Tears at night-time

Review: 
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time

My husband had a little cry a few weeks ago. This is not uncommon. He is not one to baulk at public displays of emotion. His wedding speech is legendary. We weren't entirely sure whether he would get through it. I, on the other hand, inhabit the stiff-upper-lip end of the spectrum. It is true that I am thawing with age, but generally speaking I am a dried-eyed kind of girl.

Via Wikipedia

The trigger for my husband's tears was a trip to our local cinema to watch a live link-up of the National Theatre production, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time. We both enjoyed the book by Mark Haddon and had heard good things about the play (it won seven Olivier awards). As we hurried to the cinema, however, we both wondered how on earth you could stage a deeply personal novel set inside the mind of the storyteller: Christopher Boone, an emotionally dissociated teenager.

Let there be this

My grandmother, Jean Morton, died two years ago this week. She was an actress and a television presenter, and also inspired me to write my first novel, A Sister for Margot. This is how I choose to remember her.

Dear Nana,

 It has been two years since you left us. We said goodbye one morning in May, while you were sleeping with the blankness of death chalked on your face. Sitting by your bed, I leafed through old recipe books and read your clippings out loud, in case you were still listening. In that quiet room, we breathed the same air for the last time.

Guess what? Recently you've been getting younger in my imagination. (Hurrah! How marvellous, darling!) I picture us in Ibiza again on the terrace. You have a glass of rosado in one hand and you're wearing a patterned sundress, cinched in at the waist. Your blue eyes are twinkling merrily as you recount one of your favourite anecdotes. As ever, your mimicry and comic timing are spot-on.

But I have tears in my eyes because I am not really there with you. I can see you and hear you, but I can't touch you anymore. I can't put my arm around your shoulders or kiss your cheek, warm from the sun. 

In the eye of the beholder

Hermaphrodite Mum

Three kids and a single mum

Another sunny day, another date with Stay-at-home Dad. This time we take his canoe out onto the river with a bottle of Rioja and a bag of Kettle chips (his idea of a picnic). The kids are with my mother and I rejoice at my new sense of freedom.  There's nothing like a bit of romance to make you feel young and carefree again.

Once we've battled the river current, half-soaking ourselves in the process, we end up at a sandy cove on the edge of a sheep field. Stay-at-home Dad tethers us up (sorry, I mean the boat) to a tree, while I sit back and admire the muscles bobbling under his wet t-shirt. Then, while he busies himself with setting up the 'picnic', I carefully arrange my legs in a flattering v-bend. 

Full disclosure down by the river

Eek! I suddenly notice a bristly patch of hair just below my left knee that got missed by the shaver. Instinctively I cover it up with my right hand, but it's too far down my leg and I am in danger of performing yoga (seated twist) in a canoe. So in the end, I go for full disclosure.

He laughs and says women should be allowed to grow their leg hair if they want to. It turns out he has just had an argument with his ex-wife about the objectification of female beauty. Without consultation, she had waxed their daughter's legs, ahead of a ballet exam. He was outraged and accused her of inflicting pain on their child for the sake of a cultural hegemony. It was akin to female circumcision apparently. Crikey! The last spat I had with Errant Ex-husband was over his reluctance to wash the children's underwear.

Packing a bag, with love

My baby (all five foot of her) is leaving home this week. Alright, I am being dramatic. She is going away for two nights on a year 5 school trip. Still, how are we going to cope without her? Our household will seem off-kilter without her serene little presence, her piles of paperback novels and her flute-practise. Not least, who is going to feed the dog in the morning?

Learning to let go...

Last night I was packing up her bag for the BIG trip, conscientiously working my way down the list provided by school: fleece, outdoor shoes, shower cap, medium-sized towel etc. Check! Somehow my scrupulous folding of her clothes and the orderly placement of each item into the holdall became an expression of love. 

I remember my own mother doing the same when I went off to boarding school. No nine-year old could have been better equipped for institutional life. My tuckbox even boasted a sewing kit, complete with a tub of dressmaker pins, a sheaf of press studs and a thimble. Never mind that I had barely threaded a needle in my life. The women in my family send their children out into the world prepared, provisioned and nametaped. 

Mummy's on her soapbox again

It is a funny business, blogging! There you are, tapping away at your computer, broadcasting your thoughts, without knowing if anyone is really listening. Back in the old days (circa 2001) a colleague of mine at the BBC walked into the newsroom one morning and told us he had started a blog. Once he had explained to the uninitiated (including me) what a blog was, my first thought was: Jeez, how conceited! Who wants to listen to you pontificating? Fast forward thirteen years and here I am doing that very same thing.

