Adventures of a Middle-Aged Matron

Every week, Julia at Julia's Place , imparts a prompt around which bloggers must construct a hundred words. I find it addictive. The idea is creative writing but I find those random challenges ferret out aspects of domestic reality that I might never have thought to blog about. This week, in honour of the Jubilee, Julia requires a poem that reflects the passing of sixty years. I have no idea how to write poetry and my domestic reality doesn't yet accommodate sixty years. But then I remembered my father's oft-narrated tale of a colleague on his local paper who returned stunned from a routine visit to report a couple's diamond wedding anniversary: Side by side they sit in the parlour, Serenity on chintz. Her hand, fragile as the flowered porcelain, pours the tea And, wordlessly, he thanks her. Behind, their family drifts through the decades on the mantel, The newlyweds briefly multiplying,  Then, as years pass, shrinking back into a twosome; Shrivelled but smiling in ...

The lament reverberates up the stairs.  In the kitchen crouches our tabby, mewling. Frisbee never mewls.  He bypasses a brimming bowl of tuna. Frisbee never declines food. Evidently he is a cat in Darkest Misery. Then he cocks his leg for a cleansing and I glimpse a purpled puckered wound beneath his tail. It is Sunday. I ring the RSPCA rescue centre, which rehomed him, and they advise the out-of-hours animal hospital. I ring the out-of-hours animal hospital and they advise that I speak to a consultant. I speak to a consultant and she fears a fox attack, an exploded abscess and a disabling infection and she urges us to hurry him in immediately. And so I drive 12 miles to the hospital and pay £33 for an assessment and wait one hour for the consultant. And the consultant examines the alarmed cat’s undercarriage and pronounces her diagnosis: the ‘wound’ I glimpsed was his bottom!

Stylish mummies are, I discover, building whole blogs  around the outfits they wear on the school run. I am entranced by this idea. If we all put up photos of our early morning selves, we could trade invaluable fashion tips which would make the daily chore of outshining the other parents so much more companionable. To start the ball rolling, and with the help of two small photographers, I've kept a picture log of the past week. Feel free to borrow any style tips for your own dawn journeys, so long as you credit this blog (a Post-it note pinned to a lapel would do the trick.) Monday The drought, as you can see, is still going strong. Underneath this waterproof coat (£30 from Harpers Bazaar surplus store in Malvern) I'm wearing a £2,250 Prada sheath dress and a rope of Swaroski diamonds. Please note the wellingtons. They're not any old wellingtons - they're Hunters and they cost me £64. The mud splashes were extra. Five mothers screamed over them when I first wo...

This week's 100 Word Challenge at Julia's Place must incorporate the words The flame flickered before... The Olympic torch must have inspired her, but I have cunningly manipulated the prompt so that I can boast about what I did on Sunday... My daughter has become an overnight football fan. The fact that she’s never seen a game is no deterrent. She’s acquired a Chelsea plate, Liverpool pyjamas and an album of Match Attax which she exhibits mercilessly.  So, after Sunday Eucharist, I agreed to my first match. Fearsome in tweed skirt and wellies, I assaulted that ball and any juvenile obstruction. I flung myself at the goal, my necklace lassooing interfering opponents. And I scored!  Triumph ignited in me a passion for a sport I’ve never rated. Briefly, the flame flickered before middle age felled me and it was smothered by the mud I sprawled in.      

This week’s listography at Kate Takes Five is Five Things I Love About Kids . I wasn’t going to participate. Come Saturday afternoons I’m more minded to list two dozen things that exasperate me about kids. But the challenge set me thinking and the thinking prompted appreciative realisations about my bickering pair and consequently, by this evening, my weekend temper had sweetened immeasurably and I’d promised them crumpets for tea. I am, therefore, grateful to Kate. Here are the five things I love about children: Glee Everything is a treat: that tea of buttered crumpets, a scour in the car wash, finding a worm, a turn with the Hoover, rainbows of petrol shimmering in puddles and watching the ball-cock rise and fall when lid of the lavatory cistern is removed. Actually, all of those things are still a treat for me, bar the Hoover, but whereas in children it’s an engaging enthusiasm, in adults it suggests an undeveloped mind! Imagination The plastic laundry basket is a doomed crui...

