’en ghost that shrieks when you step on it, and a rather menacing cyberman). Anyway, I tried to put something away on a tall shelf (a cunning ruse, in the hope that little hands would never find it again), but, instead of standing on something sensible, such as a chair, to reach, I decided to stand on my daughter’s trike. Great idea. The trike immediately lurched one way, I went the other way, my oh-so-svelte backside hitting the trike, my head hitting the table. Luckily, there were only a couple of pheasants (careful how you read that word, it’s not that time-warped in Suffolk) peering through the window, but the yell I gave sent them squawking off in that ridiculously fussy way they have. It was a really, really stupid thing to do and also ill-timed, given that I had five minutes to race up the lane to collect my daughter from pre-school. I staggered up there feeling badly bruised, tearful and shaken, but had to soldier on (cue violins). Just to bore you all with my tale of woe, for I have no-one else to bore, my head has a lump the size of an egg on it, by tailbone is so sore I can barely sit down (I’ll have a lovely bruise, but, sadly, will only be able to show it off to those closest to me) and a swollen wrist. I told my husband when he happened to phone, and he did that really annoying male thing of pointing out that I should never have stood on the trike. No, really?

That set the tone for the day, really. I have had meeting after meeting throughout yesterday and today. I’ve been trying to think of a suitable collective noun for a bunch of meetings, but am foiled. An annoyance, perhaps? Our part of Suffolk is about to go through one of those disruptive and expensive periodic reviews of education, and although the tiny village primaries are safe, thankfully, the way they are structured will be affected. I had a governor’s meeting last night, and have a PTA meeting later. My daughter has been dispatched to play with a friend, quite happy to go because she thinks the friend’s mother looks like Snow White (irritatingly, she does). There is something about meetings, I find, which brings out the worst in people. In the ones I go, at least, which these days are usually about school, there are always several mums desperate to prove that they are educated, had careers prior to children or still count themselves as high flyers, and as a result try to run them like board meetings. They always try to get the upper hand and drop in a few anecdotes about the days when they were head of finance or whatever. The rest of us sit in embarrassed silence while they talk over us, getting louder and louder. It’s usually pretty hard to get a word in edgeways (and that’s saying something, coming from me, as I can be quite vocal). Then there are a few pedants who also love the sound of their own voice and like to ensure that we have every, but every, little detail covered. Generally male and often, but not always, fifty-plus, they tend to talk over you as well. Usually I find all this quite amusing but I wasn’t in the mood today. I had to read something out at one point and I had the most embarrassing and hideous feeling that I was about to burst into tears. My voice was catching slightly and I knew my nose had gone bright red. I was horrified and just about managed to pull myself together (I think) – I don’t think putting my head on the table and bawling would have created quite the right impression. It must have been just delayed shock, as I am perfectly OK now, although a hot bath and bed would be far preferable to another meeting in an hour and then dashing to collect the children. Once all meetings are over, there is a little pile of badges waiting to be sewn onto J’s Cubs uniform. I feel like they’re looking at me every time I go into his bedroom. Is any one else hopeless at sewing, or am I the only completely non-crafty country dweller? My poor boy always has the scruffiest uniform with lopsided badges. I do have one particular talent, however; I am unbeatable with a corkscrew, and I plan to put my modest but handy talent to good use tonight. Cheers.

2007-04-28T10:35:00.000+01:00

I once read somewhere that land, at least until it is highly civilised and urbanised, gets the kind of people who are suited to it. I think Britain could claim to be pretty intensively cultivated, and, hopefully, civilised, but I wonder if the general idea still rings true? Do we suit the land that we live in? I was wakeful last night and annoying my husband by asking him questions when he was trying to get to sleep. I was wondering where he would choose to live within the UK, if money was absolutely no object (cue hollow laughter), work didn’t matter, you didn’t have to worry about uprooting children, etc. He muttered something darkly about life on Orkney, all alone, looking good to him at that particular moment, but we’ll let him have his little joke. It’s harder than you think when you start considering all the places that are special to you – at least it is for me, but then I am known for being maddeningly indecisive. Maybe the rest of you are all lucky enough to be living right where your dreams first led you, or else you’re firmly rooted where you’ve always been and couldn’t leave.

My favourite part of Britain is Northumberland. There is a huge family bias, of course; it was my childhood home until I was uprooted to the south of England at
the age of seven, and for me it has the pull of early memories, family summer holidays and Christmas get-togethers, and, now, as a place where I take my own children each year. I won’t wax lyrical about the beauty of the place; there are several other people blogging here who live there, know it intimately and can describe it far better. But whenever I used to think about relocating to the country, I’d always imagine myself there, among those ‘blue-remembered hills’ (and I know that was written about Shropshire, but it always makes me think of Northumberland). Unfortunately, we couldn’t do it because of work commitments, and maybe it was just as well; I don’t think it could ever have lived up to my expectations. It’s maybe better that it remains the place I escape to, both literally for holidays and figuratively in my head. My Grandparents are still alive there in my memory, along with the wallflowers and lupins and hollyhocks in their tiny garden, the pee-wits calling overhead, the notes of their clock still echoing. My Grandad was a miner, and spent a large proportion of his life deep underground in the pitch black. Yet in that ordinary colliery village where I spent most of my childhood summers, what I remember most of all is the clean sweeping air and the way my Grandad was first and foremost a countryman and gardener.

Maybe it’s better that I’m not continually assailed by little drifts from the past blown in on that air. My other Grandmother is still going strong at 94, still living independently just outside Newcastle, and writing this reminds me that I need to go and see her, and soon. The days really are slipping away.

