'Bucker!' cursed my then two-year old when she got behind the wheel of her Little Tike car. 'Bucker, bucker, bucker!' I admonished her for swearing. 'I have to,' she said. 'I'm driving.' Now her language has become more decorous as she steers a Skoda across the roof of a car park and topples a bollard. And she keeps a cool that would elude me as she dodges an oncoming car and brakes just before the wall that separates us from a five-storey drop onto the Brent Cross retail park. Multi-storey car parks do not bring out the best in my character, but my 13-year-old shows signs of being superior in temperament and skill. Behind, her 11-year-old brother reverses tidily into a free parking space. Unlike me he collects no strangers' wing mirrors in the manoeuvre. I, meanwhile, am still recuperating from wrestling my own Skoda through the perils of the North Circular to get here. I had to get the Vicar to park it. The children are having their first...
I wonder sometimes what I am. I have lived the last decade on an inner city council estate, amid Oxford academia, in a remote country town and in London suburbia. In the first we were, with our relentless consonants and sagging bookshelves, regarded as aristocrats. In the second, as the 'squeezed middle'. In the third, as city sophisticates and now, sometimes, isolated in my tweed amid the Ralph Lauren and the hoodies, I feel myself a bumpkin. Class should no longer matter. Nowadays, for most of us, it's more a question of perception than birth. But the perception matters. My daughter battles to adjust speech, habits and dress to blend in with each new environment; the political parties compete to woo the amorphous throng they deem Middle England and Melvyn Bragg has started a television series on class and culture. The British, he decides, no longer define themselves by class, but by the music they listen to, the books they read. I listen to Dolly Parton and Beethoven....
Daily Mail columnist Liz Jones has provoked the ire of Twitter with by declaring that mummy bloggers are blinkered dimwits whose lives are spiced by Napisan. I'm afraid I have to sympathise with her, for all of her prejudices echo my own: Writing about my life has pretty much ruined it. Supper last night was an elderly carrot glued to the fridge shelf by a pool of brown mucus and the floor was flooded when I left the bath taps running because Blogger has diverted me from domestic essentials. I've had to shut the children in front of the television when a new post has assailed me and some family members no longer speak to me because Twitter interactions leave me no time to reach the telephone. But there is a big part of me that thinks writing should be hard: you should cringe whenever you press that 'publish' button. Artists – and I'm sorry, I do consider myself an artist – have to wrench the dirtiest, most disgusting part of their inner soul and show it t...
This will get us through the vicar's sermons.
ReplyDeleteNow I know why Spanish beer tastes of cats' pee...
ReplyDeleteI'm guarding the good stuff....hic
ReplyDeleteMy eyes are too beautiful to be seen in public all the time! bye
ReplyDeleteI found the EMPTY box... someone else drank the beer ... honest! hic
ReplyDeleteIf I hide in here I might some beer
ReplyDeleteDon't forget your pets this Christmas
ReplyDeleteSan Miguel's advertising idea of getting a free cat with each cartoon was a roaring success!
ReplyDeleteIs it a coincidence my eyes are the same colour as lager?....hic!
ReplyDeleteTa da! What? Oh, right, you said Puss in BOOTS. Sorry.
ReplyDeleteWho's the designated driver?
ReplyDeleteA cat is for life not just for boozing . . . ;)
ReplyDeleteWhat beer? *hic* *meow*
ReplyDeleteMiaow who drunk all the cats piss?
ReplyDeleteI'll be hibernatingin here for the next few weeks, come and get me when all that darn christmas fuss is over
ReplyDeleteIs it safe to come out? Has xfactor finished yet?
ReplyDeleteAnother reason to drink San Miguel - it comes with free cat carrier! (pet not included)
ReplyDelete