Giving Up

Hands up who loves daylight saving? Not so much? I’m writing this at 5.47am according to the cuckoo, and I’m surrounded by children who think it’s well cool.

A few weeks ago we were tricked into buying ’fun’ wall lights for our 4-year-old boys. It was one of those euphoric Ikea moments where everything seems possible thanks to coloured plastic and insanely cheap prices. It was a classic rookie mistake of the kind rarely seen here in Bootcamp North London, where the ruling adults work on a mainly arched eyebrow ‘I’m sorry, you think your opinion counts?’ approach. The lights have, of course, been turned on and off constantly throughout the night, resulting in entirely unnecessary sleep deprivation and rows that we should have just had in Ikea in the first place like normal people.

It’s not been a great week for nerve endings. For the past seven days I have mainly given things up, sleep included. Caffeine, carbs, alcohol, fruit, sugar – it’s only for a fortnight of autumn detox but you can probably feel the tension.

So far, the lack of caffeine has done nothing visible for my skin, ripped my no-headache policy to shreds and had horrific effects on my husband – who’s also indulging in the big Give Up. What it has done, along with the shocking lack of alcohol, is put life into high definition wide screen perspective. This has in turn shed light on cavernous corners of my life that were festering nicely in the semi-gloom of a carb-infested existence. For instance, you might think that after 20 insignificant weeks of blogging, and a many not-so-spare hours researching other people’s offerings, I’d probably be a social networking expert by now right? Well sadly not. And in particular ‘the point of it all’ is still a bit of a haze.

But now, with a clear head and no clear direction, I have had time to read some really geeky books about the whole world of Web 2.0 in order to fully prepare for my genuine ‘big moment’ in the 21st century. The irony of the fact that I had to get a proper hardback book to learn this is not lost on me. Neither is the fact that, because of a very 20th century postal strike I had to get on an actual bus and go to an actual bookshop to get my virtual-life instruction manuals.

The main bit of info I’ve picked up – I can’t use the word virtual anymore, it’s sooo Dotcom. This whole gig isn’t about pretend shops anymore. It’s about real people, real-time streaming, real friends in every portal. Everything, including Wikipedia, is Internet fact, not virtual fantasy.

Next on my reading list is a history of Twitter. Yes, a history. I bet no-one in the Valley goes eight days without caffeine. How else would they squeeze five years of social coding into every Earth year. Meanwhile, I get an extra hour of pain each morning and a cup of mint tea.

The Age of Politics

When I first came to London as a student in the early 90s (oh, how much more romantic would early 60s sound…), being principled was as easy as getting dressed. In between leaving the Socialist Worker lying around and introducing myself as a vegetarian, I would trot around campus in my ‘No Means No’ date-rape campaign T-shirt with carefully trashed Doc Martins and hair the same shade of plum as my distressed mini skirt, and it was clear to everyone that I was fully opinionated and ready for heated debate.

Anger is a natural state for students, along with complete inertia – but when everything from the restoration comedy reading list to the choice of bottled beer in the SU bar needs to be challenged, a state of total apathy is essential every now and then to complement the turmoil of life.

This was a time when a love/hate relationship with Katie Roiphe was as far as you had to go into real-life issues to feel politicised and engaged. Wearing a T-shirt stating your beliefs could only make them stronger. But then it was time to graduate, and start putting money where there’d previously only been a need for mouth.

And with that came the gradual stepping down from the soapbox – in tiny almost imperceptible increments to start with. I was shopping for soft furnishings on Saturdays rather than rallying in Trafalgar Square, but I did set-up monthly direct debits to charities to help pay for someone else to do the legwork. New Labour and Nelson Mandela brought an abrupt end to most of my remaining political fury, and suddenly interest rates and promotions were the only things to get a bit bothered about.

So now, after two rungs on the property ladder, three children, several career hops and a couple of poignant birthdays, I no longer have a post-it note list of the things I’m going to change about the world today. I have a nagging sense of unease about some things, a desperate sense of anger about others, and lots of things conspiring to prevent me acting on either. I’d like to blame the kids, but we’re probably back in the realms of apathy.

Last night I had a very unsettling conversation with a very old friend, which made me question the whole issues of beliefs, and whether any of them are ever any more than paper thin. There’s no way you can progress through life with the same unwavering stance you held as a teenager. Everything changes and shifts as it ages – you, your opportunities, your understanding, your priorities and the world you live in. Although I’m not sure my friend would agree, I don’t think my basic principles have changed, but maybe my expectations have. Obsessing about which secondary school I’ll be allowed to send my daughter to is clearly a very personal use of my campaigning energy, and won’t contribute a huge amount to the greater good of society. But even when you’re 18 you have to pick your battles. And I do still have battles.