Probably because of my early memories, I’m a sucker for dramatic northern landscapes. I love the Lakes and North Yorkshire. Further south, I have developed a deep love for Dorset, particularly that part of the coast between Lyme and Bridport, because of the times that my husband and I spent there – it’s become ‘ours’. Cornwall I love, well, just because it’s Cornwall. The Chilterns, particularly the bit around the Bucks/Oxfordshire border, is mellow and beautiful, and I know it well. I don’t know Devon all that well, really, although we’ve had a couple of spectacular holidays with the children on the North Devon coast, and I have friends who have relocated there. My husband loves Dartmoor, yet I haven’t been there much. This is a small country, yet huge tracts of it I’ve never been to. I’ve spent time living in France and Italy, and know some of their regions better than parts of Britain. I don’t know Shropshire, Herefordshire or the Welsh borders at all. I’ve never been to Wales (I know, I know). My husband loves Snowdonia; I love the sound of it, but it exists only in my imagination. I went to the far north Scotland for the first time last year and fell in love. East Anglia, in truth, was never one of my ‘special’ places. I barely knew it before we moved here. The dream of the lifestyle was seducing me, I admired the places we saw, agreed with all the practical reasons for being here, wanted the house. But I didn’t fall in love. In fact, in those first months, I fear I behaved like a sulky teenager. Nothing to do. Rains all the time. Don’t know anyone. S’boring. I longed for drama, for moors or cliffs or mountains. I got oceans of grain and sleepy, half-timbered villages and churches on the skyline. It isn’t really me, I thought, snarkily. I won’t deny that I still love dramatic landscapes. But I’ve learned that drama can be found in the history of places, in the echoes of the past that can be heard all over this county, in lonely villages which might disappear, quite soon, beneath the waves. It’s just beneath the surface, in those slumbering, but staggeringly beautiful and once rich wool towns. The drama is in the local lives that are being played out every day amongst an unchanging and very English landscape. I’ve put down roots, they’ve been fed and watered, and a scar would be left if they were ever pulled up.

2007-04-28T10:33:00.002+01:00

4 March

“Land of the silver birch, home of the beaver
Where still the mighty moose wanders at will.”

No, clearly not Suffolk, but the opening lines of a song that my children just can’t stop singing at the moment. I don’t know what it is about a Native American lament for Canada that makes tears prick my eyes each time I hear their soaring yet slightly off-key voices. It is surely to do with the continual yearning for home that we all carry around inside; we’re all still banging on the locked doors of Eden, after all. I used to suffer from the most dreadful homesickness as a child; it blighted sleepovers and school trips and sometimes I feel as though it has never quite left me. We went to visit friends on London on Saturday and have just returned now, on Sunday evening. I was longing to go – weekends when it rains relentlessly make me especially keen to hit the bright lights of the city, and I was dying to see my friends. We had a lovely time, with far too much late night drinking and talking, yet increasingly I feel the pull of home wherever I am. It’s a bit like the umbilical cord that still binds us to our children, or the let-down reflex that breastfeeding mothers feel whenever they think about their babies. I never thought that I would feel like an outsider in a city where I’d lived for so long, yet I did feel disconnected . Maybe it’s because my life has certainly become narrower – village, school and shop pretty much covers it these days – yet I don’t feel less because of it. I don’t believe my mind has narrowed. For all that I once lived the jaunty, cosmopolitan existence, in truth I mainly mixed with other people like myself. Similar jobs, similar backgrounds, similar views, similar lifestyles. Now, I am part of a community that is made up of people of different generations, different backgrounds, different opinions. Some city friends have asked me how I can cope with the fact that the countryside is so insular, and of course it’s true that there is less of an ethnic mix of backgrounds and languages than in an inner city. It is part of my job as a parent to open the eyes of my children to different worlds. But scratch the surface of this apparent monoculture and the differences yawn as wide as a chasm. I love the way that a community, like the landscape itself, slowly opens itself up to you, if you look hard enough.

Back to our weekend; I may be feeling increasingly displaced if I venture far from home, but children, of course, demonstrate that total adaptability to their surroundings that is the preserve of the very young. They apply the same energy and enthusiasm to walking down busy London streets as they do to kicking leaves in the woods. My son particularly loves seeing all the tall buildings, so we always do the rituals of seeing Big Ben, and pointing out Tower Bridge and Canary Wharf, and we often take a trip on the London Eye. They both love to play with my friends’ children and giggle the night away, all crowded in together. James spooked me slightly by saying that he was jealous of my friends’ children for living in London. My antennae always attuned to any hint of deprivation that my children feel, and worried that they might be missing out on the culture and fun of the big city, I anxiously asked him why he felt like that. “Just imagine, Mummy, being able to see the Thames Barrier whenever you want”, he explained. ???????! Must be a boy thing (and no, we didn’t take him to see it).

I don’t know if anyone else reads Edward Lear, but driving back home, leaving a comfortable urban world, I felt like the Yonghi Bonghi Bo, returning to:”Two old chairs and half a candle
One old jug without a handle”.

As we leave the busy motorway behind and head east, the world empties. Fewer cars, fewer towns, less noise, just immense skies and vast tracts of farmland. It’s the silence you really notice. Like animals who sense when home is near, we all grow calmer.

“Blue lake and rocky shore, I will return once more” sing my children, as they get to the end of their favourite song. We have no blue lake and rocky shore to welcome us, no crags nor forests. But I like to think that I can hear a welcome in the hoot of our familiar owl, and in the quiet utterance of the leaves.