'Mummy is going on about her blog again' (yawn)
Credit: Tim Bevan

Some days getting on my technological soapbox feels awkward and graceless. Then there are days when I get shortlisted for a Brilliance in Blogging (BiB) Award by BritMums - as I did last week - and suddenly all those hours of shoehorning my thoughts into a blog post seem worth it.

The mainstream press is often rather rude about so-called 'mummy bloggers'. Even one of my favourite novelists, Jojo Moyes, once wrote an article for The Telegraph, asking "where do these mothers find the time?" as if there were more important things we could be doing. Others have criticised mummy bloggers for focusing on the domestic humdrum of raising kids to the detriment of feminism.

Time out from tigerish endeavours

About ten days ago, I was stood on a ferry in Hong Kong's Discovery Bay, wondering what my kitchen looked like. For a few seconds (shock, horror) I struggled to recall the exact positioning of my sofa and the layout of our cupboards. As I stared out at the twinkling lights of Lantau Island in the dusk, life back home felt like million miles away.

Lantau Island: living in the moment

I put my temporary memory loss down to a strange condition: living in the present tense. To exist purely in the moment, without reflecting on the past or worrying about the future is very rare state for me. The only time I ever manage to blinker myself in this way is when I am on holiday.

So while I was gorging on dim sum, haggling in Temple Street market or even practising handstands in the swimming pool, all my usual hang-ups and busy thoughts were put on hold. For a couple of weeks, I was like Julia Roberts in Eat, Pray, Love (with less of the praying and a lot more steamed dumplings).

Reading Red magazine on the long flight home, I stumbled across an article that examined this tension between living for the moment and planning for the future. It was an interview with Amy Chua, the apocryphal Tiger Mother who pushed her kids to extreme levels of self-betterment. 

A break from trampolining

Hermaphrodite Mum

Three kids and a single mum

So this is what a lie-in feels like. A house quieter than the grave and no one using me as an indoor trampoline. I almost start to miss them, but I am comforted by the thought of Errant Ex-husband staggering into his bijou kitchen to pour out three bowls of Cheerios while I luxuriate in bed.

One more surprise!
© Salpics32 | Dreamstime.com

I turn over and almost die of shock. Lying on the pillows next to me is a man. In sleep, his face seems almost unrecognisable, but eventually I recall how he came to occupy my bed this Sunday morning, after two years of sleeping alone and a lot of indoor trampolining.  

His eyes flicker open. "Good morning," he says lazily, crooking one arm to rest his head on. "Good morning," I repeat, before politely enquiring: "Did you sleep well?"

This, gentle reader, is Stay-at-home Dad. I met him last night through match.com. We bonded over tapas and one too many cocktails, methinks. My first foray into internet dating has served me well, perhaps too well. He has twin daughters (one's into ballet, the other Brownies) and he spends school hours painting canvases in a garden studio. Alimony from the ex-wife (City hedge-fund manager) keeps them all afloat. 

Breaking good

It was a momentous day yesterday. On my daily dog walk, I swapped my ear muffs for sunglasses. Down by the river, the flood waters have receded and spring has finally sprung. Just when you think you can't endure the grey days of winter any longer, nature throws down a few sunbeams to lift your spirits again.

Pickle sniffs out the first signs of spring

As a child living in the tropics, I remember one of my mum's friends lamenting the absence of seasons. Personally I have always felt seasons are overrated - give me eternal summer anytime. But, living in England as I must, there is something undeniably lovely about the return of spring each year. As a species, human beings are pretty remote from the rhythms of the natural world, but spring is one event we can't ignore. 

The teenagers who took on Michael Gove

Imagine never enjoying sex. Imagine having problems going to the loo and suffering constant pain. These are all symptoms of female genital mutilation (FGM), which in the past was known as female circumcision. The procedure involves cutting away the clitoris and/or labia of a young girl, often with rudimentary tools, to make her 'fit' for womanhood and marriage. It is a brutal and traumatic practice that bears no relation to male circumcision. 

Fahma asked Gove to write to headteachers about FGM
Credit: Oliver Zimmermann

This month a group of teenage girls took a stand on FGM and forced all of us - including Michael Gove, the UK education secretary - to sit up and listen. The 17-year old Fahma Mohamed and her classmates from a school in Bristol have successfully campaigned, with the backing of The Guardian, for schools to play a greater role in protecting pupils from FGM. 

"You wouldn't think it's something people in Britain would have to worry about today - but that's the problem," said Fahma recently. "People don't talk about it, doctors don't check for it, teachers don't teach it. But we know it happens to thousands of British girls each year."