Maybe you just reach a stage in your life where you have to stop wearing your anger on your T-shirt. Then you won’t disappoint the people who have been around long enough to remember the original slogans.

The Working Day

Women eh? Honestly, you just can’t trust us to know what we want. Even after 38 years of being one (that’s my whole life, I haven’t switched), I am no closer to understanding what women want – not for more than about 20 minutes at a time, or the distance from Selfridges to a strong cup of coffee.

I have, for a while now, been complaining that working from home is not what I’m good at –that I miss the free posh water, the fresh-from-uni eye candy and the unmanageable hours of office-based earning. And then last Friday happened. Give me a rare chance to get out of my trainers and away from my lonely workspace and into a pair of heels and onto a train to an actual face-to-face creative meeting, and I spend the three preceding nights fully awake worrying about it. Not the creative meeting bit. I can do that my sleep, if I could get any. The heels bit (specifically which ones and how high is appropriate) and the train bit (specifically the inevitability of missing it after dressing three children, throwing out placatory pain au chocolate and leaving them with their father for the school run of their lives). What’s wrong with me? Isn’t this the dawn of a new life I’d been longing for? And do the answers to these clearly rhetorical questions involve the words controlling, neurotic, contrary, or is this just what motherhood does to us?

I remember going to meet my first new client after the babies were born (actually, two years after they were born). I spent the entire train journey close to tears after realising that my nail varnish was a bit chipped, and obviously the man I was going to meet was going to see this as a direct indication of my working style – sloppy, inattentive and possibly a little slutty. In retrospect, I’d be surprised if he even knew what I was even there for. Poor makeup application was not his concern. And the look on my husband’s face when I told him of my honest fears was not kind.

Having said that, as I left for my train on Friday, he suddenly announced his firm belief that I should go back to an office job. Based mainly on the heels. Actually, I think based entirely on the heels. It was clearly a while since he’d seen me face-to-face and with a hair do sans Weetabix. And while I don’t want to get all ‘Mad Men’ on you and imply that my day can be made perfect only by the wink of approval from a man with his own expense account, it did make me feel good. In the same way as I liked my daughter seeing me in a proper working outfit, heading off to save the world from the scourge of bad website copy. And I liked being let-off the school run for once, and turning left not right outside the house.

But I didn’t sleep for fear of all these changes. And this is when I have to admit that, for me, the working mum question is purely and simply one of routine. Going back to an office would offer me the glorious predictability, time sheets and weekly childcare schedules I can only dream about. However, if I work from home, I can earn, shop, lunch, web surf, spend every afternoon with the kids and still have precious time for all those domestic chores. I just need to embrace the randomness of each day, which after eight years of organising my life around the unbending schedules of mealtimes, nap times, snack times, playgroup times, bath times and over-night clothes washing to save any accidentally unstructured day time, is making me feel light-headed. It’s going to take some practice to remember the genuine pleasure of wearing heels before 8pm.

May contain shot

I know it’s statistically the most common thing to waste money on, but my monthly gym membership has now been completely unused since the start of the summer holidays and I have totally failed to get back into the habit of a morning run or humiliating high-kick around the aerobics studio since the kids went back to school. (I made up the bit about the statistics, but it seems like a reasonable assumption, along with the assumption that no-one will care enough to check.)

Also, my gorgeous basket-on-the-front bicycle is too dangerous to ride because a tiny screw has come out of the thingy that goes through the metal pole which holds the basket in place above the front wheel. Without blinding you with science, this means that the metal pole could slip through the front wheel spokes at any time and deliver me the kind of knee and elbow injuries I’ve not experienced since the mid-1970s.

On the positive side, our shower has finally been fixed. Which is actually one more reason not to go to the gym. And so the yin yang of my life is once more perfectly balanced. I have access to early-morning revitalisation in my own home, but still have a tiny screw missing from my bike, thus adding several sweat-filled hours of tube travel to any journey that could have been completed in minutes on my Dawes Heritage. Vitally, there’s still something to moan about.

I’ve started following a number of American blogs recently, and of the many excellent examples of wit- and sarcasm-soaked confessionals I’ve read, there’s a definite sense of optimism that I don’t believe you generally find in anyone working to Greenwich Mean Time. Daily life is a menu of rich pickings for amusing observations, irritating events and even painful repression therapy, but there’s no sense that any of it is an inevitable consequence of being American. Unlike us Brits who, banal as it sounds, still approach life with the attitude that if all else fails we might just make it to supper with nothing more than an unwarranted parking fine.

