Presentation

This week I have ten articles to ghost write which involves interviewing ten ghostees and then editing or padding what they have said into 500 words. There is also the small matter of moving out of the house to be attended to. The furniture has now all gone leaving only piles of dust, dead flies, crusted socks, atrophied apple cores, dusty half-read books, a pile of sharpened sticks which I can only assume my son in stockpiling for the revolution and loads of clothes. Who knew we had so many? Lots of them don't fit any of us any more and will be edited when I come back here to visit from our rented house, where there are beds, on Sunday morning. The moral dilemma I will be grappling with then is do I launder and dry clothes for the charity shop or wheech them straight into the skip? The cupboard under the sink, which will also need to be cleared in the next 72 hours is already stuffed with ex-clothes dusters, enough to be surplus to my requirements for the rest of my life, even if I live to be 150.

Amongst this chaos this morning, as my seven year-old daughter packed a costume for her first disco after school today (her godmother hopes she doesn't have her first cigarette at her first disco) she wondered if we had remembered to get a present for the birthday girl. Ehh, no. It was five to eight. Five minutes until we had to leave and I had to be straight back home after the school run to do an interview. I didn't think the birthday girl would want a sharpened stick, even if my son could be persuaded to part with one and I am not the kind of organised mother who has a present drawer, even when my house isn't half empty. (I wish I was.) My husband suggested giving her a bottle of wine. I suggested an IOU and taking her present to school on Monday. My daughter looked disgusted at the prospect of arriving empty handed. Then - a victory - I found a card. I could give her a tenner. Vulgar, but a solution. Yes! No. Chavvy, horrible. No, no, no! Half a clove of garlic wouldn't do or an apple or a even a brand new unopened tub of jalapeno houmous. I consulted everyone and they all said no. So I reached for my bag, fished out my wallet and found a limp tenner. It might have spent a week tucked away in a tramp's pants waiting to buy a bottle of Thunderbird on a rainy day but, I reasoned, it was worth the same as a crisp one. We wrote the card, closed it on the note and shoved it in the envelope, which fortunately my daughter didn't notice had a water stain on the back of it. Lets say it was water. It was a horrible present but better than no present.

As soon as my daughter got out of the car at the school gate bearing her shameful present, her best friend came running over, pigtails flying carrying a pink gift bag with tissue paper stuffed in the top and the corner of a beautifully wrapped present peeking enticingly out of the top. There were curled ribbons, there was glitter. My heart sank. The BF held the ultra present out to my daughter and said, "I can't go to the party, would you give this to the birthday girl for me?"

"Of course she will!" I beamed, grabbing the bag from her and stuffing the stained envelope into it. I put it into my daughter's hand and waved them off.

I think the Patron Saint of Rubbish Mummies must have had a hand in that. Bless her.

R & R

I had a few days in London at the weekend. The sun shone, the wine flowed, the chit chatted and I saw lots of lovely friendies including a few of the kind of men I never see at home. A change really is as good as a rest, not that we parasites ever really need a rest but we appreciate one and it was nice to escape the packing and even my beloved skip for a few days.

Not my usual kind of chap #1
On Friday morning as I wandered the shops of Knightsbridge in a Nurofen daze, post-eyebrow threading and a little bit morning after, I decided to make a small detour on my way to lunch with the Babe Mamas to look in on Abercrombie & Fitch. I had heard it was a rewarding retail experience. The front of the shop looks like it might be the head office. It doesn’t look shoppy. No windowsful of wares, no branding splashed across its frontage, no lights, just a douce little sign on low-key double doors. I only just spotted it from the other side of the street and crossed over to investigate. The door opened and there standing before me was a half dressed nineteen year-old boy/man. I was in the right place. The half that was dressed was snugly encased in low-slung jeans. I didn’t see what he was wearing on his feet but he was naked from the jeans up. Naked, tanned, muscley, toned, smooth and blemishless with blue eyes and hair which involved too much obvious product, but in a good way. I glanced quickly at him and carried on into the dark interior of the shop. It is like being in a vast club on several floors. The multitude of shop assistants, male and female are all gorgeous and young and the music is LOUD, except in the fitting rooms where the same music is at a more contemplative level. Lots of the staff were dancing alone and with each other. The non-dancers were more attentive than the dancers but they were all friendly. Each had a sector of at least two or three piles of t-shirts to patrol which they did beautifully and to the very best of their pulchritudinous, expensively educated ability. The girl whose job it was to chat up old ladies even admired my trousers.
I tried not to squint at the sizes in the darkness or draw attention in any other way to the fact that I was definitely the oldest person there buying clothes for myself. The t-shirt, I promised myself as I left the fitting room, I would only wear in the garden and the sweatshirt only to the gym.
As I left, my old coolness reflex tried to kick in and was about to prevent even a peek in the direction of the half naked one. But just in time I remembered that I am 38 and was therefore invisible to half naked one and his co-workers on manning the door duty. Also I had just spent £85 in the shop and was going to get my money’s worth. So I had a good long look, top to toe to top and went out into the sunshine smiling.


