Deep fryer

I came home on Thursday after a really horrible day in the office – I do that office-thing once a week, and mostly have quite good days, but last Thursday was the worst – after drinks with a new and delightful work colleague (who lives in an actual haunted house) and after going straight to drinks and delicious dinner at the most stylish and cool new neighbour’s flat without popping home first. It was late and dark when i did get back, but my wifely sense knew as I walked through the door that something was different. Something smelt different. The air was altered somehow. My instincts took me straight to the kitchen bench where an industrial-sized deep fryer lay, still warm, still shiny from its newness but with an undeniable oily film from recent fryer-y usage.

This was a big shock. Deep fryers have been a dangerous conversation for us for many years. A trigger. A bruise. A marital landmine. Mark has been wanting a deep fryer for a very long time to make chips, but I have always told him a firm no. Chips aren’t good for you – heck, deep fryers are the opposite of good for you – and it would never have just stopped at chips, would it? It would become a bit of a deep frying odyssey, a challenge, an adventure fun park where the only limits to the deep frying would be Mark’s imagination.

For me, I have always found that chopping up potatoes and roasting them in olive oil and salt with perhaps some rosemary sprigs or garlic cloves thrown is makes a perfectly delicious chip supper, but Mark has been hankering for something more. More hot, more stainless steely, more girth, more deep fried.

Issues with the deep fryer

Size: The new deep fryer is the size of a deep fryer that a shop/cafe might need, probably able to feed hundreds of people many portions of hot chips. I think Mark is very attracted to commercial kitchen implements because he spent so many years in a stainless steel butchery and had access to top of the range stainless steels things. He also generally likes buying top of the range things and he likes them as large as is possible. This, in a small 2 bedroomed flat, was always going to be a fundamental problem. It takes up the entire draining board and its box (“gotta keep the box!”) sits between the kitchen table and the couch which blocks the much-needed flow.

Smell: The other thing, which I think is a real problem, is the way that deep fryers make your flat smell and feel like a fish and chip establishment. Without proper ventilation, the oil spits out in tiny droplets and settles on your hair, your skin, your artwork, your books, your kids and your dog. Probably your shoes in the hallway and into the fabric of the couch. Into the apples on the bench, perhaps, and all over the photos blue-tacked onto the kitchen cupboards. It gives you spots. It makes your clothes clammy and fuggy. If I didn’t have my three Chanel jackets safely stored away in my bedroom wardrobe, the oil would probably turn the fantasy tweed into a clammy webby mess.

Storage: The deep fryer also needs a lot of oil which should be filtered through some sort of funnel/muslin situation to be reused once all the chips have been made. Mark went off to Portobello Road market on Saturday purely to find an antique glass flagon to keep the recycled oil in. Needless to say, he didn’t find one.

Do you see the problem?

So on Thursday night I went straight into our bedroom where the lights were out and Mark was in bed, in his sleeping pose. I asked in a fairly unwhispery voice “Why is there a deep fryer here?’ and he rolled right around to face me (because he was clearly expecting/fearing this interrogation) and quite firmly said (with stainless steel in his voice) “Let’s not get into this now.”

Lines were drawn, I tell you.

So. The upshot is that we had a LOT of fried goods over the weekend and people (men) came around to admire the deep fryer, some even bringing frozen things to deep fry in it. The women were all uniformly disgusted. I refused to eat anything from the silver slimy beast, and I wouldn’t touch any of its silvery bits that looked like they were threatening to burn me and the children very badly, forever. Or just electrocute us. I also said that it couldn’t live in the kitchen, and nor could the flagon/oil containers, and that the whole repulsive contraption must instead live a few streets away in our storage. When it was frying, I hid in the bedroom, and when I came out later I opened all of the windows and doors and turned on the loud extractor fan (doesn’t work) and complained about how slick the surfaces now were. I commiserated the boys on their new acne and sniffed their hair sadly, urging them to go and have another wash. The bowls of chips got increasingly left to cool and dry up as everyone got sick of the same oily taste. Once Mark stuck sausages in the vat to cook, the oil just got confused and murkier and meatier and probably cancerous.

I tried to tell Mark that going against the few rules in our marriage pretty much stinks. I said “I know how much you hate tattoos, but what if I came home with one?” and he rolled his eyes and said this was entirely different, and besides, he had owned the deep fryer for years and had just hidden it in the storage until he felt safe to spring it on us all.

Was he safe? No. Did we have a good weekend? No. Will I ever get the oil off? No.

Anyway, the fruitless flagon search thing may have been the last straw for him because the deep fryer has been packed away back into the deep dark recesses of the storage along with the huge hamburger maker, the hamburger plastic packaging laminating machine, the sausage maker et al. I am meanwhile much happier now that I have a draining board back. I think the matter is closed for now.

Photos of my beloveds

Remi on World Book Day

Otis too – they were both dressed as words. Otis was ‘incognito’ and Remi was ‘broom’

Mother’s Day still from the Dove shoot ten years ago. Can’t keep this hidden away:

Boys on a Mother’s Day rainy trip to Cliveden:

Pub quiz team:

Delightful Casper turned 16:

Easter Egg hunt in a suit:

More pub quiz shenanigans:

Dorks on a fake beach:

Weak sun. Strong sons.

We’ve been out today in the pale, bright early spring sunshine, because we are all obviously vitamin D deficient. We’ve had a perfectly fine winter – not very cold, uneventful, longish and grey but no more than you would expect (and no worse either – I don’t suffer from SAD). Sure, I find the winter a bit of a bore but also kind of nice – I quite like the dark morning running and the nesting and the warm traybakes for dinner and settling down to watch TV and then early bedtimes for (nearly) everyone. But there’s that thing that happens when the sunlight lights everything up in an almost overhead florescent light kind of way and the blossoms burst and you remember what it is to feel lighter and happier. Skippier. Excitable. Smiley. The tug of outdoors and the longer days and the warmth and sun on your face.

So this morning I said ENOUGH PUT DOWN YOUR STUPID PHONES and they all followed me out like little ducklings because they all must feel it too, and we frolicked in the park and no one complained. It was a bit weird because the first tranche of children have moved on now, and the little ones haven’t done all the things and been to all the places that the first lot experienced, or they were too young to remember. So we have to try to do the things again to make sure we don’t have massively different childhood stories between them all. My older siblings had a kind of tribal threesome growing up experience before I was born and sometimes I hear my parents telling these stories about their three kids and the stuff they all did and I am like….uh……nope, I wasn’t there. I came ten years later when everyone was kind of teenage and over it.

Today we did go and revisit the patch of climbing trees and lower bushes that I took them to every afternoon during lockdown. It’s hard to remember the afternoons we passed there during the one exercise break we were able to take, because it was boring and samey and stressful. We would bring the dog and he would make a huge fuss after a while, barking and trying to run away into the Serpentine, and we had people come and complain (from afar) telling me that my dog was disturbing their precious quiet time. He very much was, but there was just me and six children (one a baby) and no where else to go and he was disturbing my peace too, as I recall. I was doing my best.