Adults – civilised adults – talk to you. Children talk at you. My children talk at me all the time. They’ll relay the plot of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows through the crack in the bathroom door. They’ll list their favourite footballers from their Match Attax cards. They’ll embark on a joke that has no known ending while I’m perfecting a tweet and they’ll test their recollection of the first names of all the teachers in their school when Gardeners’ Question Time is starting. This ceaseless, guileless prattle can be endearing. It can be exasperating and, occasionally, it can cause me to flee to the nettle bed behind the garage. But yesterday, in hospital, a mask was placed over my daughter’s face, her eyes rolled back and she was silenced. Her silence muffled even the screams of a child in the next treatment room while we paced the corridor outside. When, eventually, we were summoned, her eyes were open but she was still silent. I would have endured the highlights from five pa...

Julia’s 100-word Challenge this week wants us to incorporate the words liberty , empire, apple, yellow and enormous . She has evidently been excited by a recent trip to New York. I was going to duck out, then I remembered a snippet I’d just read in the Daily Mail. I aspire to a pear-shape, but the reality is more of a withered yellow apple. Child-bearing has killed off my crop-tops and poured me into the more accommodating contours of empire-line smocks. From behind I’m still skinny, but, front-on, strangers are apt to congratulate me on my happy event. However, today’s newspapers announce M&S’s scientific knickers which will subdue my post-natal midriff into a wasp waist. My glee is enormous. An alchemy of polyamide and elastane; panels, padding and mesh will sculpt my flesh while allowing my lungs full liberty, so, henceforth, an hourglass figure in a sheath dress will be manning the church tea urn. 

At the start of the year, my 9-year-old declared herself Pony Mad. Her rolled-up bedside rug became a steed, her wall was plastered with posters of cavorting colts, her table was cleared to make room for home-spun tack and her pink unicorn hobby horse was retrieved from retirement and stabled beneath her kitchen chair. Then, following a weekend with her cousin, she pledged herself to Harry Potter. The table was reorganised as a tribute to Hogwarts, Alan Rickman glowered above the bedstead and the pink unicorn was metamorphosed into a flying broomstick. Next, a play-date with a precocious friend turned her into a fashionista. The bedroom became a boudoir and the table became a repository for old perfume bottles, scavenged jewellery, lip salves and hair ornaments. Now, after another weekend with her cousin, she is a football fan. She begged a trip to Sports Direct to spend her savings on a Liverpool football shirt (‘Although I’ll get Chelsea or Arsenal if they’re cheaper!’). The potio...

My parents have met a pair of millionaires in the middle of the Baltic. The millionaires have a smart pad in London and a yacht on the Med. I am not interested in money. It is the soul, of course, that counts! But I am interested in the yacht. I like to imagine myself bobbing about on it if the friendship blooms. It would re-conjure our beloved old caravan holidays, only with plumbing instead of a bucket. And the friendship does bloom. My parents are invited to the smart pad in London. My mother ponders a gift for a woman who has everything and decides on a jar of Lidl's pickled herrings. So irresistibly do they evoke their Baltic cruise that she buys another jar for herself and swallows a few spoonfuls for a night cap. Next day they rev up the Skoda for the trip into town and my mother forgets the herrings. They speed back and she lunges into the fridge and grabs the jar and she hands it to the hostess who is thrilled and grateful. Back at home again, my mother is probing th...

The prompt for the latest 100 Word Challenge is this sphere of prehistoric bones in the National Museum of Scotland.  It reminded me of awed afternoons in Oxford's Museum of Natural History. The Gothic contours resemble a dinosaur’s rib-cage so I feel I’ve been swallowed whole. And they’re echoed by the skeletal giants that motionlessly prowl the aisles. The Eustreptospondylus oxoniensis and Camptosaurus prestwichii once roamed nearby fields; now they’re poised in reinforced glass cases. Their names are as daunting as their dimensions. But, for me, they’re dwarfed by a flea concealed in an upper gallery. It’s detectable only though a magnifying lens, yet it wears minute hiking clothes. I’m awed by the power and perfection of such a microscopic being and by the humorous tenacity of the human who clothed it.