Not my usual kind of chap #2
Dressing up a bit was going to be required for a Saturday night out with the laydeez so I removed the Abercrombie & Fitch t-shirt I had been wearing all day, showered and replaced it with a little floaty tea dress. I applied proper foundation, took infinite care with my eye make-up (smokey) and zhuzhed my hair. I lip-glossed and Jo Maloned and forsook my usual huge hold-all for a more elegant small evening bag. The Blonde Adonis is the best turned-out and one of the best looking men I know and I had no reason to think that his new (to me) boyfriend or their friend, the Altar Boy would be unkempt either. (Although we did establish during the evening that none of them has ever had a back, sack and crack wax.) We started the night necking delicious cocktails and looking at pictures of Blonde Adonis and Perfect Boyfriend’s new dog. I think the dog is a good sign. It is also immaculate – the glossiest puppy I have ever seen. I bet it even smells good. We talked about mastitis for a bit, not that I brought it up, and got through a range of other bodily functions too. And of course we talked all about art and politics and the credit crunch. We even got onto the whole altar boy/priest thing. The answers are yes, yes and yes. But only once the Altar Boy had reached the age of consent and left home.

As I stood giggling and swaying and talking nonsense with everyone else on the tube home Blonde Adonis read my mind. “You’ll be out of all this and back in the country this time tomorrow,” he said. He was right. And as I left the train I was glad of all their lovely hugs.

Skip-edy taboo dah

We are moving out of the house in a couple of weeks, while some work is done on it to make it more civilised. I have hired a large container which is sitting outside waiting to be filled with all our belongings and furniture. By me. A small corner at the back has so far been filled with a few boxes and one dismantled bed. Actually not all our belongings are going into it. Some are going to the charity shop, some to the recycling facility, which used to be called the dump (or one of my favourite Scottish words, the cowp) and some are going in a skip and thence to the landfill. The skip arrived this morning. I am delighted with my skip and have been flinging stuff into it joyously but some of the people I know are a touch disapproving of it. I think skips may be the last taboo. But how, I ask, am I supposed to recycle the following:

The sweetest shoes that my children wore when they were first walking, gnawed to pieces by mice. A very smelly man-made fibre jacket left by our Polish au pair three years ago, also with evidence of mouse activity. Two broken plastic clothes airers. A gross of plastic hangers from clothes shops. A hundredweight of broken MacDonalds/stocking filler/free with a magazine toys. A carpet peed on by three species. Opened packets of dried chickpeas, flour and quinoa dating back to 2004. Single shoes and boots. Holey tights. Outgrown pants - clean but still second hand. Broken lamps. 1998 jam. Cracked plastic toyboxes. Half a ton of vacated plant pots. Stained soft toys. A wheel-less barrow. 59 miles of baler twine. A pedal-less, saddle-less bike.

I am filling the skip in continuous rain. I resolved never to mention the weather in my blog because it is boring so all I'm going to say is that I wonder if this saturated, sodden part of Scotland will be inhabited in a hundred years?

Better stop. Crud to chuck.

The Honey Trap

There I was this morning, my day panning out to be a near perfect example of my parasitic lifestyle. First I dropped the children at school. As no-one in my car load is now in Junior 1, I don't even have to walk them up the steps to the school any more. I take them across the car park past the dangers of the tiny blind women in the huge cars and wave them goodbye from the foot of the steps. After that I went for coffee with the Second Wife. She filled me in on the gossip from the parents night I missed last week, we bitched about one of the teachers, then I went to the gym. So far so little contribution to society.

The gym I go to is at our local university which is also an elite centre for Scottish sport. Or a centre for Scottish elite sport, or a centre for elite Scottish sports - curling, anyone? As the beginning of term approaches it is filling up with students again which means it is busier but also means there are more people to look at. My favourite students to look at are the young fit male rowers, the young fit male footballers (more lithe and narcissistic than the rugby players), the young fit male swimmers and the young fat female students who are there to lose weight. I may envy the girls their plump faces but I don't envy their plump backsides, their thunderous thighs or their muffin tops. It gives me a nice warm glow and mildly accelerates my endorphin rush to be stones lighter and years fitter than them.