The police on bikes or patrol cars would sometime come and ask me about my massive oversized group of kids and I – exceeding the magical group of six – and I would say that they were in fact all mine and the numbers simply couldn’t be helped.

We had an Easter Egg hunt in the patch during that terrible period because going into our communal garden for our annual hunt wasn’t quite in the spirit of confinement (we weren’t very well-received as such a big group of small marauding boys while everyone else was busy trying not to mix households), and I remember the ickiness I felt spreading the foil-wrapped eggs into slightly dog-pissy tree forks and thickets of grass, pretending like it was all fine and fun and good.

Anyway, we went there today, and ran around the Diana Memorial Fountain and got suitably wet. We had coffee, babyccinos and hot chocolates overlooking the water, found the huge climbing tree in the Rose Gardens, and waved at the parakeets. I felt all joint-achey the whole way and Mark confirmed that’s what being old feels like. Every day.

So that’s awesome.

Tales of illness

Last night, Mark got all stomach-achey and vomited for a good long while and I was like ROLL MY EYES IT’S PROBABLY KIDNEY STONES and I was trying to find a way to tell him that when he did, in fact, have to call the ambulance at approx 3am for morphine and a trip to A&E, I wouldn’t be coming. Last time I had to try to sleep on a plastic chair which hurt my already screwed-up neck and all he did was sleep off the serious drugs (in between moaning like a woman in labour and looking at me with tears in his eyes saying THIS FEELS SO AWFUL) and I was feeling a bit sick of having to do that kind of thing AGAIN. I was getting all annoyed because the doctor told him last time to become a vegetarian and I am always saying ‘go on a diet and come for a run with me bro’ and he doesn’t do either and so I think the kidney stones are kind of his fault. I was a bit ungenerous and so I put him to bed last night at 8pm and said to shout out if he needed me and closed the door. We had a perfectly nice movie night and ate creme eggs and Doritos. I crept into bed at 11pm and he was asleep, so I hopped into bed and settled in, fully expecting that sleep would be brief and jarred when the kidney stones moaning began.

BUT! He slept til morning and he seemed ok, which means one of two things. Either, he has a kidney stone brewing and last night was just a little teaser of what is to come, or he poisoned himself by not cooking the lentils well enough in the chicken soup he gave us all for tea. I am hoping, really hoping, for the latter. Why weren’t you all poisoned, I hear you asking….? The only thing I can think is that he has a very babyish stomach and we are all made of steel.

More worryingly

The other thing I woke up to was a whole slew of messages saying that my dear old Dad had collapsed at church and was in hospital all the way on the North Island of very-far-away New Zealand. Mum was up there at the hospital with him still but she doesn’t know how to use the phone – Dad does all of that (and a whole lot of other stuff). We were lucky that they have a few nephews and nieces living near them (thank you, you guys!) who looked after them and let us all know what had happened, but they are pretty much alone. No kids in the actual country. No one to do the stuff that will need to be done. No one to help them. No one to take responsibility. So we are thrown back into the worry about how we can all manage what will be increasing ill-health and general elderliness when we are all plane rides away. I don’t know quite how we got to this, and I know they don’t either. Thoughts on caring for marvellous and loving elderly parents who live in a different hemisphere and who are currently utterly unsupported by their brood of four adult kids most welcome.

Photos to cheer us all up after that

Covid lockdown tree patch:

Noah and me, before he chipped his tooth in half (again) on a piece of soft bread. Go figure.

The horse stature. Everyone must climb this and I must take a photo. They also must look into the weak sun for the best light even though it is clearly burning their retinas.

More covid lockdown tree patch shenanigans:

On strong sons, the kids can now pretty much heave themselves up into the trees using their extremely impressive upper arms. Ned said he would like to become a BBC gladiator eventually and his name would be ‘Dorito’ because he loves Doritos and his musculature is currently triangle-shaped. I think that’s a marvellous goal.

First, a farewell

You know how December is all preoccupied with itself, and the schedule for stuff is ridiculous and you just lurch from one thing to another, and while you are at it you are a bit cranky about it all, thinking that if only you had some TIME to enjoy the Christmas drinks and had some moments to spare to go proper shopping instead of constantly ordering off the evil Amazon then you could really be having a lovely festive period, and then you finally finish up at work and go on holiday and everything stops, kind of (but not really because everyone needs to be fed and dogs need to be walked, etc etc) and then January comes at you like a punch in the actual face?

Compared to January, December now seems like a silent movie, tinselly and slow motioned, full of gentleness and fizzy wine, sequins and goodwill. Work in December was a masterpiece of loose-ish plans assembled for the new year – projects roughly sketched, emails signed off with a ‘let’s circle back to this in the first few weeks in Jan’, Christmas lunch budgets ‘o’erflowing, OOO messages ensuring nothing much mattered because no one was even there anymore to care. December was, I see so clearly now, the best month ever.

I think I expected the circling back in the first few weeks of January to be a bit of an empty threat, like when you tell people you will be in touch for some dates to catch up for a drink or dinner soon, but you won’t, and the other people are a bit glad because going out feels like salt on raw skin these days. But in a work context, they actually mean it. So it’s been so so so so busy, serious work things all lined up for the first week back, deliverables expected to be delivered in those embryonic January days that should have seen everyone slowly emerging out of their post-Christmas and New Year slanket skins all pale and rubbery from too much cheese and not nearly enough vitamin D, with work gently coaxing the brilliance and the drive out of us in a kind of lovely massage. But it didn’t. It made us pay for that sparkling December lull. Coming back to work in January is violent.

In the middle of that, we said goodbye to Mark’s mother, who has been sick for a long time. He had been to see her in New Zealand a few months ago which was a most wonderful thing, giving them both time to sit together, talking and not talking, napping, watching TV, navigating nurses and the visitors and the cadence of end of life care, just being there before things got worse.

Her funeral was livestreamed (that’s such a weird phrase to type), planned carefully and thoughtfully by her. We sat in our basement flat half a world away and watched, everyone hunched over a phone or a laptop, sounds on all devices muted except for Mark’s laptop to stop the chorus echoing slightly out of time. We were a part of it and yet not; the gathering on a sunny morning in a whole other hemisphere reminded us that we are strangers, placed too far away for too long.

Her granddaughter read out my mother-in-law’s life story, written because she worried that no one really knew her story as she saw it, and it was true – what she wrote was revelatory to all of us, even to Mark. Because how do you really see or know your mother? How do you really see your husband’s mother, or your grandmother, with whom you’ve seen a few times, or only ever had some snatched phonecalls now and then? What I knew a little of was that she was enormously elegant, self-deprecating, curious, loving, intelligent, and wise. She valued faith and friendship. She was bossy and stubborn. She was house proud and fastidious, keenly alert to the opinions of others and to a high moral code. She was a connector of people; gathering women together, organising things, dispensing advice and ideas, good at listening and caring and weighing things up. She had too many clothes, loved shopping, never left the house without a full face of makeup. I love that so much, because me too.