2007-04-28T10:33:00.001+01:00

2 March

Am racked with guilt and regret this morning as I am having (another) bad mother moment; I shouted and snapped at my eldest today for being disorganised and making us even later for school than we normally are. The truth is, it was me, having decided to wash my hair at the last minute, who held us up. My boy is calm and stoic and took it on the chin, probably quite used to the fact that he has a feckless and maddeningly indecisive mother. It’s almost as if he has to play the Saffy figure to my Edina; unfortunately my tiny daughter shows all the signs of becoming a Patsy. Oh well, it will give him something to talk about in therapy when he’s older. I’m probably a little more short-tempered than usual since today is one of those days that I refer to privately as ‘knife-edge Friday.’ R has been away since Sunday (Saturday night, really, since he left at 4.45 on Sunday morning and no, I wasn’t waving him off), and we never find these weeks away particularly conducive to marital harmony. Instead of being thrilled to see one another and embracing gladly, we are horribly competitive as to who has had the worst week. We circle each other slowly like vultures waiting for the kill, and the first comment from either of us produces a volley of sarcasm (me) or self-pitying resignation (him). He just has to mention the words ‘hotel’, ‘plane’ (especially ‘drinks on board’), ‘dinner out’ , or anything that could be construed as ‘adult conversation’ or ‘time to think’, and my back stiffens, my eyebrows raise of their own accord and some pithy remark escapes my lips, all by itself. Equally, any suggestion that that I might have had anything resembling a life since he’s been away, or that the children and I might have had fun, is met with an Eyeore-ish despondency and hunched shoulders from him. In my defence, my memory always settles on a particular incident last February, when he had to go to Seville for a week. It was the most grim and bleak kind of February weather here, and both children were unwell. He called me to reassure me that, although the work was boring, there wasn’t much of it, there was a great swimming pool at the hotel, and the weather was so mild that they could have breakfast outside in the walled garden. I rest my case.

Wow, blogging as marital therapy; I bet you’re all thrilled that I started this diary! I ought to point out, in the spirit of fairness, that although R is constantly travelling, his job is neither remotely glamorous nor fantastically lucrative, which begs the question of why we’ve ended up with this ridiculous lifestyle. The poor man does genuinely hate being away so much. He hates all the schmoozing with strangers that is involved when he goes away. As for me, I’ve become pretty self-reliant over the years, but believe me, it isn’t through choice. If you’d asked me when I was first married what my worst family life scenario would be, it would have been being alone in the country with small children with the owls hooting and the floorboards creaking – which sums up my life now. In the early days, when we were new to all this and we had a serous renovation project on the go, you could guarantee that the minute R left, some fairly major catastrophe would occur. The electrics would fuse, tiles would start throwing themselves off the roof, chimneys would crack, the car would break down, deliveries would fail to arrive and we would always, but always, forget to order any oil. To this day I think he thinks I did it all on purpose. Still, we have a sort of weary resignation with regard to our life now; God knows we have tried so many other permutations (R looking at different types of work, me working full time, me working part-time, me doing freelance work, me being at home full-time) that we have come to feel that this is just life’s little joke. One consolation is that in the country we seem to meet all sorts of people with slightly unconventional lifestyles. Green is the new black and all that, but there are an awful lot of frantically chaotic arrangements being made to fund our eco-friendly rural idylls.

Still, now the self-pitying is over, I am happy to report that we do have the sanctuary that we always lusted after, even if it is more dilapidated and rough around the ages than our dream version. The children have the lifestyles that we wanted for them. We’ve just got to work on both being here at the same time to enjoy it. And remember not to score points off one another. Or shout at the children over something that isn’t their fault. Here endeth the lesson.

2007-04-28T10:20:00.000+01:00

1 March

If I were compiling a list of my favourite creatures, hares would be right up there, along with owls. Hares are everywhere in East Anglia; in the folklore, the symbolism of the architecture, the vernacular; watching you slyly from a barleyfield, somehow always there, at the periphery of your vision. I suppose it’s fitting that I feel compelled to ramble on about hares today, for surely this is their month. I was awake at the rude break of day, thanks to my daughter, who couldn’t sleep due to the howling wind and came into my bed, and who ensured that I could only doze fitfully, gripping for dear life to the edge of the bed. (My husband’s still away and we have a huge bed, but she of diminutive size magically expands through the night to fill every inch of space). Anyway, she woke as dawn was breaking to ask for some milk and then promptly went back to sleep again. I am one of those people who were born to sleep: I crave it, cherish it, and am vile and hideous when I don’t get enough. I store up the promise of lie-ins and afternoon naps like little bags of treats. My children, of course, being sent to carelessly smash this pleasure, naturally don’t care at all how often I have to wake up for them, but have had to cope with my filthy moods and complete disorientation while I stagger around, swearing and wondering where I am. This morning, for some reason, I didn’t feel like that at all; I got a cup of tea, opened the curtains and watched the light stream in. Out in the fields I could see a solitary hare, ears pricked, this most ancient symbol of spring just sitting there, letting the air wash over him. I watched him for ages. Hares have become talismanic for both us since we lived here. R (husband) has always loved them; before we moved here, we lived in Hertfordshire and R was enchanted to find that we lived close by where the poet Cowper used to live. He kept tame hares and wrote exquisitely about them. Since we moved here, they have followed us everywhere. I love the way that in the old East Anglian dialect, they are called the ‘lookers to the side’, which resonates with me as it not only describes them, but also seems to describe the way they are always there, at the edges of my sight. Whenever we have had a bad time we seem to see them, as though they are reminding us of a more primitive, playful reality. I have seen them running through the corn, leaping over hillocks. I have seen them boxing in the late spring, and, once, I saw one in, in time-honoured fashion, gazing adoringly at the moon, while it seemed that the moon was gazing back in delight. There is something so mysterious, prankish and puck-like about them; in mythology they have been, at various times, an emblem of spring, a fertility symbol, a moon-creature, a fire-devil and a shape-shifter. Perhaps it is their shape-shifting antics in the fields that make it one of the oldest and most widespread animals in world mythology. Brer rabbit was a hare. So was the Easter Bunny. Associated with the moon, dawn and, eventually, Easter, he was linked with death and resurrection. All cultures seem to have linked the hare with the night skies, with cunning and bravery. In Egyptian myth, Osiris is sometimes portrayed with a hare’s head. Across Africa and India and other parts of the East, there is no man in the moon – just the outline of a hare on the moon. In a lovely old wool church a couple of miles from here, there is a representation of the ‘three hares’ symbol that I believe is common in some churches in Devon. I’d love to see them.