The National Trust has compiled a list of things that every child should do before the age of 11 3/4. One of them is to climb a tree. I would go further. Tree climbing ought to be a regular activity until the age of 65. There is, however, a problem. Our local council proposes to ban tree-climbing in all its parks, including the large semi-rural one that my children and I walk through to and from school each day. In future, I would have to pay £500 for the privilege of swarming one of the oaks in the wood, unless I could satisfy the council that I had a reasonable excuse. Retrieving a stuck kite would not be a reasonable excuse, for the council plans to ban kite-flying too. For £500 I could take out a six-month membership of our local David Lloyd gym and my children could exercise safely in a risk-assessed, temperature-controlled environment which has a mission statement and a latte machine. But I shan't. I shall continue to encourage them to climb trees and I shall continu...

This week's 100-word challenge at Julia's Place  requires us to use the word ruby . It just so happens that... It strikes me, as I try transmuting a pair of Doodles into Dorothy’s ruby slippers: parenting classes omit crucial aspects of child-rearing. They are eloquent about weaning and potty-training, but they don’t touch on how to conjure a flock of sheep from Whiskas boxes or improvise a Victorian maid’s cap from a wedding garter. Primary education is less about times-tables and more about encapsulating historical and literary landmarks from household flotsam. My advice to new parents is to relax about the intuitive routines of feeding and hygiene. They’ll need all their energies for mastering conjuring tricks when their children start school. 

The bus is late. I stand at the head of a lengthening queue outside the 99p Shop. Three lanes of traffic roar past us and a beer can rolls round our feet. 'We spend half our lives waiting,' says a tiny old man behind me. 'It is not good'. I reflect on this this. The greater part of parenting involves waiting. Waiting in playgrounds, waiting at swimming lessons, waiting at the school gate. It's the aspect of child-care that the uninitiated find most challenging and it's the aspect, a mother of independent teenagers warns me, that she most misses. Waiting, it strikes me, gives us time out of the rush and clamour to collect our harrassed thoughts. Time to wonder where that man with the yellow shoes is headed with that aspidistra. Time to rationalise a hurtful slight; to draft the next blog post; to ponder elusive cosmic mysteries. Why should flapping a J-cloth or lunging for fashion bargains be more valid activities than the rare stillness of time suspended. ...

This week's 100 Word Challenge at Julia's Place  requires us to incorporate the words: I'm exhausted. Shut the door behind you... Easy peasy. I say them every day! I have begun to neglect my children. For every two hours of their company, I crave 20 minutes of silence. When a storybook is finished or Scrabble lost and won, I scuttle to the bedroom to breathe freer air. There sits my laptop, a portal onto a virtual world which seems, after a day of juvenile bickering, more real than reality. When my twosome erupts after me I banish them: ‘I’m exhausted. Shut the door behind you!’ Lately my craving has coincided with bathtime and, miraculously, the children have learned to organise themselves. I’ve muffled my guilt for I’ve realised that careful neglect is favour; it hastens priceless independence. 

In the Disney film of Sleeping Beauty, two fairy godmothers bestow their gifts on the infant princess before the witch blasts in with her spoiler. For this week's listography,  Katetakes5 has been pondering what blessings she would wish to be bestowed upon her children, were a passing fairy to take an interest them. And that set me to wondering too. My daughter, if I asked her, would plead for a Juicy Couture tracksuit; my son for the extinction of school. And I? If I could wish for them gifts to carry them through adulthood, I would choose: Imagination An essential tool that allows you to conjure a stallion out of a roll of carpet, to plan an Eden in a rubbly back yard, to invigorate a wet Saturday and walk in the shoes of a stranger. Imagination helps empathy and empathy fosters charity and charity is the root of all virtues. Patience I always hope that if I wait long enough the gift of patience will be bestowed on me. But, two minutes into a childish alter...