I didn’t really know her, but I see her often, in the snubness of Remi’s nose, the shape of Noah’s face, the slightness of some of my boys. I see her enormous capacity for friendships in my husband, her kindness in him too, and I think I now know where that side of the family get their bafflingly strong will. She was a force, that woman – a tiny, formidable, proper old school matriarch. She will be forever missed.

To birthdays, then

Meanwhile, my children refuse to stay little and in the 11 days between 23 Jan and 4th Feb, three of my six children all get another years older. This is horrible, not so much because all the weekends and all the money get used up, but because they aren’t babies and I am no longer surrounded by chubby little messy adorable preschoolers. They are all just tall and handsome and sassy and we hardly remember to hug anymore and I lose them a little more each day and even THE BABY TURNED FIVE! This is weird for me because I have a history of filling the small baby slot with another one but Mark is too old and I’m probably barren, my ovaries like tiny useless raisins.

Here’s a selection of birthday shots. Each birthday means a cake of their choosing, some sort of outing (a trampoline park for Remi or an ice skating rink for Ned), and whatever they like for dinner. It’s an old formula but it works.

In other news, we are trying to buy a house. It’s exciting and frustrating and depends upon selling a house in New Zealand which feels impossible and expensive and causes all sorts of emotional triggering. I have also read Wifedom by Anna Funder which all women who feel exhausted by domestic demands and general grumpiness towards the patriarchy should read asap. I am personally feeling somewhat like in danger of drowning from the tasks that fall to me – I have been forgetting parent teacher interviews, booked the wrong weekend for a hotel and had to pay twice, forgot what time I had booked the bowling for Ned’s birthday which ended up meaning we had to switch to ice skating (much to everyone’s slippery bruised horror). I keep saying that I am at capacity and am struggling but I am not sure anyone is listening. Anyway. I am now going to take Ned to Portobello because I forgot to get the timing right for that yesterday and we missed out on that too.

Drowning. And saying goodbye. And making too many cakes in too short a period of time. That’s 2024 so far.

A better year, we hope

It’s a few days after Christmas and we are in a cottage in Devon. It is raining and the whole place smells of bacon. I haven’t written in a while, mostly because November and December were both social engagement tsunamis and so my usual end-of-the-month need to purge myself bloggingly of my stories and worries and little incidences of no consequence passed me by.

What must I record here? I have checked my calendar on my phone and it is a series of greyed-out two word entries like ‘Fiona Inge’, ‘Rebecca Mayfair’, ‘4:30 smear’, ‘4:30 police’, “Remi River’, ‘Hair @9’, ‘Underwear’, ‘Erdem’, ‘Muppets’. This translates to:

Drinks at Fionas to thank Inge for all of the incredibly hardworking for the PTA; a Sunday afternoon stroll through Hyde Park to watch Saltburn at the Curzon Mayfair; smear test (all clear); a police followup on the (second) attempted mugging of Ned which was scheduled to happen three times but never did; a paydate for Remi on a houseboat on the Grand Union Canal; a haircut, colour, treatment, and two cocktails in Portobello; the Erdem sample sale that yielded me a silver dress I have been wearing everywhere (photo to follow); our third consecutive year attending en masse the Prince Charles Theatre singalong screening of The Muppet’s Christmas Carol, which ended in a delightful meal in Chinatown with two Peking Ducks and £67 worth of fried rice.

That’s just a snippet – there were parties and houseguests and The Royal Albert Hall and sightings of Stella McCartney’s entire tribe at the local Chinese restaurant and work dramas and Borough Market for the sabich sandwich and Remi and Otis’s nativity services and operating the cake stall at the primary school Christmas fair and attempting to view the Christmas lights in Carnaby Street. It was relentless and tiring and I just had to remind myself that by mid January I would be all lonely and a little bored, waiting for the Antipodeans to return from blindingly hot Sydney and thinking about throwing my own party with ham and fizzy wine and a massive cake so I would have something to do and some people to talk to.

A bit of Carnaby Street for your viewing pleasure:

The Gospel Messiah:

More lights:

Remi as ‘the green wise man’:

Me in the sample sale Erdem:

Otis and Anna showing off their hand sewn Bob Cratchitt and Tiny Tim sweatshirt homages to Santa (and not winning the prize which seems extremely Scrooge-like of that particular Santa who instead gave the prize to two men in Primark Christmas jumpers with a tinsel boa):

Taking up nearly the entire back row:

All of that aside, Barnaby returned home from his first term away at university and we tried various musical beds until we found a solution to the not-enough-beds-anymore situation. Barnaby has now nabbed Remi’s bed and Remi has swapped it for a little nooky den carved out in our room where he is effectively camping until Barnaby returns to Nottingham in a month’s time. The nooky den used to be Mark’s ‘special corner’ where his golf clubs, vintage train sets, car seat covers, old maps, files, toner cartridges, guitars, etc, used to just kind of pile up, so much so that he hasn’t been able to get into half of his wardrobe for years. So Barnaby’s return heralded a good clearout of which we (me – ME) are all immensely grateful for. I have, over the piling-up years, just learned not to ‘see’ that part of our room. I turn my back and gaze upon my half which is full of delightful boudoir-ish things like perfume stacked on a vintage tray and artwork and jewellery hanging on vintage Murano candelabra and artfully piled books and an awful lot of dust. Miss Haversham-like layers of dust which I sometimes try to clean with a damp cloth but mostly ignore.

So we are all together again and the months Barnaby has been away has signalled a seachange in the family dynamics. Last Christmas, two of the boys had a huge physical fight which ended up in three of us crying, banishment, stolen beer and vengeful drunkenness (not mine, btw), and avowals of fraternal hatred which I feared would never fade. But in the year since then, and solidified over the physical distance of one moving out, peace has restored. I have praised both culprits/usual suspects for prioritising harmony and practising restraint and tolerance and above all else, showing a maturity that I feared would never manifest, Both our families have fracturing which have partly stemmed from teenage resentments and old hurts, and sometimes these just don’t go away. I have spoken to all the kids about this and asked them not to let that happen with us. So far, nearly two weeks in, the boys have orbited around each other respectfully and tolerantly, and I really hope the sharp edges of all that piled on, hair-triggered fury have softened enough to no longer be a constant threat.

So instead we have had good times. Swimming and spa pooling, a trip to the dunes at Woolacombe, a few pub meals, a Christmas movie every night (Die Hard, Love Actually, Four Christmases, tonight’s choice not yet decided), charity shopping in Barnstable, Secret Santa, Christmas morning church service at St Stephens in Tawstock. Today, the plan is to raid Sainsbury’s for more ham and batteries, half prices crackers, and no doubt some more sparkling wine.

Here’s the pool:

Boxing Day beaching:

On Friday, we drive back to the flat to see what 2024 will bring. In January last year we got The Bad Tax News, and in summer the You’ll Have to Find Another Flat Because We Are Renovating News (this is as yet unresolved, leading us to pretend it might never happen. Ha! Wail!) There were kidney stones, cysts and MRIs and a neck that has ceased to work properly, unrelenting work stresses, and emergency trips home to see elderly ill parents. There were necessary fundamental financial changes to make. Teenage breakups to witness, too many school things forgotten (odd sock day, an art exhibition, a school trip or two), regular martial fights over domestic chores, a dog with a terrifyingly huge fatty lump which is probably too big to remove but surely too big with live with. This year has been hard work, amongst all of the wonderful things and the constant joyful drumbeat of having a big family.

Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year. Thank you for still coming back to this neglected little nooky den where I pile all of my stuff that probably needs a good sorting out.

A quiet place

We are two men down and everything is quiet, so quiet. Barnaby is having a most excellent time at university, enchanted by learning Russian and being introduced to art history and Wagner, although less enamoured by the liberal arts part of his degree which seems to be mired in self-congratulatory existential twaddle. I love a bit of self-congratulatory twaddle myself but there needs to be a balance and I suspect this hasn’t been struck. But it’s early days and the sweet young man has to bed himself down and figure out a whole lot of stuff around his new life and what looks good and what doesn’t, and what matters and what doesn’t. A massive part of this will be getting a job which seems to have fallen quite far down (or off) the to-do list. Money is always very handy when you have to fend largely for yourself, so I shall be reminding him that being broke sucks more than going to your fun student job where you learn things you will benefit from forever. Ahem.

The other fella to have jumped ship is the husband who has flown to New Zealand to be with his family and to see his mother. He has had a rough few weeks – waking me at 3am three weekends ago after we had been at a party, lights on, moaning and mooing and sounding very much like a woman in labour/a man with kidney stones. This was all a bit familiar as he has had them once before, so I called for an ambulance in a jaded sleepy kind of way and asked him if I really needed to come along too. Unfortunately he said yes, gasping it out before another wave of pain hit.

I am a terrible, terrible nurse. Let’s just get that out of the way sharply.

So the ambulance came and I just sat there in my trainers and my jeans, little bag packed with newspapers and phones and chargers, face all old and puffy, hair horrible, watching the men give Mark morphine and making really shit jokes. We were taken to St Mary’s and basically both fell asleep on a wheely bed and a hard plastic chair respectively in between blood tests and more morphine. At some point someone came in to tell us there was an obstruction in the kidney and then all of my peri-menopausal anxious tearful, fearful unhinged emotions came out and I spent the next many hours just crying like a massive baby, convinced that it if were ‘just’ kidney stones’ then that’s what they would have said, and that it was no doubt some terrible kidney cancer and he would die and we hadn’t really sorted out affairs yet and he never ever did hang all my artwork onto the walls like I’ve been asking for for years and he still hasn’t sold the truck and OH NO I am not really up for being a widow and my children are too young and why haven’t you looked after yourself properly and this sucks and I’M SO TIRED.

But it turns out he had a small 2mm kidney stone which took five days to pass and one ultrasound to check it had passed before he boarded the plane because who wants a kidney stone attack while you are flying over the Middle East? No one, that’s who.

Mark was horrified to hear from his specialist a day before he flew away that he needs to become a vegetarian for three months to fix his body up a bit. I mean – we have SOOOOO much venison in the freezer. Ironically, venison is the WORST for kidney stones and Mark is a meat man from way back and this news was like telling a voracious reader that they have become allergic to paper and kindles. Devastating. But I said go with it – it’s a simple rule and for a finite time, and it may keep you alive and certainly it should help you avoid five days of racking pain. He seemed unconvinced, particularly as he would be staying with family in New Zealand and who wants a guest who doesn’t eat meat, he asked me. I’m like, that’s actually not really a thing – you just swerve the sausage. But he thought it might simply be too much to ask of people to pop the chicken to the side and so….er, let’s just say the Great Vegetarian Experiment is limping along rather than a gallop. Or a jog, or a feeble ramble.

Sample dialogue:

How’s the diet going darling? I ask.

Good, he says. I’ve only had one steak and cheese pie.

SHAKE MY HEAD AND SIGH HEAVILY.

Anyway. Since my last post I have turned 46, travelled to Porto without children but with a meat-hoovering husband ignorant of the small sharp crystal making its way down his bits, finished the pottery course making us the proud owners of disproportionately large handled mugs and unpleasantly textured bowls and sculptures of people who are not at all reflective of what people actually look like, and probably had nits. Annoyingly for me, Mark ended up being a bit of a pottery maverick star and each project of his emerged so full of character and spirit and joy that I have been forced to examine why I think I was going to be so much better than him at it. This stuff is so humbling! So awkward! So irritating!

And half term came and went and I have barely looked at the children who have spent the week playing Minecraft together, racing out to Tescos for forbidden snacks, watching terrible TV, fighting each other when I am on Teams calls, and singing loudly. We are trying to make the most of Dad not being here and so are hitting the meat/cheese hard, and watching movies that Mark would refuse to see. Remi is sleeping with me which feels rather nice as he doesn’t snore and only takes up a tiny part of the bed but he does tend to wake at 6am on weekends asking me if it is time to get up. It isn’t, but we do it anyway.

In the Culture section of this post, I can report I have been to see the Marina Abramovich exhibition at the RA (wonderful but I missed the naked people as they had clocked off), saw Bafta screenings of The Holdovers (great, sweet, a little forgettable) and Past Lives (overrated but who am I to say?), and I became a member of the V&A so I can go see the Chanel exhibition whenever I want. I will go, once I stop being very busy with mid-life crises and upheavals and feeling so tired all of the time.

Thanks to our private healthcare at work I went to see a gynecologist about my hormones and when I arrived and sat down and he asked me how I could help, I burst into tears and told him snottily that “I am 46 and I just don’t think I am very well!” and the way he calmly pushed the tissues over to my side of the desk showed me he has seen it all before. So there were bloods done and an examination that showed indeed I am somewhat worse for wear after all those babies (prolapse, hernia, etc) – the poor old undercarriage is a little ramshackle in places. Anyway, just give me the drugs.

Here’s a fleshy cheese hand I made for Halloween:

And a nice photo of Mylie and me out on Friday night for her birthday:

Some ceramics for your visual feasting pleasure:

Noah and Otis crocheting together:

Tuesday night winning pub quiz vibes:

That’s it – that’s all I have. Happiest of Halloweens and Guy Fawkes and the return to school and the Christmas runway, y’all!

One gone, five to go

Today, I bought one packet less of the fresh bagels on my way back from the Portobello Sunday morning run/crawl, because this morning, we are one person down. Last night, when I once again rolled up the window blind in our middle bathroom, letting in the light and undoing the paranoid blind-unrolling habit each of the boys cling to (in case someone from another higher-up flat manages to manoeuvre themselves into some kind of impossible viewing position from their upper windows that overlook our lightwell, purely, they say, to spy on them while they pee), Barnaby’s precariously-placed electric toothbrush did not come crashing down onto the bathroom tiles like it has been doing every night for years. This is because the toothbrush, and his razor, and his shaving cream have all been relocated to a university hall in Nottingham. As has he.

