Adventures of a Middle-Aged Matron

This week's prompt for the 100-word challenge is a picture. Last night a ripper was on the loose. Guts lay in slimy pink piles in the corridors. Last night also a friend's toddler plunged head-first down a stairwell while in my care. And then I lost my teeth and my daughter. Why should a mind, placid in daylight, unleash such horrors at bedtime? By day we are anchored by deadlines, smalltalk and teabags. At night, when darkness swallows the reassuring props and the mind is uncaged, we are reminded that the comforts we cling to are frail ones and that we are all perched perilously above the unknown.

Today my daughter turns 10. She rejoices in her new seniority. I lament her ebbing childhood. Once birthday lists contained dolls clothes and magic wands. Now she requests Hollister hoodies and an iPod Touch. We get out the albums and watch her morph over the pages from a blurred foetus to a lanky schoolgirl. She questions me closely about the forgotten years. For her, the mop-haired toddler is a stranger. For me, sometimes, it's the tall pre-teen beside me, who is unfamiliar. In my mind's eye, she is small enough to lie on my lap and biddable enough to stay there. In clothes shops I unthinkingly head for garments that are five years too small. In reality she is big enough to borrow my shoes and cool enough to lament my sober heels. I regret now all those years I wished her older so that I might gain quiet nights, civilised meals and the luxurious liberation of school days. I'm worried that I didn't make the most of what I had, while I had it. And I'm nervous...

Middle-age is an underrated condition. Those who have yet to reach it fear it; those who have, deny it. A survey by that matchless celebration of mid-life endeavour, Saga, shows that its customers reckon they pass from youth to old age near their 70th birthdays, bypassing middle-age entirely. I am an expert in this field. I entered middle-age in spirit in my early teens and in body a good half decade ago. It's a stage that brings many comforts - a thicker skin, maturer children, guiltless nights on the sofa and an extensive collection of cardigans. But its greatest gift is wisdom. While the young continue their blundering pursuit of their true selves, we mid-lifers have found ours, absorbed the shock, made some necessary adjustments and resigned ourselves to what we cannot change. And so, from this enviable perch, I'm contributing to KateTakes5's collection of Truths as divined by women. Younger readers like Kate - this list of enlightenment could save you years of s...

I strayed the other day past a shop which sold classy and desirable homeware. I knew that it was classy and desirable because the soft items were patterned with Cath Kidston-style florals and the hard ones notched and lined with cracks and crinkles. Distressed furniture is the scientific term. The more distressed a chest of drawers, the more it is valued.  House guests are supposed to assume that the chest has passed through your family dynasty; that each scar, painstakingly applied by a craftman's tool, is a souvenir of a generation. My body is similarly distressed. My chest, after four decades of family life, resembles the railway intersection at Crewe. A craftsman would be proud of the fine lines that pleat my face and I've grown three well-shaped liver spots on one hand. By rights, like that furniture, I should be highly prized by society. Yet adverts urge on me hi-tech slime to thwart Time. Clinics beg to hack years off me with a surgeon's knife. And now I read t...

As the apple fell is the latest prompt for the 100 Word Challenge . Anyone who was on Twitter last week might have heard my anguished cries from the kitchen after I'd burnt a pan of apples. @kateab answered them with the following fragrant recipe which saved the greater part of the Vicar's cherished Le Creuset pan and, thereby, my marriage. For decades it's shamed me. Then, as the apple fell, I made my resolution. My crassness in the kitchen is legendary. Guests pale at the thought of my catering. My children have been reared on fishfingers. But now Worcestershire Pearmains rain down on me and the lawn is aroll with Bramleys, so gingerly I braved the cooker. Too late, the stench of incinerated Le Creuset recalled me. Frantically I simmered a soup of washing powder to salvage the Vicar's best saucepan. I blocked it from view when he came home, but he smiled and, for the first time in our marriage, declared: 'Something smells good!'

'What,' I asked my 9-year-old, 'Would your three wishes be?' Solemnly she sorted her priorities and concluded: to meet Emma Watson, to become an Olympian and for us all to be happy. I asked my 8-year-old niece. She required no reflection. 'A bow and arrow, a sword and shield and a laser gun,' she replied. I admire childish precision. But now Babberblog has turned the tables on me. He wants to know what I want. I assume he means that whatever it is he'll try to get it for me. The trouble is, my mind's now gone a total blank. Naturally, I crave world peace, health and wealth for all, a rebirth of the rain forests and a cure for dandruff, but I'd better keep my wants within the realms of reason so that Babberblog has a chance of procuring them for me by Christmas. So, Mr B, these, in random order are my desires: I want hair like Wonder Woman. All around me, insane beauties are forcing the curl from their tresses and bleaching out their chestnut h...