For fun I decided to take the official practice citizenship test - that government interrogation designed to check whether immigrants have absorbed enough Britishness to merit a UK passport.  I am born and bred British and so were three centuries of my family tree.  I scored 53 per cent and failed the test. Briefly I was stricken. I love warm ale and the sound of hard balls on cricket bats. I own a box set of episodes of Are you Being Served? . I thought I was British to the core. But, according official criteria, I am an imposter. Then I started to ponder and it struck me that the problem is not with my imperfect national identity but with the questions. You could know how many days a year British schools have to be open, the difference between Hansard and Speaker’s Notes and which year women won the right to divorce their husbands and still nurse a murderous hatred of the British way of life. But noone who sincerely loves Marmite could look an Englishman in the eye and w...

The dead, I discover, no longer wear shrouds. Probably everyone knows this, but I didn't, and I find the news strangely disturbing. A while ago, I was at the funeral of a school-gate friend (where I discovered too late that mourners no longer wear black). It hurts more to think of her laid out in her casket in her familiar plaid skirt and knee boots, rather than transfigured in white linen. Later a dismaying notion strikes me. I struggle to decide what to wear to the office, to church and for our occasional wild nights at Bella Pasta. Now I must ready a costume for the Last Journey. Just in case. I do not wish the Vicar to have a hand in this: I would spend Eternity in a boiled wool cardie. And so I ask the church sideswoman whether tweed or tulle would be best. She says greens are nice. We discuss my wardrobe and ponder my Boden notch-neck-knit dress with my patent Mary Janes. These don't get out much because they torment my left bunion. The sideswoman says that, under the...

The latest torment devised to force bloggers to humiliate themselves requires us to disclose ten things that we say to ourselves every day. Random Pearls of Wisdom  is the kindly culprit in my case.  It was hard to narrow it down for I mutter to myself all day long and, although much of it is certainly random, none of it, unlike my tormentor, contains either pearls or wisdom. Below, however, is the verbal framework, that supports me through the daily grind. Sock it to me, junior!  I emit this upon awakening and rearing bolt upright on my pillows each morning. It makes the coming day seem more malleable, but the Vicar, for some reason, dislikes the habit and asks, mildly, if I could devise a different salute to the dawn. Let’s get this show on the road! Another ritual motivator, usually uttered while still prone in bed, and which also seems to exasperate the Vicar. HatemyselfIhatemyselfIhatemyself! This I mutter at intervals throughout the day when I realise that I’ve ...

Earlier this week a 40-something blonde journalist called Samantha Brick wrote an article for the Daily Mail about why the world resents her beauty. I have watched the fall-out from her candour with appalled fascination. Hate campaigns have rippled through Twitter. 5,000 mocking comments were left on the Daily Mail’s website. Columnists in rival newspapers have lined up to condemn her delusions. I am a lone sympathiser. For I too am a 40-something blonde journalist and I too know how it is to be condemned for your looks. This is my story. Fifteen years ago, as I hurried for the morning train to work, a voice hailed me urgently. I turned and saw a handsome young man in hot pursuit. As he drew close he held out a flaccid parcel. It was the egg mayonnaise sandwich that I’d packed for my lunch and which I’d dropped on the pavement in my haste. I knew, though, as his eyes met mine, that the favour was a pretext and the alacrity with which he moved off after handing it over confirmed ...

My children love money. They make minute study of the Queen's head and of the date of minting. They rejoice in coins released during their birth year and in coins with an extra polished sheen. They squirrel their riches in a mysterious system of purses, pockets and money boxes and occasionally, after grave reflection, they take a few coins out and spend them. Ever since my mother handed my daughter a quid and informed her that, at six, she was old enough to receive pocket money, I've sacrificed a portion of my weekly earnings to my babies. For two years it was 50p each. Then, when Haribos caught up with inflation, I recklessly doubled it. Since few of my friends had begun the habit back then, I had no benchmark against which to calculate their dues. I worked on the premise that my 10p a week income in the early 1980s funded a bag of sweets and so my children should be enabled to afford the same. Swiftly they learned that they could blow their weekly hand-out on a chocolate ...