Reading the blog comments is the best way I can substantiate this claim. Most of the US ones are fairly unnecessary but wholly supportive. In fact, overwhelmingly complimentary. On even the most popular Brit sites, comments are either of the self-apologetic nature (sorry, I probably shouldn’t say this and it won’t be anywhere near as clever or funny as your post but…) or downright practical. Or, my particular favourites, the passive aggressive ‘why did you feel the need to share this’ type.

The other evening, I was at a very English restaurant in town ordering the very English game pie, and the waiter (nationality unclear) reminded me as he took my order that the pie ‘may contain shot’. Metal shot. Naturally I simply smiled my thanks and set about eating a supper that offered substantial risk of a bullet cracking my molar and necessitating months of NHS waiting rooms and overpriced yellowing crowns. Stiff upper lip, grin and bear it. Without a healthy portion of shot, life would be far too easy. And I’d be biking to gym without a grazed elbow to moan about.

Nothing trivial I hope?

A friend of mine was updating me this weekend on the progress of her American niece who’s just started High School. Being 15, she has to come home on the school bus, unlike almost everyone else in the school who has turned 16 and owns a car. In America, significant age markers are sensibly spaced. Unlike in Britain, where coming of age to legally drive, drink Southern Comfort and take the most important academic exams of your life happens within 12 months – something generally considered nothing more than a happy coincidence.

Anyway, the bus is called the Looser Cruiser, for obvious reasons of puerile High School amusement, and the previously status-happy niece is now living in a state of permanent mortification.

I also learned last week that the older brother of a child in my daughter’s class had been bullied persistently since the day he started at our lovely Ofsted-perfect primary school. ‘Until the day he left,’ according to his mum. Which was July, so it’s still all a little raw. And more than a little shocking.

I was bullied at school, fairly mercilessly for a fairly short time, and even in my world of perpetual self-criticism, I’m not really sure to this day why it was me. I was neither the prettiest or the cleverest, or the quietest or the strangest. I did however have a habit of thrusting my sleeves up over my elbows – regardless of the weather and in a slightly obsessive manner possibly – and this seemed to be the reasonable focus of months of unwanted threatening, lurking and hair-pulling behaviour. Funny what bothers a bunch of fourteen-year-old girls.

Bullying continued for me into the work place, but this time as a time-honoured extension of the women’s-magazine interview process. Surviving two years as the most junior female on the all-female staff of a weekly mag – when everyone else was old, face-lifted and snagging their cashmere on the way back down the ladder – was all part of a natural selection process that starts with The Lady and ends with Vogue. Unless you take a break for children, or fresh air.

And so it all goes down as good character-building stuff, lessons to learn from, reasons to drink, and amusing anecdotes to add to the after-dinner chatter. But suddenly now there’s my kids? How can I just leave them all day in a world where wearing the wrong coloured socks might be enough to turn them into victims of endless persecution?

I feel already as pained by the injustice of the bullying one of them will inevitably suffer as I do the inevitability that one of them will be the cause of another child’s pain. I know about girls, and I see the way they’re already skirting around the periphery of behind-the-hand whispering and three’s-a-crowd play dates. And even the four-year-old boys have got clear ideas about who they will and won’t entertain, based on truths unperceivable to even the most observant mother. They’re honing their skills right in front of us, and it’s going to be a long journey back to character-building.

Gentle bullying, teasing maybe, is a common thread in many of my most precious adult friendships. It’s the easiest way of saying ‘I love you’ to someone you’re not sleeping with, to show that you’re completely candid and irreverent about the weaknesses that make them special. But no form of bullying is without its pit-falls, and I have always been suspicious of the Eleanor Roosevelt school of self-belief, where no-one can hurt you or make you feel inferior unless you let them. It’s not true, not even with a decent therapist. No-one will stay hurt or inferior if they’re picked up and cuddled.

Happy (and) in bed?

My husband and I have a little game that we play in bed. I’m not clever enough yet to write blog-listings teasers, so that’s probably not as exciting as it sounds. But we do have a name for our game: ‘The Gin and Tonic Question.’ It’s very easy to play, mainly because it involves absolutely no action or reaction, and everyone’s a winner. The basic premise is to illustrate how happy you are to be lying in bed by naming your minimum price for getting up, getting dressed and – using only public transport – getting to a specific bar in Soho for at least one gin and tonic.

I say it’s a measure of happiness; since having children has taken our out-of-bed time in significantly different directions, it’s really an indication of gender. My husband will usually refuse to head back into town for less than £2,000, while I, having spent the day waiting for the evening, will often price myself no higher than the free gin. The tonic is negotiable, I’ll bring my purse.