The changes are small, though also massive and human-sized. He doesn’t like cheese, so every weekday meal for the last 18-ish years has been an exercise in avoiding cheese. Imagine – six kids but no cheesy pasta, no quick’n’easy pizza, no thrown-together jacket potato with grated cheese on top. No lasagne. No cheesy omelettes or cheese on toast. No parmesan chucked in for flavour, no feta for the sharp salty tang. No mozzarella for the pleasing stretch, no pasta bakes, no macaroni, no mascarpone-enhanced tomato sauces. But now? Now there’s a whole new world opened up to me, though it doesn’t exactly feel like opportunity – it feels like a loss.

There’s no one to empty the dishwasher, traditionally Barnaby’s job. There’s nothing really left of him here. One extra seat at the dinner table (which is good, because I’ve been perching on a step-ladder for years). There’s an extra sort-of-bedroom opened up in the old coal store, but that’s been taken swiftly by kid no. 2, because nature obviously abhors a vacuum, and which means there’s a vacancy for Remi opened up in the big old dorm room where the others sleep. Remi, right now, is helping Mark dismantle his cot as he prepares to move out as well.

So far, we are ok. This emptying out of our home and of my mothering load isn’t the opposite of the initial filling up. Before Barnaby, there were two. Barnaby’s arrival was over a long weekend – it was sore and shocking and bloody and unfathomable. Then there were three, and the life we once had was blown up spectacularly, delightfully, sleeplessly. It reshaped eventually, bits of us and him settling into something else entirely – a new build, one that we loved so much that we kept at it. Blowup after blowup, reconfiguring what life and tolerances and expectations and Christmas present budgets and car sizes and sleep-ins and space looked like. As we grew, all this made a kind of a sense, a chaotic, messy, noisy, overwhelming, joyful, impossible sense.

The other side of this is much tidier. Where once there was a cot is now dust, a virgin rectangle of untrodden carpet, and the ghost of all that bruised and wounded newness and hope. Where once there was my son, my first son, big and beautiful and clever and mistaken and prickly and loving and wonderful, is now a little more space in the flat, some discarded books, a few photographs on the fridge. It’s a slimming down, a quietening. I am that little old woman in ‘A Squash and a Squeeze’, but with kids, not farm animals. I am losing people as I reclaim some room, but I don’t exactly like it.

I didn’t cry when we said goodbye yesterday because he was happy and excited, and he has a whole life to begin living that isn’t with us anymore. That is good and right. And just as it took a weekend for him to arrive all those years ago, it took just a weekend for him to leave us. Just a few days. I tried to throw in some last minute advice to eat apples and get enough sleep, to know your limits when experimenting, to be kind, to look for bargains and to wear a helmet when on his bike so he doesn’t fall off and get brain damage and live as a pirate until the rest of his days. But he knows all that, because he’s many steps ahead of me. He’s been honing best practice for years, thinking about things, watching and learning and trying stuff out, all while I thought he couldn’t care less. He wants to have his turn now. He’s ready. And so are we, for better or worse.

It’s been quite the month

A few weeks ago we got told we would have to move out of our flat because the landlords want to renovate and let the flat out for higher rent. This is news we have known would come one day, but after 15 years, you kind of push the thought of impending UTTER DESTRUCTION OF OUR LIVES under the Turkish rug. I was at first numb, then sleepless, then tearful, then panicky. It seems rents are high out there in the real world, and flats are small, and it is entirely possible that no one will be delighted at the prospect of renting to a big family with a fat dog, and that even if they were, it would be very far away from our friends and schools and neighbourhood and support systems and doctors and haunts and things that make a life really sing. So we asked if there were any way we could stay, at least until we could figure out what to do, and it seems that they will consider that. We have no idea under what conditions, but we are hoping something will work.

Then there was a sniff, a hint, a teeny tiny possibility of a role shift at work. These are nothing new for me – I am spookily prone to role shifts, as I am bouts of psoriatic arthritis and coldsores. These things linger, benign, undetectable, me foolishly thinking that I have grown out of them, but they come at me periodically to strike me down and render me weak and sore, powerless and sad. Embarrassed. I thought that it was a case of here we go again, and floated the idea to our nanny and the kids just so they could readjust their expectations in case the shift came. Change is always horrible, but right now, with the threat of having to move, and a kid needing to be supported at university, and the tax problem still hanging around in the form of repayments until next year, and the cost of living meaning that literally stepping out of this flat causes HSBC to send a flurry of panicky notifications to my phone, was just too much. White-knuckled panic, bloodshot eyeballs, big ol’ existential discussions of what it means to live and to thrive and whether we just need to shut up shop and scuttle home to New Zealand – all this for a few days.

But LO! It seems I got the wrong end of the stick – decisions made by people above my pay grade were made and I get to stay in my role – in fact, I get to stay with a few more most excellent role changes that equal challenge and opportunity and chances to stretch like that long-desired-for mozzarella. This, on the same day that a doctor at Chelsea and Westminster told me that my psoriatic arthritis has probably ‘burned itself out’ and that I am not needing any long-term plan for rheumatoid arthritis as they had thought. The stiff neck that I sport like an unoiled Tin Man is just a mystery they are happy to put down to an anomaly which may get better by doing physio exercises diligently. That news felt good, but also odd – someone telling you your long term thing that you’ve begrudgingly learned to live with is actually…not a thing at all. Those years of blowup knee joints where movement feels like shard of broken glass replacing cartilage and bone, where getting up and around on mornings in the midst of flareups sees me hobble and grasp for support until the joints warm up and calm down…what even were they?

Lastly

Mark and I started our pottery classes. It turns out that Mark is good with his hands, I am impatient and prone to internal tantrums when I think I am not the best in show. I think the universe is trying to tell me something, and that I desperately need some HRT.

Anyway. Here’s some photos from the last few days:

Go well, my son. Thank you for everything.

Broke stuff

I thought, when I was a younger person, with a neck that still swivelled gracefully and hair that hadn’t yet begun to thin, that having a lot of children wasn’t going to be very expensive. The rationale was that they could share clothes, they could sleep in bunkbeds, I would make simple lovely one-pot meals that everyone would eat (thus capitalising on the economics of crowd-feeding – cheaper by bulk and batches), and that we would entertain ourselves instead of needing trips to Thorpe Park and Legoland. That we would eventually save on babysitters by getting the older ones to do it. We would borrow things and share things and everyone would learn to have cheap brotherly home made fun. That we would reuse the cots and the car seats and the buggies and the sleepsuits and just get on with it.

I didn’t bank on quite a few things, in this early, sweetly naive financial assessment, such as how often those now big people break my stuff, or incur needless costs in big, dumb ways. I didn’t think much about future holidays where everyone brings friends and everyone is now adult-sized (with adult-sized luggage and adult-sized fares) and everyone has inherited their parent’s snobbish attitude to food and wine and everyone equals a minivan. Our holiday to Gozo has been over for a week but OH THE COST will be with us for a jolly long time after.