I have to say in closing that although they are hardly a local phenomenon, they do seem to fit this landscape so well, with its huge, arched skies and patchwork fields. There is something a bit solitary and introspective, I’ve often thought, in the local character, and I seem to have adopted some of that sort of quietness since I’ve lived here. There is something so calming and steadying about living here, it does seem to seep into your bones. I do love cities too; London is the only city I know really well, and there are things that I will always adore about it. But my attention is always being arrested here, by the smallest things, which never really entered my consciousness before. The shy magic of hares seems to represent that shift for me.

2007-04-28T10:19:00.001+01:00

28 Feb

Have been musing this morning on celebrity country dwellers. To be honest, they’re a bit thin on the ground here. Those that we do have, are, in the main, definitely your D or even E-listers. We aren’t really a terribly glamorous part of the country (not that I’m complaining). There seems to be some sort of collective country-wide amnesia as to where West Suffolk actually is; we’ve lost count of the number of times people have looked blank when we’ve said where we live and confessed to not being able to pin-point it. Not having terribly sexy credentials (we grow a lot of sugar-beet!) means the flow of A-listers looking for status houses hasn’t really happened. There are plenty of large country houses and some huge sporting estates, but few of them seem to have flamboyant – or famous – owners. Maybe there exists some of sort of celebrity hot-line – or maybe a secret celeb bloggers’ site! – where they compare the merits of various parts of the country , what the access is like for whatever it is that they need. It has been darkly muttered in our village that we even, in fact, have some sort of curse in place; for mainly historical reasons, our summer fete is quite a big event and we generally get some well-known (ish – it varies!) person to open it. Unfortunately, over the past three years, two of the invited guests died soon after cutting the ribbon (John Peel and Richard Whiteley), so maybe it’s just as well we don’t have a huge pot to choose from - we’d kill them all off. We do, however, have one very famous part-time resident – a German supermodel – who owns a huge ‘weekend’ estate very close by.

I’ve been thinking about these huge estates lately. I’m aware that many of the rich landowners who used to live in them would spend huge amounts of time in London, or abroad, or at their other homes, and I’m certainly not wistful for the days of exploitation and feudalism, but it seems that more than ever these huge country piles are removed from the local countryside and the lives of the locals. In previous times, I suppose, even if the ‘family’ weren’t in residence, there would still be a whole army of local staff employed in the house and grounds, and doubtless plenty of gossip flying back and forth. Now they just seem so remote and asleep. Not the ones which have turned into conference venues or hotels etc, but those still in private ownership. They must only get used for such a small fraction of the year; the one nearest to us is just a sort of upmarket party house. There is so much concern (rightly so, in my opinion) over second home owners in villages, yet everyone seems to forget or ignore the super-rich. Maybe it’s because they will always just be beholden to their own rules and really do live in a different universe.

Anyway, I wandered up to the village toddler group with K this morning. A woman was there whose husband is a local estate agent, and her news caused a little frisson of excitement in our gossip-starved lives. The German supermodel is reported to be selling up. Everyone started speculating wildly on who might be buying her house. Are we about to get some bona-fide A listers? Will Suffolk become the new Cotswolds? Can we expect chi-chi little boutiques and organic delis springing up in our agricultural villages? Could I become the new Jilly Cooper, writing about the lives of the rackety Suffolk set? I’m sure some people were frantically working out what the effect on house prices might be. Will it be Madonna and Guy? Elizabeth and Arun? Kate and Pete? Well, I can confirm that, happily for most of us who like things the way they are, Suffolk won’t become the new Cotswolds. I’m not sure that the house prices will rocket either however – rumour has it that the new buyers are Jordan and Peter Andre.

2007-04-28T10:17:00.002+01:00

27 February

My aura today is not that of a happy camper. My son belongs to Cubs, and please believe me that I yield to no-one in my admiration of what they provide for boys (and girls these days), and I am equally full of admiration for the volunteers. It’s just sheer bad luck, I suppose, that our local branch seems to be run more along the lines of Hitler Youth. Obviously not, I hasten to add (in case anyone from the organisation should ever see this) in terms of their philosophy, but in the discipline sense. Perhaps a boot camp would be a more appropriate and less potentially offensive comparison. The woman in charge makes rules and sticks to them, and does not do flexibility. My boy is due to attend an overnight camp soon (he’ll be the one with an over-anxious mother peering through the tent-flaps and stalking the camp late at night), and we had to present the permission form, duly signed, last night. My mental faculties seem to be swiftly deserting me these days, causing me to no end of worry in the small hours, and, despite having left myself post-it notes reminding me to take the form stuck to every available surface and even on the door, of course I managed to forget it. I realised half way there, and clutched my hands to my head and groaned like a character in a French farce (never a good idea to clutch your head when driving down country lanes in the dark). I rushed in full of apologies, and I confess I was envisaging some friendly, light-hearted banter about Mums who forget things, and we’d agree that I’d send the form next week. Fat chance.

