I’m beginning to understand why I need to be here so much, at my father’s bedside. Having had 24 hours off yesterday to take the kids to meet friends in town, it was so hard - like underwater punches - to go back into his bedroom, to see his yellow skeleton head on the pillow, to hear his puffs. If I never leave the room, that disintegration isn’t quite so striking. I understand why people keep away.

The family doctor visits and makes an almost-comical face when describing his bafflement at his patient’s continued survival. It seems we all have to keep remembering how serious this is, even though it seems ridiculous, utterly unreal. Why are the nurses taking this so seriously? Why are there so many carers here? Why are they all treating this like it’s a *real* life or death situation? We are getting worse and worse at maintaining our poker faces. I don’t even stop my iPhone game when the nurses come in, now. But I have developed a horrible new fear, too, to match my horrible new habit: what if this really *isn’t* real? It’s all just makeup and camera trickery, and tomorrow he’ll leap out of bed and berate us all for not fighting for his life hard enough.

Soon, says the doctor. Soon.

August 20, 2014

Last night, after three days sitting mostly alone at my father’s bedside, I go a bit Bertha Mason. A phone call from someone infinitely more sensible than me stops me from torching the place, and tells me that while my father *will* die, we will all keep living. So we need to keep living.

This morning I wake up to pouring rain. By the time I’ve got my running kit on, it’s become a full-blown thunder storm and the rain’s coming down so hard I can’t see the end of the road. My mother forbids me from going. It’s all the fuel I need. I run away from the traffic and into the fields, and in the middle of one huge open field I’m already drenched and the thunder booms and it’s like a perfect Dawson’s Creek moment and I remember how much I liked being a teenager, for moments like this.

In the afternoon I get in the car for the first time since Monday and drive to the shopping centre to get shoes for a wedding on Saturday I’m glad to know I’m finally definitely going to attend, whatever happens. The teenage boy at the till asks me if I’ve been shopping long today, and I respond with a beaming non-sequitur that I’ve just come from my father’s deathbed. ‘I take it from your smile he’s OK, though!’ he smiles back at me, and I find that I’m smiling even more now, as I explain in way too much detail (Him: 'Right, if you could… just… put your card in… please…’) just how long they think he’s got, and that it’s just sheer magic to be out in the real world again. When the transaction is finished he smiles at me, properly, and wishes me luck, and I want to hug him and have him hug me and we would both feel total peace and that feeling would spread out from us to all the shoppers, out past the glass walls of the shopping centre, out across the country, out over the world, and all wars would cease forever, for good. But I take my bag and thank him and look away, not knowing how one deals with this precise situation.

August 14, 2014

Besides the family doctor, the only people in my father’s room are women. Carers, nurses, palliative teams; my mother, my sister and me turning him over in bed. Five of us today, daughters of mothers and mothers of daughters, cackling at his bedside at the thought of any man demanding a son. I try not to breathe in his smell of warm, rotting cabbage when I touch him or bend down into his lemon-yellow eyeline, attempting to interpret the sounds from his mouth. When we unbutton his pyjama top for the nurses to fit a syringe driver to his upper arm, I see that the skin on his chest is rolling hills, valleys between each rib and shadowed craters of collarbone dips. His upper body is all bone and wasted sinew, with binding muslin skin.

Mostly he doesn’t greet us when we come into his bedroom, only fractionally rolling his semi-open eyes. Dude, I know what you mean.

This morning, my mother brought me orange juice in bed and said he was the same as yesterday, peacefully sleeping. I told her I’d had a terrible nightmare that he was up and about again, and she asked if that wasn’t a nice dream, then we looked at each other and I rubbed my puffy face like people don’t do in real life.

August 12, 2014

Baby clothes bagged up for the charity shop, each one faintly stained with memories and ghostly food smudges, and it’s hard to justify my sadness at seeing them leave. It seems inviting disaster to wonder if our babies might have babies, and need these same clothes many years from now.

At my parents’ house two days ago, my dad tried to laugh at the idea of his plans for the future, for retirement. A grimace, no sound, then a blank Parkinson’s stare again. Today, every window is open to try and rid the house of the smell, and he doesn’t wake much even when my mother strokes his face. I almost make myself cry by playing the Judi Dench performance of ‘Send in the Clowns’ in my head, even though my dad has very little affection either for Dame Judi, or for any musical theatre that doesn’t contain pop hits of his younger days. It’s just a beautiful song.

We sit with him, and listen to him breathe.

August 11, 2014

Neither of M’s best friends at school have English as a first language. At a Sunday afternoon barbecue with their parents, we are about seven languages behind everyone else (although I can now say “Pleased to meet you” in a pretty good Brazilian accent, though I say so myself). Of course, the food is excellent. At one point, the host takes a leg of chicken from J’s hand mid-bite, saying, “Don’t waste your time on that - have more steak.”