Here’s some annoying money-related things that irk me, roiling my guts with the pain of it all:

To save on costs, we all went for the early flights there and back and that meant 2am and 3am violent unnatural wakings and terrifying vomit-inducing coach and taxi rides to airports (if you are Otis, that is – the kind of kid who routinely vomits just as soon as we pull up to Gatwick’s unloading bay after looking pale for the hour long drive, or chucks up in the sea after the boat ride has well and truly concluded, or sticks his head out of the cab and spews into the wind that blows it all back into the car). These early morning trips probably ended up saving up about £10 each and we are STILL feeling the aftereffects of travelling all night last weekend to get home. Reader, this kind of economising is just not worth it.

We also went for the soft hand luggage under-the-seats-in-front-of-you option rather than cabin bags but Casper was determined to take his favourite hard cased square bag with him even though we said ‘no – take a backpack like everyone else’. Easyjet are wankers, obviously, so when we got there the Easyjet woman took one look at Casper’s boxy bag and said ‘That will be £48 for your oversized bag” and when we said “NO WAY, it is certainly not oversized because when using your VR online tool it seemed to roughly fit,” she said “Put it into the wire cage over there to see if it fits then” with a kind of sigh. It fitted into the cage perfectly except for a millimetre of plastic hard wheels poking out of the top. We pushed and we rearranged but she remained steadfast in her conviction. “Oversized”, she said, taking our payment and (the kids are adamant about this) ending with an under-the-breath throwaway burn at them: “IN YOUR FACE!”. I wasn’t so sure, as she was an actual middle-aged woman, but who really knows?

Casper also left his phone in the transfer van at the end of the holiday and by the time he realised, the van had sped off. I emailed the transfer hire company to send it back to us once they had found it and it has so far cost us £125 for couriering and ‘admin’. We might also be stung at customs.

There were ten of us on holiday and that meant we couldn’t all fit into the biggest minivan on the island, a 9-seater. So we had to resort to buses and eventually cabs for the older kids. The older kids also got quite keen on a refreshing glass or two of Maltese wine at every meal which, though cheap per bottle, quickly added up. One night the little buggers ordered cocktails each and I nearly exploded with euro-related rage.

They broke two lampshades at the villa. The first was because one teenager got skittish and outraged about a fly being in his room and he chased it around while trying to swat it dead with his tshirt, and the tshirt caught the glass lampshade and it shattered all over his bed. The second lampshade got broken because the other teenagers decided to throw hard balls around in their room and misfired, hitting the glass lampshade and shattering it all over the beds. I mean, FFS.

The breaking of things continued today because another teenager of mine throw a pillow at another brother but it missed the kid and hit a vintage mid century ceramic vase which smashed all over the kitchen. At this point I was a bit sick of hearing the unnecessary and unbudgeted for costs incurring by my large and unwieldy thoughtless oafs, and have today constituted a policy whereby the suckers have to pay for breakages (and oversized luggage and lost phone courier charges) themselves. This has caused a lot of tears and handwringing and outrage but how else will they understand this stuff?

The other thing the children do now is that they eat all the things. But not the things I would like them to eat. On Gozo, the watermelon was left to go drippy and soft, the thoughtfully quartered plums and peaches turned brown. My tomato salad got optimistically rejigged until the heat and the juices combined, turning it into a kind of terrifying prison hooch. The massive tub of locally-made gelato, asked for repeatedly, got ignored once bought and transferred from the little bakery down the road into our villa freezer, inexplicably losing its appeal on the walk home. The cherry croissants were rejected as being ‘too sugary’. Mark, who ALWAYS buys a chunk of smoked processed cheese whenever we go anywhere, despite my protests that no one else likes it, ghosted the little cheesy stump until it grew a smoke-infused fur all over its surface. He also bought sad mushrooms that sat in a bag getting funky and damp.

But then we went out and the children’s appetites returned once in Gozo’s main tourist square, trying to order steaks and pork ribs and chips and two drinks each at least and I was DYING – the cost! I said. Why don’t you eat the watermelon? I said. Keep your costs down! I said. The budget is FINISHED! You’ve spent it all, you little hungry pests! But it was no good. I was outnumbered and overspent.

Here’s some photos though because actually, who cares? I can always sell a vehicle.

Gelato. Eaten at the bakery, but no where else:

A beach with red sand, rocks, waves, and a taverna with expensive things to order from:

A little bit of Catholic awesomeness:

More of the above:

The bluest sea:

Beloved and a big boat:

For the Bishop of Gozo:

Beheaded:

Me contemplating the money running out and deciding to smile anyway:

The inland sea in Dwerja Bay:

Spending money:

The waters are rising

Remi has become frightened of the toilet. He says that while he was at nursery, someone flushed the toilet that was filled with way too much toilet paper (every parent of a small child recognises this scenario) and the water began to rise. He now will only do a wee outside or if you come into the toilet with him. He won’t flush the loo unless you are in there with him, and he asks you to watch the water while he turns his back and washes his hands. He’s like, KEEP WATCHING. Don’t look at me. Watch the water!

Obviously this is not a sustainable situation. It makes me wonder if he has seen more overflowing toilets than I actually realise. There’s that incredible act two in the Triangle of Sadness where everyone in the superyacht gets vomity and the toilets overflow with the most revolting and slippery wastewater, and there’s an overflowing toilet in Rose Byrne’s bathroom in Platonic. How much does this kid see? I used to have a good handle on these kinds of things but the whole cadence and tone of this family has shifted now that the teenagers have gained in power and number. They watch things and listen to things and say things that I cannot do much about, and the culture and morals of the family have shifted in response. Mostly I accept this. We are, in any case, overrun. There is usually a teenager somewhere in my eyeline. They tend to lie down quite a lot. Ned constructs Esher-like cushion-to-couch stairways and other soft furnishing platforms to splay his newly-hairy body over, along, and in, while the others are often plugged into a device and just sit for hours. They come and go, to school, out with friends, babysitting, walking the dog. I never quite know who will be home for dinner. Dinner might be for four, and might easily swell to 12. No one bothers much to articulate any of this in advance, and as such, my powers in the kitchen are simply unparalleled. I whip up meals like magic and always manage to pad the table out regardless of the unexpected extras. I keep telling the children that one day they will marvel at my skills, but right now they think everyone gets served three Ottolenghi salads plus a traybaked chicken and warmed sourdough of an otherwise unremarkable Tuesday evening. One day they will understand.

What do those kids do when they are not littering the couch with akimbo limbs? Last night one kid was at a party, another had one babysitting job which segued into another babysitting job as a neighbour went into labour and off to the hospital, another kid was at a WWF wrestling match with friends somewhere, another was babysitting another lot of neighbours kids. Two kids were with us, one asleep, one trying on my high summer heels. It’s like The Babysitters Club series here right now, but in real life and with absolutely no girls. The Square in which we live is awash with neighbours needing ad hoc and regular babysitting, and what better people to know than the family with lots of kids who have been looking after each other for years? They’ve nearly all had experience looking after kids from all ages, from tiny babies onwards…and there’s usually one kid here who hasn’t gone out to a party/isn’t in the middle of GCSEs or A levels/unwilling to each a tidy £10 per house for sitting down at someone else’s place for a few hours. It’s a goldmine, I tell ya.