“No form, no camp. Perfectly clear.”
Yes, and I’m truly sorry, but if you really need it before next week, how about you let me have your address and I’ll post it to you first thing in the morning?”
“No form, no camp. That means form here today.”
“But it’s only on the kitchen table …” I was sorely tempted to say I’d go back to get it, but I had a sleepy toddler in my arms, which she could see perfectly well, and no-one at home.
“If you’ve got a spare form here, why don’t I just sign that one here, in front of you?”
“No spare forms, sorry.”
I then had a moment of inspiration:
“Why don’t I just write that I give my permission for him to camp with you, on the agreed date, and sign and date it in front of you? You can then use that as insurance until you get the correct form.” I could see she was dying to say “No form, no camp” but I think the fact that we were holding up procedures forced her to acquiesce with a curt nod. HONESTLY …I’m beginning to wonder if I want to entrust my boy to her tender care! It wasn’t as if the journey there had been a breeze either, since my son kept up a fifteen minute monologue on Dr Who (trust me, he can do MUCH longer). He was only curtailed because we had to stop to pick up a friend. Eight year old boys – in fact boys of any age, I’m sure you’ll agree, are clearly in early training for competitive male syndrome. The minute he was in the car, the friends leaned forward and said “So, James, ever been on a plane?”( he’s about 6 months older and always assumes the role of the man of experience in their relationship). James said yes, he had, so the friend, only disconcerted for a moment, shot back with “but have you ever flown one?” James confessed that no, he hadn’t (although I suspect that if his mother and sister hadn’t been there he might have been tempted to fib), and the friend proceeded to tell us all about how he’d once … had a go on a computer flight simulation game. At least my mood was mellowed on the way back by seeing two badgers slowly shuffling their way across a lane. I love the way they manage to look so gentle and yet so curmudgeonly at the same time. We also passed a large herd of deer racing across a field in the moonlight. Thankfully, none of them decided to shoot across the road. I had a nasty accident with a deer when I was six months pregnant with my daughter, and have no wish to repeat the experience. I’ve also just read about a fatal accident very close to us involving a deer, a mother and two children which was very sobering.

Today, so far, is turning out to be a bit of a blah day. No money. No work. Washing machine making strange noises. Car needs an MOT. Demands for bills to be paid. Snarling conversation with husband on the phone. Daughter snuffling with the beginnings of a cold. Pouring relentlessly outside. Everything feels streaming, dishevelled and tearful. I really need to will myself into a burst of energy today, but I keep lurking in the kitchen looking for sugary treats. I am supposed to on a no-sugar diet, I think it’s safe to say it isn’t working. I even found myself with a teaspoon and a jar of Nutella last night, and now I’m gazing greedily at the children’s after-school snacks. I need to go and feed the animals, and take a book with me to the pool while they’re having lessons. I’m reading two great books at the moment – Claire Tomalin’s biography of Thomas Hardy, and Mother’s Milk by Edward St Aubyn. I nearly always start two books at the same time, a really irritating habit as it takes me ages to decide which one I’m in the mood for.
Hopefully I will be in a brighter mood tomorrow…

2007-04-28T10:17:00.001+01:00

26 Feb

They do say it takes a village to raise a child …. well this morning I had a visit from one of the doyennes of village life. She is a smart, plummy-voiced, really scary octogenarian who appears to single-handedly run the village and, to her immense credit, is involved in most of the voluntary organisations. When we first moved to the country I thought, in my lippy London way, that she would be one of the running-everything, interfering, no-one-makes-Jam-like-me, Victorian-era types that I would avoid like the plague. Actually, she is, but I love her. In a sense she probably symbolises my conversion to village life more than anything else. Or maybe I’m just mellowing as I get older. Although time does seem to have stalled for her in about 1930, and she always looks at me in my jeans as though gels really shouldn’t be wearing slacks, she is one of the kindest and most genuine people I’ve ever met. When both my children were poorly with chicken pox a few months ago and I had a chest infection (and felt desperately sorry for myself – husband, naturellement, was in Paris) she, at the age of 83, was the first on the phone to see if she could do some shopping for me or help out in any way! I got to know her well as she does a huge amount for the local pre-school and primary school, both of which I’m involved with, and she adores children. The only trouble is, she has never actually had any of her own, and whilst this obviously does not preclude you from being great with children and having views on to their welfare and education, it does make it a bit difficult if you have, dare I say it, draconian and inflexible views on their upbringing!

Anyway, she was due this morning for coffee later this morning to discuss an issue we’d come up against at school (we’re both governors). The lovely, lovely boiler/Aga people had turned up first thing to sort out the oil pipe so we’re back in the land of warmth. I’d planned well – the best china tea set, flapjacks baking, (but not on the Aga, obviously, as it’s still warming up),the house relatively clean and tidy (i.e. toys and various detritus swept under the sofa) my daughter, deliberately dressed in a smock dress (I know, I’m a pathetic people-pleaser!) playing beautifully with her dolls’ tea set. About fifteen minutes into the conversation, we get started on the subject of children’s diets. It’s obviously been a fairly hot topic for some time now, and I should think that most people with any common sense broadly agree on what sort of diet children should have. I should point out that my own children eat pretty well on the whole. They do have treats though, and my husband did once make the great mistake of stopping at a garage and introducing my 3 year old daughter to the delights of a packet of Quavers. She, my child who will eat pretty much anything I put in front of her and probably eats more healthily than I do, reacted as if she’d been given manna from heaven. She probably dreams of Quavers, and certainly salivates if they’re mentioned. Anyway, village octogenarian was in full flow about the iniquities of modern parenting, highlighting in particular the fact that some children are given crisps by their parents. I weakly nodded and smiled, paralysed as ever by this woman’s sheer force of personality (I’m really not a complete wuss in real life, at least not all the time!). Anyway, you guessed it, on cue in runs my daughter: “CRISPS? Can I have some? My favourite!” I tried my best to cough loudly over her, when that didn’t work I laughed lightly and said nonchalantly, ‘‘Yes, you’ve had them occasionally.” My girl is nothing if not a stickler for the truth, and corrected me by pointing out that Daddy gets them for her at the garage every time they go there. I felt my halo slipping, but I have to say said octogenarian coped magnificently, chatting away to my daughter and changing the subject as she was obviously brought up to do when someone makes a gaffe! I was less composed, however, having been outed, in her eyes at least, as yet another cr*p parent. She will probably be keeping a close eye on the welfare of my children from now on.

