Adventures of a Middle-Aged Matron

I am not a fan of February, not least because I emerge from it a year older than I entered it. The frigid temperatures, which I embrace so eagerly as a proper accompaniment to Christmas, have lost their savour and my winter pelt, so fondly cultivated during the shortest days, is impatient for a spring trim. By the end of this brutish little month I have lost my inner sunshine. I am fractious with my children and neglectful of my Hoover. Days confronted from beneath the rim of my duvet require energies I do not possess and my daily wardrobe is limited to the two jumpers capacious enough to accommodate a hot water bottle underneath. Most cruelly, Lent falls plumb in the middle of this doleful time, depriving me of my twin props of beer and Bendicks Bittermints. Last weekend, however, I stumbled upon an astonishing remedy for the February blues. It doesn't come cheap - at £3 it cost me more than a dose of Peroni - but boy, is it effective! The first time I tried it the world looke...

In olden days there were four customary remedies when you awoke to find that your life's partner no longer inflamed you: divorce court, adultery, counselling or gin. Progress, however, has supplied a new option to reignite a relationship - all you need is a keyboard and a good memory for past grievances.  Eli Finkel, a US Professor of Psychology, has devised a seven-minute audit which, when completed by couples every four months, should strengthen and lengthen their union, and there must be something in it because the results were published in the cerebral journal, Psychological Science . A key component of this audit is a resume of a recent rows. This presents a difficulty. I've never knowingly had a row with the Vicar. He's too good-natured and apologetic and I'm too idle to rouse myself to wrath. Brief sulks, maybe and occasional peevishness, but the professor is after far meatier fare than this. Then it occurs to me that his hypothesis is flawed. Revisiting past ...

It can happen to any man. One minute they're running an oil company from a mansion in Mayfair, the next they're living off a clergy stipend on a council estate. I've seen the shock on the faces of wives who married a publican and ended up ironing cassocks when the Calling came. There's no telling at what stage of life the Church can claim them. All you can do, ladies, is to lay in some tweed and some cake tins, so that you are ready if the time should come. In the meantime, here are some pointers to recognise whether your home has become a vicarage: Women you've never met before are liable to emerge at any time of day and evening from your husband's study.  Men you've never met before are liable to require admittance at any time of day and evening when you're alone in the house in your Marigolds. You are gyrating to the Bee Gees with a potato-masher mike when you discover an archdeacon in the hallway. Your children are cataloguing your materna...

The eight-year-old has acquired a thinking hat. It's a formidable piece of headgear which enables the wearer to unlock cosmic mysteries. By its powers he hopes to storm the indecipherable code that is his school reading book and to locate the lost key to his diary. And, miraculously, he does find that errant key and his reading, when the hat is on his head (and his new glasses on his nose), is noticeably improved. I have therefore set my sights on this hat. There are many cosmic mysteries that I should like unravelled; many powers I wish to acquire. I plan to sport it in the supermarket to gauge the fastest check-out queue and to wear it in church to banish Boden bargains from my mind during the Eucharistic prayer. Behatted, I should be able to answer my children's questions about why cats don't have to eat greens and what are seven times eight. Most of all, though, I should like the hat to reveal: Why my hair is migrating from my head to my chin.  Why, after three ...

Beneath the surface is the prompt for this week's 100 Word Challenge at Julia's Place . This morning I visited an auction room where the harvests from local house clearances are displayed before going under the hammer. Antique bureaus stood beside 1970s kitchen cabinets; Victorian chaises longues beside wicker sofas. Someone's bowling kit was mixed in with a warming pan, a china doll, a fur coat and a ukelele. I'd gone in agog for a bargain and emerged chastened by a pair of bedside tables circa 1960... The scars on the two small tables chart fifty years of married life. Now, shorn of context, they stand degraded, their plywood cheapness shown up by someone else's ornate oak wardrobe. I wince at the intimacy of the objects, exposed to the assessing eyes of strangers. To the auctioneer they are catalogue numbers with a pitiful reserve price, but beneath the surface I catch poignant echoes of dismantled lives. And I realise that the treasures of my o...