Clothes update

The Tax Situation has curbed many, many old spending habits, and forced new ways of meeting my new dress needs. Two weeks ago I got all het up and panicky and sold a Chanel jacket which felt very much like ripping a baby from my arms. It wasn’t a jacket I had ever really worn, so not really like a baby at all, but it felt like I was making one of those rash decisions you rue, for years later. Like I do the Alexander McQueen jacket with the 40’s shoulders and slimmest of lines that I let go on a whim one day stupidly, rashly, mindlessly. Anyway, the Chanel jacket sold for £510, along with some Charlotte Olympia heels (£71) and two Roksanda blouses at £60 each. The money was quickly deposited into my account where it burned and ached and screamed at me…SPEND ME BEFORE I GET USED UP ON HAIRCUTS AND PE SHOES AND HYDROCORTISONE CREAM AND MOBILE PHONE BILLS! And so I spent a good week obsessing about finding a new Chanel jacket to ‘reinvest’ into. The only good one was on a US site but there are horribly expensive customs and duty taxes these days. So I came up with a plan to get the jacket via a complex system of friends and friends of friends and other people’s sisters and new accounts and shipping addresses and various countries and I may well have lost a week of my life and tried many good people’s patience. And it probably won’t fit because of the upper arms situation which shows no signs of resolving.

I also went to an Erdem sample sale after work this week and found dresses reduced from £1500 to £150 and so now I have more dresses to sell to ensure I adhere to the ‘one on, one out’ policy. Which I have to do three times. I also think I have a bit of upper-arm-induced body dysmorphia because one dress I bought is a size 16 and another is a size 18. I was like ‘ohhhh I shall belt it in and look all swishy and a bit like Audrey Hepburn in ‘Roman Holiday’ with all this fabric’ but Mark said WHY IS THAT DRESS SO BIG AT THE BACK? IT LOOKS LIKE YOU ARE STORING A TAIL.

On Mark

He has been struck by a mysterious swollen set of feet/lower legs. They have been hurting him so much that he can’t walk without crutches and he has to put them up on cushions and moan a lot. I was my usual brittle self about it because I kept telling him that if he didn’t do something about his generous tum then his sciatica would get worse and he would turn…immobile. Which he has been, all week. I said I will not prematurely become your carer. It’s all a bit tense. So he has had xrays and blood tests and emergency visits to the blood test clinic to check for clots and it turns out his current cocktail of (not fun) drugs may have exacerbated latent gout.

Talk about sexy times in Cleveland Square.

He also had a wonderful birthday party before the gout attack where everyone told him he was a most excellent and loved man, and they gifted him pottery lessons which he shall get to once he can walk again unaided. (Roll my eyes).

Anyway. here we are at the party:

Here’s his cake which the dog got to first:

And Barnaby, Ava and I at his Year 13 Leaver’s service in a chapel in Westminster Abbey. Oh yes, that’s how we roll here in Londontown:

And more party photos from last weekend on a penthouse apartment balcony with lovely, lovely friends. Mark had to go lie down with his legs up in the air in the living room so missed out on *quite* a bit:

Lastly, the baby, Barnaby, Otis, and Mark:

May was different

It’s the 4th of June, a Sunday morning, at 7:25am. I have been awake for a few hours and no one but the dog is yet conscious. Magic, though sleepy right now, is pretty much well except for fatty lumps all over his torso. A cursory google suggests it is quite normal for an old overweight dog to be this fatty lumpy, though he has a particular massive one which is coming out from his chest and feels and looks quite Ripley in Alien – it keeps growing and seems to be straining to come out through the skin. So we will take the old fella to the vet. A vet, hopefully called Evette. Colin gag right there – it’d never happen in real life though, right?

May was quite a month. Mark and I went with our friends Ben and Gaby for a few days to Valencia, apparently the third largest city in Spain. We went to celebrate Mark’s 60th birthday. When your husband turns 60, you have to take stock for a moment. 60 is the kind of age you expect your own parents to be. 60 is greyish and sore back-ish and comfortable shoes and free public transport. It is high blood pressure and no getting up ladders. Forgetting things more often and glasses. Various pairs of glasses. Hearing aids. Flat caps. Slacker jaws and age spots, funny little skin tags and unexpected dry bits. Wiry geometric hairs that come out of ears and noses. Sciatica, bulging discs, MRIs and pain specialists. A fondness for early nights and sleeping. More snoring.

It’s a bit weird, all this. So we went to Spain to elevate the man and to make the birthday feel more like an event (Evette) because 60 is a milestone. After all, I went to New York at 30 and Portugal at 40 and so it is quite right that the milestones coincide with a trip on an airplane.

Here’s what eating things in Valencia looks like: tapas at every opportunity, a big old glass of Agua de Valencia which tasted like very nice fresh icy orange juice but was enhanced vai the medium of cava and gin and some kind of mysterious herby Valencian spirit. Tortillas and ham ham ham! Such ham. Warm melty salty ham. Ham that makes all other ham feel pallid and imposter-ish.

A saint’s preserved forearm and some monks. General religious battiness was everywhere and a’plenty. Also, a photo of us at the City of Arts and Sciences complex after walking our 25k steps with niggling sciatic pain. One of us trying to smile through the pain fug:

We stayed at a lovely hotel in the middle of the old town with an impressive buffet breakfast with proper coffee and green juices and more meats! So many meats. Mark was insistent on paying a little more for the buffet breakfast though I tried to weasel out of it because I was being all thrifty and budget conscious and decided the buffet was a bit of a hotel ‘have’ and we would be better off finding a little cafe down the road. I was wrong – the Valencians didn’t really do breakfast other than a coffee and a pastry so PHEW we were locked into absurd feasts every morning. Fortified by meats, we could march through the day on only a little bit of extra strong ibuprofen and a keen eye for the next tapas place with another tray of ham and a fried cheese croquetta.

The whole weekend coincided with a religious festival which saw, on the last day, a march through the town of about 1000 maidens dressed in lace followed by their mamas and grandmothers in serious widow garb:

It was a Spanish-y dream and made me remember when we went to evening Spanish classes with Amber and Glenn at a night school in the olden days, in the olden country. Twenty-five years ago, surely. I do not know what has really happened since, or how we all got so close to/actually reached 60.

So that was May Part One.

May Part Two.

A few days after coming home with my packets of chorizo and nougat, pleased to see the children hadn’t burned the flat down in the powercut, I flew home to see my parents, brothers, sister, brother-in-law, and sister-in-law. It was a gathering of some importance, urgency, and of note, as Dad and Mum aren’t well and we felt we needed to see them soon. We managed to settle on a date and all flew in around the same time to spend a week together. For me, the trip was so long overdue that the not-going had really crystalised into a normal thing. The thought of the trip back home was always dismissed because of all the reasons – babies, breastfeeding, pregnant, covid, money, Mark’s turn, Mark’s turn, Mark’s turn. The ost of the trip back home, in all of the senses, always seemed too high. I was scared, I think. But the call home this time was clear. So I found a cheap flight with an 8-hour layover in Shanghai, and I got onto the Heathrow Express and 40 hours later, found myself with my family, at home, a long way from home.