Returning to the routine is the prompt for this week's 100-Word Challenge . I was about to glory in my reclaimed domestic rituals in a blog post anyway, so all I had to do was delete half the adjectives to fit! This week I felt suffused with wellbeing. The cause? I'd matched a stray sock in the laundry to a single sock in the Vicar's drawer. Heady with triumph, I indulged in self-gratification. I arranged the spare loo rolls in a pyramid. I conquered the rings of limescale round the taps. And I bagged half my children's possessions into bin-liners while they wrestled fractions at school. The summer holidays were invigorating, but returning to the routine brings a superior fulfilment. Today, for instance, I am agog for that ritual unburdening. Yep - no spa resort can offer the purifying pleasure that is bin night!

Yesterday my 9-year-old was wrestling the new experience of grief. Today she learnt about miracles. Her beloved black cat vanished ten days ago and we all presumed he was dead. Then we received a call from a stranger in response to this: The stranger happened to have been in our neighbourhood, happened to have seen our posters, then happened to take a walk past a secluded fairytale cottage in the woods: There on the gate he saw this: A black cat had arrived starving on the cottage doorstep the week before, he discovered, and the owner had been leaving food in the front garden ever since. Instinct convinced him it was Harry. Instinct convinced us that it couldn't be. We drove to the woods and found the pink cottage and soon a small black cat came hurtling out of its front garden. He found us before we found him. It was Harry. He had strayed half a mile over fox-ridden parkland, crossed a busy main road, climbed a wooded hill and arrived at the lonely cottage the very sa...

Death has touched my my 9-year-old over the last two years. She sat a foot from the coffins of her great aunt and uncle at their double funeral. She watched the cremation service for her grandfather, mourned the loss of a schoolfriend's mother and attended the burial of the kind man at church who had given her his collection of vintage toy cars. The disappearance of familiar faces baffled, but did not unduly grieve her. She tried and failed to imagine the people she'd known nailed into the wooden boxes. She gathered fragments of memory - her grandpa's flourishing bow when he opened the front door, the ice cream the friend's mother had bought her - and tried and failed to comprehend that they would do these things no more. But life continued its orderly path without them and she moved serenely onwards with it. It's taken the disappearance of a small black cat to teach her the reality of loss. Harry was her baby. She'd race upstairs from school to see if he ...

Last week a security man at London's Natural History Museum asked to search my handbag. I was dismayed. I have, you see, things to hide. Things that I really do not wish London's security officials to know about. Should some of these things come to light, my good standing in the community could be gravely undermined. The man, however, was ruthless. He rummaged unfeelingly through my capacious companion and exposed my guiltiest secrets to public scrutiny. For all those in the queue behind me could see that within the elegant contours of my leather Bridge bag lurked: I'm not sure why I carry a potato peeler. Probably it dates from my backpacking days in Eastern Europe when I had to seize any culinary opportunity that came my way. For those who scoff, how do you know you won't find yourself in the middle of a carrot field one day, and require instant gratification? Yes, I do have those sophisticated tissues in neat plastic packages, but I don't ever open them if...

I'm a mother who does things by the book. If I can't find a book that says what I want it to, I search out another one. When Penelope Leach told me to keep nightly vigil by my crying infants and to permit ice cream when their spinach had been flung at the ceiling, I switched to Gina Ford who allowed me to pour a beer in front of Poirot, while they cried themselves to sleep, and to scoff their Maltesers when they spurned my liver and cabbage stew. When Tiger Mother advised us to drill three-year-olds in arpeggios, I embraced The Idle Parent  which reckons that after-school activities stifle infant creativity. Appalled by the new philosophy of Attachment Parenting, which required me to devote both waking and sleeping hours to anticipating my kids' unmet needs, I signed up to Slow Parenting which recommended herding offspring into the garden and shutting the door on them The notion that parents have to devote their attentions to their progeny, and the guilt we all feel whe...

Legacy is the prompt for this week's 100-word Challenge . The centenary of Captain Scott's fatal expedition to the South Pole is commemorated in an exhibition at London's Natural History Museum. The optimism that drove them onwards, the despair of defeat, the deadly return are as stirring as you'd expect. But the story that struck me most concerned three of his companions who left base, some months before the main expedition started, to seek out the eggs of Emperor penguins. Scientists believed that the study of these embryos could reveal an evolutionary link between birds and reptiles. As the penguins lay their eggs in winter, the men had to haul their sledges over ravines and ice cliffs in perpetual darkness. Two of the five eggs they managed to grab smashed and it's thought that, for five weeks, they endured conditions more extreme than any human had survived before. It was science, not personal glory, that drove them. They called it 'the worst jou...

over at Mammasaurus . This is a very unusual sight - my daughter studiously doing her homework, that is. Your captions could inspire her to continue in the same scholarly vein, so please give it your all...