My daughter has fallen asleep on the sofa after the ridiculously healthy lunch I made her eat as a penance for earlier. And what did I have, after I’d finished explaining to her the importance of fruit and vegetables and she’d fallen asleep? Why, a packet of crisps, of course.

2007-04-28T10:16:00.001+01:00

25 Feb

Anyone else harbour occasional secret fantasies about living in a fully serviced, lavishly furnished, modernist city-centre apartment with all amenities to hand? I know it’s not quite the place to admit to it, but if I didn’t harbour any previously, I certainly do after today. After the usual bribery and force required to prise the children away form the TV and out of their pyjamas, we planned to tackle the garden, which is a bit of an eyesore at the moment. (I have to admit that my husband had to use bribery and force to prise me away from the Sunday papers). Just before lunchtime there was a power cut, which is not an infrequent event in this village, electricity still being regarded as a bit new-fangled and awe-inspiring. It came back on early afternoon, by which time we were being a terribly industrious family unit in the garden. At least my husband was – the children were trying to be helpful, which is always a recipe for disaster, and I was clearing up the mess (it was ever thus). Anyway, I suggested to my husband that a particular clematis should be moved to nearer the front door, and he applied himself vigorously to digging. A little time later, really cold and desperate for a cup of tea, we came indoors. The subsequent conversation went something like this:

Me: It’s freezing in here. Can you put the heating on” (Going to stand by the Aga).
Him: “The heating won’t come on”
Me: “The Aga’s freezing …”
Both of us simultaneously: “Oh Sh*t”

No, we hadn’t run out of oil. My husband, in another of his DIY special efforts which he seems to save up, by means of a sort of calamitous telepathy, for when I can least cope with them, had sliced through the oil line when digging a hole for the clematis. As soon as we realised what had happened we rushed out to look and check the oil tank. Naturally, we’d realised just in time to watch the last of the oil (tank previously half-full) trickle out of the cut pipe.

We came back into the house in a kind of stunned silence. I went to make the much needed cup of tea, while my husband when to phone the brilliant people who always see to the Aga. Then all the lights went out again.

As I write, the electricity is back on (obviously, or I wouldn’t be on the computer) but the lights are flickering ominously. We’ve lit a fire, and I admit it’s quite mild, but the house loses so much heat without the Aga. The Aga people are coming out in the morning, and there is probably just about enough oil left in the tank to see us through until we can get another delivery (which we can really afford at the moment, ha ha), and husband is off to Frankfurt for the week first thing. I suspect we will be dining by candlelight tonight, which is something we try to do quite often as a family and I really enjoy, but somehow not when it’ll be sandwiches again and the choice has been taken away from me.

2007-04-28T10:15:00.001+01:00

23 Feb

It never ceases to astonish me that a simple trip across the village to drop my son at school and my daughter at pre-school can feel as though it has lasted about 5 days. In my rural-Mummy fantasies, this is a daisy-picking, squirrel-spotting, chatting hand-in-hand time of day. The reality, of course, is ever so slightly different; mad harridan mother (any guesses?) races round the house screaming that we’re going to be late, whilst the children resolutely ignore me, keeping at their own, fixated in the present, very s-l-o-w speed. There follows an extremely wet (I couldn’t find either the coat hoods or an umbrella) and muddy dash to deposit my eldest at the village primary. Naturally, I’ve forgotten his PE kit. My son, being a thoughtful, sensitive child, shames me by being full of concern that I will have to go back home to retrieve it. My daughter, on the other hand, is somewhat more in touch with her own needs and wants, and lets me know in no uncertain terms that I have failed as a mother by not realising (telepathically) that she wanted to bring her favourite doll with her. Still, at least she trots in very happily to pre-school, and I am able to retrace my steps across the quagmire that is usually the village green without too much angst. This makes a huge change from her early days at pre-school, when she would scream blue murder when first left. This was despite the assurances from the staff (who she has known from earliest babyhood) that she always settled down very happily, and my own instincts when collecting a happy, bouncy, child at the end of the session who couldn’t wait to go back again. I have particularly vivid recollections of walking back across the green (the pre-school building is about 300 yards from our house) and hearing her scream ‘help, help’! Before the world rushes in to accuse me of abandoning a distressed child, I did rush straight back to comfort her, a knot of anxiety practically making me retch, only to find her giggling with a gaggle of little girls. She has had a high sense of drama since she entered the world.

I’ve just been down to the stream that runs through the bottom of our garden. During the summer it’s a muddy trickle, but at this time of year it really picks up pace and can turn into a torrent after rain. Even a tiny insignificant stream like this can have such a power sometimes, you can see why people worshipped water gods. Standing in the garden after rain is one of my favourite things to do, particularly at this time of year. You can really feel the life force bursting out all over. I know it’s quite worrying to have daffodils and primroses out already, and tulips in bud, in my north-facing garden (and the primroses have been out since January), but you can’t help but be cheered by signs of the unstoppable, relentless march towards summer. The light seems to take on a different, cleaner sort of quality at the end of February too.