The last of the guavas and feijoas from Dad’s garden:

All together at the Fat Camel drinking very good coffee and snafling very good ginger crunch:

Mum and Kerry

Actual burial plot – Mum and Dad took us there so we would know where they were. A funny old excursion to have, but a good one. Dad is talking in a typically animated way:

Me and Dad on a walk past our childhood home. It looks much greyer and smaller than I remember. That’s a tree he planted:

All together for dinner at the old butter factory:

Dean:

Most excellent sister and sister-in-law:

At the airport, about to leave on a windy day on a very small airplane:

So. We were together for a week, and talked and went out and saw things and laughed and ate jammy doughnuts and crusty rolls with ham and butter and crisps inside. I remembered what it is to have family just beyond your own, and it felt good. I know what we have been missing.

Some AI woes and bad poetry

I hesitated writing this post as I am in a bit of a funk about AI. Last week I had to do some research into ChatGPT and Large Language Models for work and went to a webinar thing about it and listened to about three podcasts on the topic. Fuelled with all this terrifying, thrilling, depressing information, I went to book club, drank much of the cremant and then three of us had a marvelously spirited slightly shouty book club ‘discussion’ over it and what it means for our jobs, and what it might mean for our kids. By then I was thinking of myself as somewhat of an AI expert because, as I was busy telling everyone,

“I’ve been reading about this for THREE WHOLE DAYS!”

Three whole days probably does not an AI expert make. I see that now.

Anyway, the book club dynamos and I didn’t really come up with much of a solution to the AI problem – more like a kind of resigned despair. The tidal wave is about to hit: what do you do? Prepare, I guess. By being more human? What does that even MEAN? Bleed more? Emote more expressively? Fail and screw up and get things wrong and fall up stairs more frequently? (although I think AI and robots do all those things too except for bleeding).

So in the week since I have been wondering about writing which is what I do for a job, and writing here which is where I play with words and settle my thoughts and reorder my recollections. Writing here is about catharsis and connection. I have been thinking about what it is to tell stories and bring people into a world through words and cadence, through choices of tone, lightness and jokes, and writerly embellishments that segue into not-exactly-true for the betterment of a story, and those more honest little bits that always find themselves woven through the waffle like a bobbly bit of Chanel fantasy tweed. Can AI do that? My funk prevented me from trying, but this morning I gave it a go, asking it to write me a post about a mother who lived in a small flat in London with six sons.

Reader, it was reassuringly total banal shite. Kind of skimming things, no depth, not interesting. Like a wikipedia page but more glossed over. Trite. Absolutely real estate marketing copy in tone. It then wrote me a poem for Mark’s impending 60th birthday and it was delightfully bad – my prompt mentioned him hunting deer and fishing and his sons and it created a rhyming horror. An excerpt for your pleasure:

“He loves to hunt those graceful deer

And fishing too, it’s very clear

He’s spent his life enjoying the great outdoors

With his sons, he’s made many memories and more

Their bond is strong, it’s plain to see

A father and sons, as tight as can be…”

…and on and on into interminable nothing drivel.

But, oh…..if only that were the end of that, and I could shake off my AI-related dread. The AI will only get better. The shite gap will close and that robotic smarmy nothingness that stood for a ChatGPT blog post will learn to mimic more closely human meanderings and silly things and fun things that stand for heart and warmth. Probably. Luckily I am well-skilled in making wonky cakes and churning out lesser Ottolenghi salads. There’s hope for my ability to monetise myself yet.

TV situation

The TV situation is very healthy at the moment, with many shows that we are halfway through – the kind of shows that at 8:30am, just as you are setting up your uncomfortable bedroom work desk with the thinly cushioned chair in the tiny space that your husband kindly lets you have (still causing pressure points where the office cupboard door hook digs into the upper thigh), you think…ONLY 12 HOURS TO GO BEFORE I CAN WATCH TELLY!

Best things right now:

Colin from Accounts (Australian joy, thank you Charlotte)

Big Door Prize (Chris O’Dowd in a slightly silly show about unfulfilled potential – natch)

Succession (obvs)

Blue Lights (Northern Irish police show with excellent reviews)

Beef (a little bit pleased with itself and a bit too mean)

Ted Lasso (for the kids and husband more than me – I think it is a little daft-not-in-a-good-way. I also cannot stop thinking about Harry Styles when I watch it, and that Keeley is becoming too thin).

Reading situation

Unsatisfactory right now. Finished The Rabbit Hutch by Tess Gunty (cold, clever, unmoving, about a block of flats and the people within it, connected and all a bit doomed) and Girl A by Abigail Dean (a faster read, engaging but still a little hollow, all about a family of seven kids whose nutty religious parents starve and chain them up until one of them escapes). Next on the list is The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida by Shehan Karunatilaka. On the to-be-read pile are masses and masses of books that I compulsively buy from charity shops, though I do have the Susannah Constantine memoir at the top of this pile, which my very delightful friend helped to bring to fruition. I shall read it because it’s certainly funny and I know it’s got a poo story in there somewhere which is always a massive plus.

Clothes situation

I’m selling things so I can buy more things. The tax situation shows no sign of becoming any healthier so my former life of willy-nilly sample sale fritterings is but a mere memory (and has resulted in a wardrobe full of silken gowns and many things that don’t go over my arms). The arms thing is a mystery. I look at myself in the mirror and think “You aren’t really that fat as such”, particularly considering all those pregnancies and the undeniable fact that I have Big Bones, and then I go to put on a shirt and by the end of the day it has ripped a bit at the seams or puckered the upper arms where the fabric has been stretched beyond acceptable capacity. Every time I run I stop at a park bench and do at least six pressups. I mostly don’t have breakfast. I have eaten all the Easter eggs, so they are no longer a problem. Why the arms thing?

Does perimenopause give you fat arms? That’s really my question here I suppose.

Anyway I sold a Batsheva dress to someone in Canada (bit tight in the arms) and a Vilshenko paisley column dress because the last time I wore it I had an altercation with a past nemesis and so it felt tainted. Then I went on ebay and bought a Roksanda shirt (terrible colours on me and I suspect I once had the same shirt but no longer so may have sold it on ebay in a strange circular economy kind of way) and a Vilshenko flowery tuille-y skirt which makes me look old rather than like Carrie Bradshaw in a tutu AND IT’S A LITTLE TIGHT IN THE WAISTBAND!

Does perimenopause give you a fat waist? That’s really my question here I suppose.

In other news

Otis got invested at cubs and so the fifth kid enters his Paddington Cub and Scouts years. I was supposed to sew badges on his sweatshirt but even though I am extremely poor I paid someone at the laundromat to do it for £36. That’s because I am bad at sewing and think it is sexist that no one else is expected to do it.

Easter was fun:

And here’s Ned at the Hockney exhibition and on the way home from seeing the Grenfell film at the Serpentine Gallery as proof that we don’t spend all weekend in front of our phones playing Penguin Run (though we do quite a bit of that too):