My children have not turned out how I intended. Yes, I read all the books. I nodded along to features on perfect parenting and honed my prejudices against mothers who fell short of my ideals. Yet things went awry within weeks of my eldest's birth and it's been downhill all the way since then. I'd resolved, you see, on rearing children who: Owned only three toys, all of hand-crafted wood, plus a single teddy bear. Ate the green twirly things excavated from my garden with gratitude and with cutlery. Begged the Hoover off me to fine-tune their bedrooms. Thought an iPod was a hybrid vegetable. Turned their private desks into a homework hub. Greeted the Sunday faithful with smiling enquiries after their health. Instead, my children: Single-handedly turned Fisher-Price into a global empire and would sink Noah's Ark with their menagerie of stuffed animals. Eat only fish-fingers and chipolatas - with their fingers. Beg a step ladder off me to surmount the impenetra...

This picture is the prompt for the latest 100 Word Challenge over at Julia's Place . Now if I were one of those figures on that flimsy protruberance I would be worrying like heck that the architect had got his calculations right. And maybe that's why the picture made me think of death - or more particularly of an interview I heard yesterday with the guitarist Wilko Johnson who has been given ten months to live.  The man sounded positively jubilant as he recounted how the imminence of his end has liberated him from the preoccupations that blinker us all. Eyes trained on the chasm of the future tend to be blind to the Now. A tracery of branches, the smile of a child are eclipsed by mortgage angst and to-do lists.   But the dying man is clear-sighted. 'Every cold breeze against your cheek, every brick in the road makes you feel alive,' he says. 'There is this marvellous feeling of freedom. Why didn't I work out before that it's just the moment you'r...

The secret to surviving middle age, says a survey, is a good marriage, a good breakfast and a puppy. The Vicar and I have spent 13 years-worth of contented evenings side by side under our tartan rugs; I never confront a day without sultana bran inside me and, although I can't vouch for the power of a pup, I seem to be plodding reliably through middle-age, so I assume two cats can count. But there is more to marriage than this. It has, finds a different survey, an enhancing effect on men's bodies and women's minds. And men who wish to push those enhanced bodies into antiquity, while steering clear of Alzheimers, should, according to a third poll, select wives who are younger than them and clever to boot. So far so good. I'm a year younger than the Vicar and, unlike him, I've mastered the purpose of all the attachments on our vacuum cleaner, so I am most probably clever. He can pace the Seven Sisters without a stroke and my mind has undoubtedly flourished on a dinne...

On Sunday the extreme weather meant I had to find a daring new approach to parish rounds. I'd long suspected that beneath my church hat lurked a Hell's Angel and, after decades of demureness, I decided it was time to take blameless parishioners for a ride. High on speed, I eliminated all, even the church verger, who stood in my path... ..and resolved to show the world I was a woman with balls. My ruthlessness, though, proved to be my downfall: So now I am resigned to life in the slow lane. But I have bought a racy new hat to live it in! This week's challenge at Julia's Place requires us to add 100 words to the words the extreme weather meant . But, naturally, I was going to write about the snow anyway...

Since Christmas I've felt shiftless. I've peered into the cobwebbed corners of my soul to pinpoint the malaise. True, it's a dismal feeling, after months of anticipation, to know that I've ridden the Santa Express through the local garden centre for the last time this winter. It was upsetting to hoof our friendly Christmas tree onto the cold pavement on Twelfth Night and I am being persecuted by boxes of Ferraro Rocher, which multiply unpalatably across the vicarage as fast as I offload them. But these private pains don't give me my answer. Then, suddenly, I find it in a bottle of Fairy Liquid. I am shiftless because, when Christmas faded out, so did the sustaining mounds of washing up. No sane person enjoys the scabbed dishes from a family supper, but the dramatic aftermath of a banquet is one of the pleasures of the festive season. You can put on Act III of a grand opera (you can rely on everyone melodiously dying in Act III), shut the door, snaffle choice lef...

