Adventures of a Middle-Aged Matron

It is the Sunday morning service and we are gutsily singing 'For all the saints who from their labours rest', while above our heads is a painful sizzling sound, like ripping Sellotape, as a myriad cluster flies are zapped by an ultra-violet exterminator. As, in the musical climax, the saintly deceased reach the 'calm of paradise', our voices are drowned by a long and mighty fizzing. Something large and airborne is having trouble shaking off the mortal coil. Even the Vicar, in his gold-trimmed chasuble, looks uncomfortable. My peaceable husband has a warrior outlook when it comes to the lower links of the food chain. On summer evenings he leaps gymnastically about the bedroom, swatting midges with the Church Times until the walls dribble blood. This morning's violence is inevitable. Cluster flies have colonised the church in readiness for winter. Their whine gives an Amazonian flavour to the chancel, and they are dropping dead into the Jammy Dodgers. There is som...

Katetakes5 , fretting efficiently over her Christmas lists, is anxious to identify the top five toys of all time. Parent bloggers are invited to spare each other a fortune by listing their soundest investments in infant pleasure. This troubles me. My six-year-old rejoices in jay cloths, Post-it notes, cotton wool pads and twine. They form flaccid sculptures under his bed and have cost me half a dozen Hoover belts. My nine-year-old's wish-list would enrapture the auditors at Claire's Accessories. I'm the only one who plays Sylvanian Families in our house. But below are five ingredients that have, over years, made child-rearing that much easier. Hoops   The sort you see in Victorian etchings being bowled along with sticks. Modern descendents are rainbow-hued and pleasurably pliant with built-in rattle sounds and twinkly spangles. Ours have functioned as fairy rings, skipping aids, lassoos, bridles and ground-hugging boomerangs. They are the highlight of home-made assault co...

My married, forty-something friend Emily says that she has had to buy condoms and there was a problem. I'm not sure that I want to hear of this problem over toad-in the-hole, but she continues.  The condoms, she explains, came in packs of five  or packs of twelve. Emily is a thrifty girl. She always buys eggs and loo rolls by the dozen, but this twelve-pack confounded her. The problem was the use-by date: 2013. 'Am I realistically going to get through twelve condoms in two years?' she mused to herself in the middle of Family Planning. Reason prevailed and she saved £3.30 on the five. I am interested in this because I've read in the papers that couples in their forties have more vigorous relationships than those twenty years younger. Then I notice that our companion, Serena, is silent. Serena is also forty-something and she is also married. I ask her roguishly whether she'd have bought a dirty dozen. She says that her money would be more usefully spent on a set of ...

Suddenly we have acquired kittens. Two pretty brothers hailed us from a cage in the rescue centre and begged us loudly for a home. But first we had to prove ourselves to the scary lady who wielded a fat folder. She paced through our house, examining our plumbing and our characters, seeking nerve-wrackingly for a cause or just impediment why we and these two felines should not be joined together. So grateful were we to be found worthy that we agreed at once to expand our family. Now the house smells, the curtains are shredded and there is an unexpected IMP@ct oN my W*rking LiFE. The kittens Per@MBULATE A%cr*SS mY KEYBoard and take naps on CAPS LOCK so my editors at THe GUardiAn will think I'm SHOUTING. They take my computer mouse literally, claw a passage up my back and nest flatulently in my best hat. My guilty, secret Boden fund has been swallowed up by jellied rabbit pouches and I'm buying nappy bags again. But this is why it's all worth it:

'Cats,' says the woman blocking my trolley in Oils and Condiments, 'help children develop in a different way.' I'm not certain what she means by this. Whether feline companionship makes children caring and responsible, condemns them to a life on anti-histamines or fosters a violent enthusiasm for small rodents. My daughter is desperate for a cat. For two years she's been decided on the name - Frisbee - but has lacked an animal to bestow it on. Now everyone is telling me that pets are as vital to a child's emotional growth as sleepovers and probiotics and I know that they are right, but I don't want to face up to it. The sad truth is that middle age has made me cowardly. Long ago I planned to be a spinster with 17 cats. My two moggies shared my pillow and my dining table. But age, kids and matrimony got in the way. Now I worry about paw prints on my White Company bath mats, jellified lamb chunks putrefying in the kitchen, pigeon entrails draping the...

I am walking my daughter and a visiting six-year-old through the park. On a bench is a couple embedded in each other's larynxes. 'They're having sex!' says the six-year-old conversationally. My nine-year old notices me freeze. 'Don't worry, she consoles me. ''Sex' means kissing.' I am unthinkingly relieved. Then a horrible thought dawns. If sex means kissing, does kissing mean sex? What might she tell her school mates about daddy's goodnight peck? I realise that the Moment has Come and, as usual, I am not ready for it. I tramp onwards in weighty silence while I muster my shreds of courage. And then, with agonised effort, I tell her. 'Sex,' I gabble, 'is kissing ... without clothes on.' But I am whistling in the wind. The girls are shrieking with glee over fallen conkers. The moment has passed and I don't have the bottle to resurrect it.

My daughter wants an iphone. I am Against it. I tell her lamely that it's too expensive. She says she'll pay for it with her £1 a week pocket money. I tell her she's only nine years old and I was 35 when I got my first mobile. She says she's the Only One in her class without one and that even the French teacher illustrated conjugation with the assumption that 'We all love our iphones'. I pause. I'm not why sure why I am so viscerally dismayed by the notion. Probably it's to do with my instinct that anything that wasn't around in the 1970s is unnecessary to child development. Which is why my children can feast unfettered on Iced Gems, but I have vigorous prejudices against Haribous. We put on a DVD of The Railway Children (1970) and my intolerance suddenly crystalises. 'See that!' I say jabbing zestfully at Roberta's tumbling hair. My daughter stares at me, anxious. I tell her about the sacred rituals of Coming of Age: how maturity in ...

Eileen mentions that there is a bag of breasts in the vestry. All sorts of oddments have found their way to that dank back chamber since the church was reordered, but I hadn't noticed mammaries among them. Eileen explains that she's been knitting them in the evenings. Eileen is very good with wool. She can knit crinolined mice and fancy tea cosies, but she's not the sort of person you would expect to knit breasts. I do not want her to think that I am not a Woman of the World, so I ask very casually what the breasts are for and she explains that the ladies of the Mothers Union have been asked to knit them for the maternity wing in the local hospital. The nurses are no longer allowed to touch their patients when showing them how to suckle their newborns and so Eileen's breasts will be used for demonstration. I am briefly silenced as I conjure visions of midwives modelling globes of pink purl stitch and suddenly I am worried. Eileen is a gentle, proper white haired lad...

My daughter thinks that I do not stand trendily at the school gate. 'This is how you've got to do it,' she says, buckling my right knee with one hand and swivelling my toes together so that my left hip slews out and jabs Dillon's mother. Then she rotates my arm into a teapot spout, unfurls my index finger and instructs me to dangle my car key from the end of it like Summer's mum does. We both turn to look at Summer's mum. She stands there in a floral maxi dress, flesh bronzed at the Tantastic tanning salon, a Peugeot key swinging from her fibreglass nail extension. Then we look back at me. It doesn't help that I don't have a car key. If I did, I point out, it would be a Skoda key. It also doesn't help that I'm wearing my customary school uniform of corduroy stuffed into wellies. 'You look like an old countrywoman,' my daughter says. I find I mind this. Not the countrywoman bit. I nurture the usual urbanite fantasy of marshalling regimen...