Full of the righteousness of the recently exercised I made tomato-faced for Sainsbury's where I ambled the aisles picking up everything I needed for cooking this weekend. I even found polenta in our understocked outpost. I almost had everything when I remembered that my daughter had requested a new jar of honey. I buzzed back to the jam shelves. The British honey which I would usually go for was the most expensive - the fault of the dreadful summer I am told - over three quid. Too much. The Australian was a pound cheaper. But too many air miles. The blossom honey was the same price but was the product of more than one country. Yuck. (Not as yuck as a bag of salad leaves from more than one country but still yuck.) The organic was organic but expensive and who told the bees? The same person who told the salmon? I don't think so. At the very end of the shelf was some Mexican Fair Trade. Cheap, clear conscience and half the air miles of the Australian but from all over Mexico so no good. I read the backs of jars and jars, squeezy bottles, tubs and pots. The honey almost robbed me of enough time when I got back home to have lunch at the deli and ride my horse. But I managed to fit both in.

I have some work coming up over the next couple of weeks so I'll be justifying my existence while my children are at school for a change. I'm going to be ghost writing commentaries for a group of estate agents for their in-house magazine. I expect they will be putting a positive spin on conditions in the housing market. I won't be contributing much to society (except possibly to the gaiety of anyone who reads it) but at least I'll be paying my way.

Party, Party

It turned out it wasn’t the smart dinner party we needed to bring a jumper for. It was perfect in every way, temperature included, thanks to a huge fire, ranks of candles in silver candle sticks and being snuggled up with twenty nine others at a table narrow enough to flirt with the people opposite as well as those on either side. Very good planning. The husband who organised it is an ex-soldier and there was evidence everywhere of military-standard logistics of the type that I failed to implement for feeding the same number at my son’s recent birthday party. Enough people to dole out food to that number, for example. A table plan. Which put me between two intelligent interesting men. Enough knives and forks. Water glasses. Enough plates. Enough courses. Ice cold kummel in respectable receptacles. (At my son’s shambolic birthday dinner I broke out the home-made strawberry vodka intended for New Year and sloshed it out at room temperature in plastic tumblers. The Eminent Surgeon suggested owlishly that it needed to taste more like alcohol.)

The army were much in evidence at the regimental ball but hadn’t thought to warn us to bring a jumper, or that the bar and sitting area were outside. Early September in this part of Scotland is winter. Maybe as a Scottish regiment holding their party in an ancient castle they assumed all the guests would be as hardy as them or that we would know to come in skiing gear with bivvy bags instead of handbags.

We arrived in our inadequate clothes after dinner. Getting into a chilly car to batter half way across the county in the dark might not sound like the ideal after dinner activity but I loved it. It reminded me of the days when I used to spend all night in a pub then go off to a club – yippee! I still struggle to escape a feeling of failure if a dinner party I have given ends before 5 am or without dancing but there was no chance of our host suffering from any such feelings that night. (He is a little way past the difficult age I am at now, so no doubt is better adjusted anyway.)

The kind of bitter youthful experience outlined in my last posting taught me not to wear silly dresses to balls but the teenagers at this ball were a sensible bunch. And sober too. All of the girls were in dreary high cut dresses that looked like belted silk sacks, rather like mine. But I am thirty eight, twenty years older than them. It was evident that we were in the company of the generation who go to University to work hard and pass exams. And that we were amongst the oldest people there. Did we, the Blonde Bombshell and I wondered, appear to them as the veritable old dames of the neighbourhood had appeared to us fifteen or twenty years ago?

Any group of people gathered together to take part in Scottish country dancing will include roughly 10 percent Ball Frowns. We had one in our Reel of the 51st Battalion. They used to fill me with mouth-drying fear and embarrassment but the little red one we encountered on Friday just made me giggle. And not only when she poked the Bombshell with a stubby finger. She reckoned that my husband and I had not kept dancing our way down the set far enough and had therefore robbed her and her partner of their turn. It is unlikely that we got it wrong as my husband is posh enough to have been well-drilled in reeling from an early age. Its never the posh ones who are the Frowns anyway, they’re too polite and they can dress up and do reels whenever they like. In their own ballrooms. Ball Frowns take part in Scottish country dancing simply to boss people around. That is how they derive their pleasure from the evening. I wonder how they teach their children to dance: set to your partner, cast off one place down the set , set and turn your first corner, roll your eyes when they end up facing the wrong way. Manhandle English people and people in white kilt socks into the correct positions. Never smile. Ever. If they could they would sacrifice anyone who puts a foot wrong straight after the dance. The whole set would frogmarch those who made a wrong move outside the hall (all in step and in time to the music) and burn them at the stake. They might have to watch a perfect foursome as the flames began to lick at their ankles.