Waterlogged

Rather aptly, a few weeks ago, I started reading Tales from the Ark to my son at bedtime. It turned out to be a fictional prelude to the floods that have beset our little British isle. Thanks to the Old Testament, the phenomenon of flooding still has biblical overtones (for some residents of Henley-on-Thames more so than others). Nowadays, rather than hunkering down in our wooden ark, we take a more combative approach with sandbags, barriers and pumps. As the Atlantic storms buffet our shores, it has become a contest: the human species versus the global weather system.

Living in Henley-on-Thames, I know a few friends and family who have watched the river break its banks and consume their gardens and homes with inexorable ease. Tales abound of heroic rescues, good deeds by neighbours, travel chaos and the evacuation of dogs (and even llamas) from waterlogged ground. Only today a friend told me how her husband had saved someone's new kitchen from watery oblivion by helping to divert some of the flood water in the village of Shiplake. It was celebratory cups of coffee all round!

For all the disruption and misery, however, there remains something oddly compelling about a landscape transformed into a waterscape. Our local bookseller, Jonkers, recently coined a new name for our aqueous town: Henley-in-Thames. Here are a few pictures of the flood, post Noah, circa 2014:

The famous Regatta course expands widthwise

The agonies of interior design

This past week I thought I had a bad case of PMT. Turns out it was IDT (interior-design tension). I can accomplish most tasks in life with a modicum of organisation and some hard graft, but there is something about home-decorating that ties me up in knots. Nothing like a wallpaper dilemma to keep me awake half the night. So why is it that I can write a 140,000 word novel, but the thought of re-decorating my lounge fills me with trepidation? 

The completed extension project, with dog crate! 
(see suppliers below)

I spend hours (or even weeks) agonising over the precise shade of paint: a shade too dark and the room might appear smaller; a shade too light and it feels like a wishy-washy compromise. I know my Farrow and Ball colour chart like my 10-year old daughter can recite times-tables. Pigeon? Too dark, too London. French Gray, Blue Gray, Elephant's Breath? Being literary minded, I can cope with the names better than the actual colours.

The options don't end there. Apparently I could team up Pigeon on a feature wall with Blue Gray on my supporting walls. And that's just the foundation. After that, we are talking furnishings, lighting, accents and even the colour of the skirting boards. These days we can't just resort to Brilliant White for our woodwork. The F&B website advises us to soften the contrast between walls and wood with different kinds of white so the confines of the room disappear. (That was the fruit of yet another feverish hour spent sweating over interior design sites.)

Stormy weather in Henley

In the beginning there was a UKIP town councillor and he had dominion over the good people of Henley-on-Thames. The name of this councillor was David Silvester and it came to pass that David had a message for his people. So he wrote to his local newspaper, the Henley Standard:

"Sir - Since the passage of the Marriage (Same Sex Couples) Act, the nation has been beset by serious storms and floods... Is this just 'global warming' or is there something more serious at work?"

Biblical floods in Henley?

And that letter, linking the recent flooding in the Thames Valley to God's apparent wrath over same-sex marriage, was enough to unleash another storm. But behind the headlines this week about Silvester's folly, there was a quieter story about a community pulling together and the power of grassroots activism. 

It all started last Friday, when Emma Vanstone, a manager at BT Global Services, posted a message on Facebook. She alerted her friends, including the BBC Radio Berkshire presenter Andrew Peach, to Silvester's letter in the Standard. "Try not to spit out your coffee," she told us, before describing how Silvester had drawn "a biblical link between our recent foul weather, and the rights of our gay brethren to marry". 

Once we were cute...

When my daughter was little, people used to stop us in the airport and say, "Aw, how cute!" I would glow with pride, as if I was the first mother ever to have a cute child. Then it was my son's turn. I still remember the holiday when he started to garner all the attention, after my daughter tipped over from chubby toddler into gawky school-age child. Now, no one stops us anymore. Our collective 'cute' factor is pretty much zilch.

There are, however, consolations. Scoring zero on the cute scale means that my hand luggage no longer contains an impressive, Mary Poppins-style inventory of nappies, baby wipes, calpol, healthy snacks, toys, books and a fresh set of clothes (for everyone). These days it's just an ipad and a packet of sweets.

And when the kids go back to school at the beginning of term, I actually miss their company. There's a good reason why small children are cute: they are also HIGH maintenance. As scientist Konrad Lorenz argued in the 1940s, infantile features, such as big eyes and chubby cheeks, are designed to trigger a nurturing instinct in adults. These days my children may not be so adorable, but they can self-entertain during the holidays. 

Just look at those little faces!

It's the same with puppies. If my new Labrador hadn't looked so damn cute while he was weeing all over the kitchen floor and chewing up school shoes, we would have given up on him long ago. He's big and brawny now, but a lot easier to look after.