I know happiness is subjective but I am a happy person. There’s even a scale of distance named after me. If I say something’s just down the road, or round the corner, that’s a good 20 minutes in the car to even the marginally less optimistic. But I still fall in love with my husband on a regular basis – even after 9 years 67 days, a stolen wedding dress (so not over that), two bloated pregnancies, three resulting children and a cat that we’re all allergic to. My life is good: I have amazing friends, I make money from doing what I love, and I think the pillar-box red tiles on our bathroom floor are inspired.

So it’s with real pain that I admit to having hit a bit of a wall. For the first autumn in hazy memory, I’m finding it really hard to get back into my London skin after the summer holidays. And I can see it in other people around me too. Resuming normal life is proving difficult, even by the end of September.

Maybe the problem is that I’ve just been too happy this summer. How’s that for Polly Anna? Gin-fuelled trips to Soho aside, it’s a truly wonderful thing finding yourself living the moment you knew would be one of your most content. And this is mine: Walking back to our holiday home in its French valley of sunflowers and chateaus, along a dusty track through a tiny vineyard, following behind my husband who’s carrying a bottle of 10-year-old local Pineau in one hand and holding the grubby fingers of his four-year-old son in the other, holiday hat on head, shoulders light and nothing but that evening’s dinner menu on his mind.

And then we’re home. And I’m suddenly in a world of anger and frustration because the ironing board hasn’t been packed away, or one of my children doesn’t have their shoes on by 9am. I have to find a way of using this memory to that get me through the damp, domestic winter months, and not use it to excuse countless sideways glances at the EasyJet winter-getaways site.

Alternatively, we just never leave the capital again, bring our reality back into a neat little box of daily contentment. I have a friend who was on holiday as a teenager with her single mum – a trip abroad that had no doubt taken months of planning and saving to provide – and as they walked around a gorgeous square one balmy evening she said dreamily, ‘Wouldn’t it be great if we walked around that corner and we were back in England with all my mates.’

Beating the Baddies

There’s been a bit of a recurring theme in our family conversations this summer regarding the existence of baddies. I’m not really sure how it all started, although I have always had a pathological fear of haunted houses, so it might just be in the genes. With the youngest members of the family, concern has been based around the literal concept of goodies versus baddies, with the undeniable existence of specific people who only do bad things leading to some of my all-time favourite kid questions: ‘Why don’t baddies carry bigger nets?’, ‘Can all baddies drive cars without lids?’ and ‘Will you go to prison for eating toast from a bowl?’ (The latter is one of up to twenty questions a day regarding the finer details of the British justice system.)

My daughter’s understanding of evil has become more sophisticated, mainly thanks to Harry Potter and the Ginger Friend With One Expression. Even at eight years old, she understands that the baddies being so deftly levitated by young Harry are just metaphors for the real evil out in the real world. She doesn’t go to bed worrying whether her Latin pronunciation is clear enough to defeat werewolves and dementors. But she has started to ask for a detailed schedule of our evening plans, so she knows the exact time the house alarm will be going on and she's fully protected from the lunatics of north London. (Don’t be silly darling, not lunatics, not in north London…)

My own personal dealings with baddies have been in the form of demons, more specifically the expulsion of some. And not before time either. I don’t know why, but for some reason this summer I have been released from a whole host of demons – some irritating but playful, others most certainly from the depths of the Slytherin commonroom. For example, ever since falling on my face in a shameful alcoholic slump I have definitely stopped being so concerned about the 'shame' of the morning after. Self-preservation may have increased, self-analysis has significantly fallen. I am approaching my twentieth year of legal drinking and I still have friends. It can’t all be sympathy.

More interestingly (I hope), I have stopped trying to fit bad people into the good-shaped holes in my life. I have spent my life worrying about whether people like me, sometimes to a near psychotic degree. And now, this summer, I have realised that not all of these people are worth the pain.

My theory is this: We grow up, become young adults and start to pretend baddies don’t exist anymore, make excuses, shut our eyes, and take personal responsibility for all the bad stuff that surrounds us. But then suddenly our bright, insightful children start pointing directly at the baddies, who they can see as clear as day, and we are forced to accept their existence again. But this time it’s easy to defeat them, because we’re old enough not to be scared anymore. And we have very loud house alarms.

I have no intention of being confrontational about this. Accepting that there are people who I have tried very hard to like but who, it turns out, are pretty bad, is a very private victory. And they’ll certainly never know. There’s no way they would give up time to read this and show an interest in my life, but guess what, I don't care. Honestly.