Back inside and I put off doing all the things that I should be doing – like paying bills – to write this. I am one of those people who are usually too terrified to open bank statements. A financial advisor would despair of me. It’s scary really that, as I said yesterday, we moved here for a better quality of life and to keep the wolf from door – yet that must be him I still hear scratching …

2007-04-27T22:15:00.000+01:00

22 February

We fled to Suffolk … to get a life. I’m sure you all know the kind of life I mean; a proper family life. A life where our children could thrive in a small community. A life that would, hopefully, be freer from some of the pressures we had grown accustomed to. A life where we could keep the wolf from the door, and plant a tree there while we were at it. So for the past six years we have tried to build just that, in bucolic – and intensively farmed – Suffolk. Having nearly fled FROM Suffolk many times during that dimly remembered first year, I have now wholeheartedly embraced my adopted county and my adopted lifestyle. A city girl by birth, and, I always thought, inclination, I finally gave in to my husband’s entreaties (he took advantage of those fuzzy post-childbirth days when any resistance, frankly, is too much effort) and embraced the dream. A dream that showed absolutely no sign of materialising in those early days, when we battled with financial catastrophes, with renovating a house that seemed to be stubbornly refusing to be coaxed out of its gentle decline, with settling into a small agricultural community where we didn’t know a soul and felt we had neon signs on our heads announcing ourselves as ‘London incomers’, and, for me, with the challenge of coping pretty much alone. My husband, of course, has the ‘get-out-of-jail-free’ card of travelling extensively for work – he is away for days, sometimes weeks at a time – with which I cope, of course, with grace and fortitude and not a scrap of resentment.

There have been times when I have felt that this fertile, quiet, industrious land has been swamping me. I have felt that I couldn’t overcome the East Anglian reticence of the locals, that my past life, my way of speaking, my way of living, even, would always be alien. That I could never hope to belong to a region with which I had no connection and which, despite its relative proximity to metropolitan life, has always been a stubbornly independent part of the world. I’d settled for being a friendly outsider. But something happened, gradually I think, or maybe it was something as sudden as the wind changing direction, I can’t say. I began to identify with this ordinary little corner of England, this pretty but unremarkable village, to feel it was home, and that in changing my life so dramatically I had, in a way, come home. Then something quite magical and serendipitous happened. I had become interested in genealogy and was tracing some of my family on the internet. Despite my southern-suburban upbringing and many years in London, my parents and extended family are originally from the north east, mainly Northumberland, and I hadn’t expected to find any deviation from generations of Geordies. It transpired, however, that no-one had ever actually known where my maternal great grandfather had come from; he’d been a seaman and had died young, away from home, and his wife had died shortly after, leaving very young children who didn’t know much about their parents. Family lore tells us he wasn’t from Tyneside, but none of us had thought any further than maybe Durham, or if he was really foreign, Yorkshire. But thanks to the online census, I discovered he was born about 8 miles away from where I now live – close to the hospital where his great great granddaughter was born, some 130 years later. He was a Suffolk boy. So I mentally raise a glass to my Great Grandad as I traipse through landscape that he would have known, with my children who have always known, with complete certainty, that this is their home.

2007-04-26T11:14:00.000+01:00

Had a shouty phone conversation with my Grandmother yesterday. Not shouty in an aggressive sense, I hasten to add, but because she’s a little hard of hearing, which is only to be expected, I guess, at the age of 94. Still full of vigour, her days still filled with living, she is missing having her family around her.

To me, her life has been a series of triumphs; hugely bright, but limited by being born into a large family of few means in the North-East, she has lived a full and enterprising life. She set up her own dressmaking business while raising a family, taught herself to both swim and drive in her fifties, travelled alone to Australia in her sixties. I worry that sometimes, in what must be the last slow years of her life, a life now constricted and narrowed by age, that she may see her life as series of losses – she has after all outlived three husbands, three younger siblings, and one son. Such an influential and dominant figure in my life, in recent years I think she has secretly dwelt with the long departed, despite her mental acuity. Her memories quite naturally grope back towards those people in their sepia tints and strange hats, posing unsmilingly for the camera. Those people who flitted vaguely in and out of my childhood, shadowy forms called Bobby and Billy and Jackie, Doris and Evie and Elsie, are more real to her now perhaps than me. How ironic it is, that we have such little interest in family history when we’re growing up; I could never think what to say to these people at the edge of my family circle when I was young, teenage awkwardness and constraint robbing me of my voice – now I yearn for the chance to sit them down and chat.

My parents and I tend to laugh when she says she’s lonely – it’s a family joke that she still has a better social life than any of us, a constant stream of people in and out of the house where she still lives independently – but of course she is. Our extended family has been fractured, like so many families, by distance and opportunity. I read some chatroom comments recently (you know where) about second homes, and, without wishing to relive the whole debate, there was one comment which really stood out for me. You have no birthright to live in the place you were brought up, said this commentator (a second home owner, natch), you have to earn the right to live there. I instinctively disagreed with that, as soon as I read it. No, perhaps you don’t have a right over and above anyone else; but you should at least expect a level playing field, the opportunity to stay put, if you so wish. Family disintegration doesn’t do society much good. My own family is no different to millions of others, our history a tale of small-scale emigration and disruption. My parents left the north-east for the south-east and better opportunities, which they found. Much further back, many of my ancestors came over from Ireland to Newcastle as a result of the potato famine. R and I, whilst suffering no deprivation and thinking that we had the world at our feet, were still priced out of the south-east where we’d grown up (admittedly, we moved for other reasons too, but who knows, if the large family house in Hampstead had been affordable ….!). No doubt my children will have to leave Suffolk, if house prices – from which we’ve benefited, perhaps to the detriment of some local family - continue to rise. Always moving on, in search of the promised land; sometimes we find it, sometimes we don’t. But how we still mourn our roots, that sense of belonging, our history, our local land. My grandmother is proud of all her family, those still close to home and those scattered across the globe. But I bet there are days when she wishes we were all living 100 years ago, all in the same street.