Too late we discovered that there was another bar inside, in the brightly-lit regimental musem. I was regaled with a long story about the car park at a northern branch of Aldi which persuaded me, in case the teller had a sister in there, to go back outside where I was forced to remind myself (with an object lesson, obviously) that smoking doesn’t keep you warm and that I’ve gone off it anyway. I met a girl who I hadn’t seen for years and congratulated her on being a QC. She thanked me then looked a little panicked as she tried to remember what I did. “And you’ve got two children!” she beamed. The second and last cigarette of the night wasn’t any better than the first.

A dress to depress

Unusually I am going out this weekend, not once but twice. Friday and Saturday. Going out on two consecutive nights is not something I do any more. Going out at night isn't something I do much any more, unless I'm away from home. I'm looking forward to it. I have even arranged an excellent babysitter in good time. So I won't be scrabbling around at the last moment and end up entrusting my preciouses to the untested monosyllabic, obese barrel-scrapings they are subjected to when I am less organised. The embarassment of having to translate broad early school-leaver for my children always makes me flee from the house early, compounding my guilt. But this weekend I hope, I can party on, safe in the knowledge that my babies are being watched over by pretty, chatty, fragrant Alpha babysitter who knows how to play monopoly, can tell the time and drive herself home. Please don't let her be ill.


What with all the animal husbandry and cooking that I do I tend to wear manky clothes most of the time, which isn't to say I don't enjoy wearing nice clothes. I love wearing nice clothes. I love buying them, thinking about buying them, planning to wear them and wearing them. One of the reasons I love going out is that I get to put on the foxy cool clothes which hang unworn for their own protection for 99 per cent of the time. And do my hair and wear makeup. I will have two opportunities to wear things I don't usually wear on my nights out but with provisos. There are strict dress codes for each event - floor-length on Friday, black tie on Saturday.

On Friday it is a ball at a castle and on Saturday a smart dinner. I had a rummage in my wardrobe yesterday - forward thinking again, I must be growing up. Somehow amongst all the jeans, misshapen t-shirts, smelly fleeces and unworn loveliness I found the sort of dress the regiment holding the ball will deem seemly for their big night. I have worn it once, eight years ago; the last time I went to the same regimental ball at the same castle. It was made specially for the occassion when I was pregnant with my daughter. I don't wear floor-length dresses often so I was pleased to find it and (kind of) to discover that it fitted fine and wouldn't need a belt.


Dressing successfully for a ball in Scotland where you will be expected to take part in rumbustious Scottish country dancing (or reeling as I now call it having married well) has nothing to do with little girl fantasies of gowns and jewels and silver slippers. Its about practicality, comfort, not flashing your boobs and not breaking any limbs. A bit like dressing for the gym only less foxy. Forget strapless, particularly if you have tiny boobs like me. Even in my pre-children voluptuous 34B days strapless was a non-starter, as I finally had to concede after spending a friend's birthday party largely topless. In most of the dances a man yanks your arms above your head and spins you violently, disorientating you and removing one boob from the top of your dress before passing you on to the next guy who will do the same thing in the other direction which removes the other boob before you have had a chance to scoop the first boob back in. In WAG circles it would count as an assault. Sleeves might sound like a good idea but aren't because all the hands above head turning means the dress will be ripped at the armpits after the first reel or the sleeves will be lying trampled on the floor or the wearer of a more robustly seamed dress will have flashed sweaty pit patches 96 times in 10 overheated minutes. A high-cut dress with sturdy shoulder straps is the only thing for it and at a regimental ball it has to be floor length. Which means grannyish ankle length because if it is sweeping the floor or has any kind of train it will be stood on, tripped over and cursed by wearer and fellow guests alike. Practical. Comfortable. Not words I like to associate with going out clothes but which on this occassion I must, or risk bringing shame on the good name of our host. I don't want to go into the details of the practical comfortable shoes I have selected and risk bringing shame on my own name. Suffice to say my daughter has forbidden me from leaving the house in them.

The dress situation for Saturday night is better but, exasperatingly also imperfect. The black tie dinner is being held in a huge freezing pile so we have been told to bring a jumper. I'm not sure a jumper will improve my favourite little black DVF dress but my joy in dressing up doesn't extend to being cold, ever. The hosts can't afford to heat the house now that they have bought it and have chosen feeding us dinner over keeping us warm. I would rather eat crisps and be warm. I would rather not wear a jumper over the favourite party dress that I get to wear twice a year.