'Postcode!' drawls the woman behind the counter. I recite it. 'Road name?' I recite it. 'What's the house number there, please?' I hesitate. I would be happy to provide my address if I were renewing my car tax disc. I would be happy to provide it if I were drawing up a will, buying a mortgage or stocking the larder online. I do not, however, expect to provide it when I am buying a top from White Stuff. I have to, explains the woman, so that she can check I'm on their database. And I need to be on the database to ensure that I receive regular postcards of new catalogues and special offers so that my single guilty indulgence can be multiplied into a dangerous weekly shopping habit. Next I visit my bank to pay in a cheque. 'Postcode?' says the woman behind the counter. I recite it. I assume it's a security safeguard. As I turn to go, her face irradiates. 'The screen is telling me that you live in an area that qualifies for a low ins...

Would seven prove to be too much? is the prompt for the latest 100 Word Challenge . It's a question that's been bugging me this summer as I toil to thrill the nation's frogs: Men derive happiness from washing dishes, reveals one report.  Women, says another, achieve it through being women. They are healthier, better educated and less often murdered. And, naturally, they enjoy a blissful routine of dirty dishes.  Different research claims rose-tinted spectacles are an essential ingredient of bliss.  These studies omit one crucial truth. The secret to happiness is digging. Whenever I need a boost, I hack out a pond. The vicarage lawn is vanishing beneath my pickaxe.  During the relentless school holidays I feel my serenity teetering. I know, before August is out, I'll be assaulting the London clay. But would seven prove to be too much? The first of many...

I am sitting on a pew composing myself for the Sunday service when the church sideswoman darts across the nave. She holds out a brown envelope with my name on. It's a note, she explains, from the elderly lay-reader. I assume that it's an acknowledgment sent to everyone who filled out an attendance card at her husband's funeral last week. Or a request for an additional supply of grapefruit segments. At least, I hope it is. The lay reader is a retired deputy head teacher and has a reputation for severity. I'm worried that it may be a reprimand for fidgeting during a sermon, or a summons to bible class. The service begins and I open the envelope behind my hymn book. There's no note inside, just a newspaper clipping. It shows a picture of a ragged bra and a pair of frayed lace knickers. The story explains that these saucy scanties date from the 15th-century and suggest to historians that Ann Summers had medieval predecessors. I'm uncertain whether this is a ...

Here, for me, is the essence of childhood. It's encapsulated in: The sheltering, matching, multi-hued brollies. The childish world is a Technicolored one in which things are more vivid, more vital, more entrancing than in the monochrome landscapes of midlife. Within this rainbow world they are shielded from the colder blasts of reality. And fortunate children in fortunate families are sheltered by the strong ties of belonging; the certainty that they are interconnected and indispensable. The motionless wonderment. A doorbell button, an excavated worm, a snowy walk to school are marvels to minds unsullied by experience. The freedom. It's my problem, not theirs, if they get cold and wet. The trust. In that pause before following the footsteps into wider horizons, they rely on my judgement that they are equal to the adventure and my intervention if it menaces them. This is part of a blog-hop organised by Patch of Puddles  to highlight the plight of West African childre...

over at Mammasaurus . Anyone who knows me twigs that I do not have a sound relationship with telephones. I don't even know my own mobile number. I find the pressure of modern communications oppressive. So, as you can see, do my children: Blog comments are my chief source of gratification, so don't wait for wit; I'll rejoice in any caption here!

Together the flames is the prompt for Julia's 100 Word Challenge this week. I imagine we're supposed to wax fluent about the Olympics, but now I've watched the diving and the gymnastics I'm unmoved by our national sporting fervour. Instead, I thought of a small stone village in the Derbyshire Peaks that I recently visited. Eyam seems lonely, windswept and unremarkable until you realise that almost all of the oldest cottages bear an inscription... Death arrived in a bale of cloth from London. The tailor aired it before the fire and as the household huddled together the flames released the fleas. Randomly the plague claimed victims in the knot of small lanes. They could have fled but, to contain the horror, the survivors sealed off their village and awaited their fate. Today plaques brand the cottages where whole families died. Rocks in a field show where a widow buried her six children. Within a year, three quarters of the village were dead. The disease perished with ...

I love the prospect of the long school holidays. Hot days idling with the children in National Trust gardens. Family gatherings round a barbecue. Boden dresses. Church fetes. The merciful hibernation of my alarm clock. I dread the reality of the long school holidays. Hot hours idling with the children on the M25. Petulant offspring picking black bits of the char-grilled chicken. The last-minute dash for children's summer wear in packed shopping malls. The dawn chorus of guests staggering home from our neighbour's latest 'get-together'. The constant, interminable bickering. Katetakes5 's latest Listography invites us to list the five things we most relish about the summer break, which is timely since I'm just unpacking from a miraculously hot week on a Cornish beach. Now that I've stowed my squabbling pair in front of Grease and poured myself a Peroni in the spare room, I feel equal to considering these hidden joys. Five is quite a feat, but here, afte...