I just had a thought; my Grandad wore a flat cap and had a funny accent. How marvellous – I could dash off an amusing little piece about a quaint country character like him; I’m sure he even knew what to do about moles. I might even win something! (Sorry, couldn’t resist).

2007-04-24T15:02:00.000+01:00

I am marooned of Suffolk today. I haven't ventured out of the house in three days, since youngest has been quite poorly, and I’m starting to get the wild-eyed, unkempt look of a recluse. I always quite fancied the idea of spending my latter years in splendid isolation somewhere, the madwoman on the hill instead of in the attic, perhaps, but actually I now feel I may be better suited to being in the centre of the action somewhere. I’ve been jumping on the phone, and gazing longingly at delivery vans passing by – you never know, even if they’re not for me, someone might want directions. At least the weather is nice (we finally had rain in the early morning, hurrah!) and I keep popping out into the garden with such regularity that the birds have perfected their alarm calls at my approach – you can hear the rooks teaming up with the blue tits in defiance at my continued presence. I hear the call of housework to be done, bills to be paid, Things To Do all over the place, but reason that I can’t really start anything, because I’m bound to be interrupted as soon as I do. My daughter has perfected both the pleading, little, tug-on- the-heartstrings voice and the imperious and relentless commands, and she’ll switch between them according to which she believes will get the best effect. Since my housework avoidance techniques are second to none, (I will truly never be the sort of person who co-ordinates their underwear drawers), I call happily delude myself that a quick flick here, a wipe there, constitutes a good spring clean, and, since I am also bone-tired, sitting in front of the computer once again appears to be the best use of my time. Funny how I am always trying to pull the children away from screens, whilst hunched over the laptop myself. I did promise myself that I would restrict blogging to once or twice a week, so it’s not looking good already.

My mother is coming over for a couple of hours this afternoon, so I can get to the supermarket (oops - hope Chickenix isn’t stalking us). The very idea feels dangerously liberating, I may have a sensory overload (Lights! Noise! People!) and start manically filling the trolley with chocolate, ice-cream and wine. Or talk for slightly too long to the cashier, or start up random and pointless conversations in the car park – something that will mark me out as a little mad, no doubt. I'm getting used to it.

2007-04-23T09:37:00.001+01:00

Saturday night was a blast; dinner with lovely friends, who I always want to describe as old friends, because it seems like we’ve known each other for years, although in fact it’s nothing like that long. We talked for too long, laughed too loudly and drank too much; in fact at one point I noticed that we were all talking at the same time, babbling away to our wine glasses. Ever since I first had children I have known that I cannot do hangovers any more; on Sunday morning I really truly knew it. So by Sunday evening, having spent a gentle pottering day, accompanied by the furies flying around in my head, I felt I deserved to have a long bath. So I had the longest, deepest, hottest bath ever. Alone. (If anyone else has read the Jill Murphy books about the Large family, my attempts to get in the bath without the children are broadly similar). The bathroom right at the top of our narrow cottage is perfect for a solitary soak, having a bath but no shower, the shower room downstairs being the hub of morning activity. Upstairs is more of an evening place, and I certainly turned my ‘quick bath – can you make sure the children are occupied/asleep/not bothering me’ – into a whole evening. If you twist yourself around at a bizarre angle, head at the uncomfortable tap end (I go for the mermaid look, but fear I’m more of a flounder), you can gaze through the uppermost window, to the treetops and beyond. I watched the birds swooping and diving in the vaulted sky until twilight slowly fell and the stars began to shine. My mind could take in nothing but sky and water, clouds and bubbles. If you keep your eyes trained heavenwards, your thoughts don’t get snagged by the sharp edges of earthly mess; the neighbour’s abandoned caravan, the pile of rubble from his extension, the neglected bit of our garden, all thorns and nettles, the pile of towels and clothes on the bathroom floor.

Peace is so fleeting; today youngest is poorly – pale and wan, she needs my full attention. Nothing like a conflict between my maternal instincts and my irritation at my child-free morning vanishing before my eyes. Back to reality.

2007-04-21T17:41:00.000+01:00

Sun and serenity in Suffolk this afternoon. What a contrast to yesterday's choppy waters - anger all day, followed by sulks and whining at being left out of the party. I made it in the end though, and now I feel like I'm stationed at the door, welcoming everyone in with a gracious wave and thrusting a glass of red at them, as if I've been here all along. The children have been ignored again, although they don't seem to care; I've been fiddling with my new page, proud as a new Mum, and R, never content to let the day pass by in a relaxing fashion, has decided to create a window seat in the kitchen. Very much pro the window seat - I've always missed the one we had in our last house - but slightly startled to see one wall of the kitchen demolished and gaping. We're going out tonight, and I feel quite sorry for the babysitter who will no doubt be taken aback by spending her evening in half a house - the tarpaulin flapping, the owls hooting, and the chill winds blowing ..... it's spooky in Suffolk, you know. I'll leave the fridge well stocked as penance.

2007-04-21T17:40:00.000+01:00

test

suffolkwritings

2007-04-21T11:43:00.000+01:00

Oh - My - God - has this worked????