I try to cultivate an air of pious decorum in church. My woolly layers, a vital buffer against the chill of the pew, imply solid respectability. My hat conceals the twelve months since I last visited a hairdresser and my expression of rapt enlightenment, rehearsed in the shaving mirror, disguises my internal warfare over the pea-green jeans in the Boden catalogue during the parish notices. The advent of children has not aided my endeavours, however. Since the moment of my son's baptism when my daughter slashed the silence with: 'Mummy hit me!' it's been downhill all the way. 'Baby's fallen in Jesus pond!' cried my son, panicked, as, one Sunday, a proud father filmed another solemn gathering round a font. The passing of the years would instil in them due reverence, I thought. Tirelessly in Sunday School I turned loo roll tubes into saints and conjured flocks of sheep from Whiskas boxes to prompt their spiritual awakening. But a decade on, my resolve to be...

I never was one for parties. Higher heels and shorter skirts would enhance my social appetite, my mother told me, but parties surveyed from stilettos seemed to me the same cacophonous Babel as parties endured in the tweed twin set the churchwarden had outgrown. My tentative opinions on coir-based composts and Primark polyknits packed no punch amid such fevered networking. I judged my impact on the number of handshakes I received, on the number of glazed eyes and, once, on a Valentine's proposition which turned out to be from an octogenarian with a urinary tract disorder whom I'd steered to the Gents. Nowadays, however, social gatherings have acquired new meaning. My insights into vacuum cleaners and Bourbon Creams and my passing pleasantries to strangers are validated by a mark out of 100. At the end of a month of small talk I can measure my success with a Klout score. Where once monologues about my daily routines would have cleared a room, they now collect a gratifying t...

For three days I have been liberated. I had left my handbag at the wrong end of London and so, without a purse, I was spared the exhausting compulsion to traipse round the sales. I had mislaid my mobile in the under-stairs cupboard and so was sheltered from inconvenient phone calls. My 10-year-old had lost my hairbrush and since my comb was 60 miles away in said handbag I was excused the bore of daily grooming. And I was without my children. 'I've never left my children for a single night,' said the lady on the bus. 'I couldn't bear to think of anyone else doing their breakfasts and bedtimes.' We marvelled at each other like two opposing zoological species. 'I must,' I replied brightly, 'be an unnatural mother!' Unnaturalness, the lady on the bus doesn't realise, has many advantages. It allowed the Vicar and me to walk 20 miles of cliff tops without whinging impediments. It granted us a nightly pint in a Tudor pub, unimpeded novel re...

A bit of a self-indulgent post, this one, and I'm grateful to anyone who endures to the end of it! Each year, after the Christmas festivities are ended, we strip the Christmas tree we chose with such care and haul it to the Christmas tree graveyard to be ground down by the Council. It's a sad sight seeing all those trees, once so cherished, abandoned in a heap, shreds of tinsel still hanging off them. My children were so grieved we decided to write a story about it. My 10-year-old was the creative director and illustrator and I was the scribe...  Deep in the dark cold wood stood a tiny fir tree. Its towering neighbours cast their shadows all around it and blocked out the sky and the tiny tree never saw the sun. It grew colder. One day something wet and white landed on the tiny fir tree. Another followed, then another. The fir trees stood knee deep in the snow and their branches drooped beneath the weight of it. The tiny fir tree did not know it, but Christmas was appr...

Dear [ Name to be supplied. Note to Vicar: check your address book for anyone we've left out ], Well, would you believe another twelve months has gone by and we are all a year older (and wiser, of course!!) than we were this time in 2011! And that means it's a whole year since I tried my hand at the art of the round robin, inspired by so many wonderful newsletters from dear friends I'd forgotten I had! As a raw beginner, I only managed a few pages of my own because ones lunch dates and the little successes of ones children all tend to merge into a golden haze over the course of a year, but this time I've kept a detailed daily diary so I'll be able to share properly with you the highs and lows family life in 2012!! As the Vicar and I were only saying to each other last week, our children never cease to amaze us! The year began well for the 8-year-old. He came home from school to tell us that he had come second in his class! It turned out that he was on the second...

'You', says my 10 year-old as I march her a mile to school instead of defrosting the Skoda, 'only ever do what you want!' I point out that I only ever do what is good for her, but my words evaporate in the chilly morning air, for children only acknowledge that a thing is in their best interests if they enjoy it. Thus, in my daughter's eyes: My sitting for an hour on the floor of a leisure centre corridor while she learns gymnastics is good for her. My sitting for an hour on a cupboard ledge while she reluctantly learns to swim is doing what I want. Browsing T-shirts in Hollister is good for her. Buying supper at Coop is doing what I want. Submitting to an iPod for her birthday is good for her. Barring her from Facebook is doing what I want. Crumpets in front of the TV is good for her. Wholemeal sandwiches is doing what I want. An afternoon of Diary of a Wimpy Kid at the cinema is good for her. Making her walk there is doing what I want. Clean she...

'Why,' asks my 8-year-old, 'does Monday come before Tuesday?' 'Who has the longest toes in the world?' 'Does anyone in the world have no coins, only banknotes?' My son dislikes silence. He'll fill any gap in the din of family life with a question and these questions bother me; not because I don't know the answer, but because I don't care. It's not that I don't have an enquiring mind. I wonder why facial moles sprout bristles, why my cakes never rise, why the Vicar hates spinach and why Uggs became fashionable. I ponder things of consequence, you see, and my son's unthinking enquiries are a frivolous interruption. But at night sometimes, when the incessant voice is stilled, I ponder the mind of an 8-year-old. A mind in which men caper on toes like Savaloys or wait helplessly beside slot machines with wallets burdened with banknotes. I require beer or unconsciousness to achieve such surrealism and, in those night hours, I wi...

My ten-year-old is a rock-chick, but she still wants to believe in Santa. I field her technical enquiries with carefully-worded half-truths, but something still troubles her. 'Why,' she asks, 'does Santa forget some children?' I consider reference to the Human Poverty Index then grab my stock response to her profounder theological questions: 'Some mysteries are beyond our understanding!' Her brother intervenes: 'If Santa exists why didn't he eat the mince pies we left out?' Damn! I hate mince pies. Then I'm inspired. 'Because Santa prefers chocolate,' I reply. 'This year leave a brownie and I guarantee it'll be gone by Christmas morning!' This photo is the prompt for the latest 100-Word-Challenge and as usual Julia timed it perfectly!

Ten years ago I decided to become the boss of a small business. The staff was minimal – just me, one part-timer (the Vicar) and a couple of advisors. The overheads, however, were enormous. Eye-watering figures were spent investing in infrastructure and researching core strategies. But what I hadn't bargained for was the emotional cost: the sleepless nights; the anxiety when projected deliverables failed and the fear that storm clouds would scupper my blue-sky thinking. I wonder why it has taken everyone else until this week to realise that parenthood and corporate management are the self-same thing. Mothers, some expert has belatedly acknowledged, are essentially CEOs of a small business – it's just that the assets are infants and the core product body fluids. Why, (also this week) it was calculated that over seven days during Christmas we CEO mothers perform £2,500 worth of work, ranging from chef to chauffeur. What a triumph it is for the sisterhood to know that their...

Grey is the prompt for this week's 100 Word Challenge . Some twenty years ago, when I wandered through a Richmond cemetery, I came upon a grave that stopped me in my tracks. I visited several times over the following few seasons and I know I shouldn't have peeked, but I'm glad I did for the memory of it has inspired me ever since. She was 14 when she died. A letter, taped to the headstone, told of teenage grief at the loss of a soulmate and pictured teenage revelry at discos in Heaven. For two years the letters continued. As earthly adolescence brought rows at home and trouble with the police, the dead friend lived on as a confidante. The world would have seen tough young troublemakers, but it was bewildered souls with an innocent faith in the afterlife who unburdened themselves to the 'angel' who empathised. And I, who had read despair in that grey tombstone, now, through their certainty, gained hope.