The next night we are served daal gosht and melt-in-the-mouth chicken liver kebabs at a 1-year-old’s birthday party which runs from bedtime to 11pm, the freshly feral pack of children running wild and sleepless in their darkening garden. There are pockets of deep goodness in the world, and I appear to have stumbled into one.

August 7, 2014

Exactly half-way under the Channel, my muscles started knotting, my breathing came shallower, I shucked off my week-old cocoon to reveal my new shape, same as the old one. I drove home angry, the pre-holiday rages settling like ratty fox furs back on my shoulders.

But past the front door, my in-laws waited, smart and funny and kind. And past them, past the night and into the morning, were the children, all taller and browner and funnier than before. M wants to grow a moustache. F doesn’t like crabs. P wears everyone’s shoes.

My fancies of flight can wait for another day.

August 1, 2014

The fields are filled with sunflowers, but we leave before dawn so get past most of them without being seen. I loathe those creatures. At best, they’re a forced jollity, a Chuckle Brothers prettiness with lipstick smudged round its mouth and a novelty balloon in one hand; at worst, by late August, they are fields and fields of blackened, charred children, berated, punished, burnt and sorry, their bowed heads just begging someone to forgive their cindered little faces, unable to even meet your eye.

July 31, 2014

I remember only after I’ve booked it that trente-deux kilometres seemed trop loin pour nous paddle, last time we came, but it’s too late now - they’ve enquired if I am French, admired my accent, and there’s no way on earth I’m asking for the shorter route.

It is a long way, and we are in a tiny minority in our single kayaks (and thus have half the potential speed as our two-man colleagues), but I am fast, and I am strong, and the paddle feels familiar in my hands, and I do not even want to stop for lunch but I feel it’s not really in the spirit of going on holiday with someone if you just keep leaving them behind.

Towards the end, we pass a naturist beach, and every single canoeist ahead of me is fascinated by one figure on the beach, and as I get closer I see it is an apple-breasted woman, waiting with a buggy just like she’s waiting for a bus, waiting with infinite patience while some of our fully dressed paddlers bicker amongst themselves on the beach where they are not permitted.

July 30, 2014

I have brought all the wrong music. I have brought PJ Harvey’s Stories from the City, Stories from the Sea; an Elton John Best Of which *doesn’t* contain Tiny Dancer; a White Stripes album which is so soaked in New York memories it’s as if I’m insisting on a bagel and lox from the boulangere; and the sole summery album in the car, wedged at the back of the glove box, an old Nelly Furtado CD, made in the era of claggy, spray-on, William-Orbit-esque over-production which renders much late-90s-early-2000s pop unlistenable. I really need some Solange. Or some Sia. Even some Lana del Rey, and we can pretend we’re crossing the blood-lust wasteland of American states.

So we drive in silence.

And it’s *wonderful*.

July 29, 2014

Sometimes clichés are lazy half-truths perpetuated by a handsome-sounding rhyme, and sometimes clichés kick around for so long because that truth just keeps coming around and reminding us with a humble shrug, Nope, still true.

French food, man. French food.

Even the humblest service station serves us tender, spiced ham with a rich Marsala gravy. At the grubby supermarket a few kilometres down the road, the saucisson sec and the fromage du chèvre are enough to make a grown woman keep eating hours after she is sated. And the bread. Oh, the bread. As we sit down to our breakfast each morning, golden crust and airy, tangy, chewy innards fresh from the boulangerie, I think (as best I can) of the final sentence of Jeffrey Steingarten’s essential essay on bread: “And on good days, we eat nothing else.” Jeffrey, I know *exactly* what you mean.

July 28, 2014

Nous allons à la rivière aujourd’hui, en route to which I discover possibly my most annoying habit yet: reading out loud all the French signs. Worse, and more bafflingly, I have to do each one in a different, strange voice. Miel, in a hoarse growl; Les Chevals, in a giddy high-pitched squeal.

At the river, the beautiful Euro-women have pouched, puckered stomachs over their bikinis which match mine, and I feel completely contented, even with the children jumping into the river from 60 feet up the cliff face. When there is a particularly painful sounding water-landing, the whole river bank applauds in that sarcastic French way. The noise I took for distant thunder at first is actually plastic canoes scraping over shingle in the echoing gorge, and when we’re in the water, we must dodge the canoes and paddles, as we have better speed and versatility than many of their pilots.

My lunch is pa amb tomàquet, my mother’s go-to summer lunch, warmed in the sun for a few hours. Its olive, salty smell is the most summery scent I know, more than cut grass, more than sun cream, more than anything. It is my mother making several baguette’s-worth of Catalan goodness for me and my sisters and pushing us back into the garden. One day I might even give you the recipe.

July 27, 2014

Half way through my fifth book of the holiday, and I’m no longer able to tell you which day of the week it is. The number of hours we are both awake is in the single digits. I’ve even started making my usual assessment of ‘in a zombie apocalypse, how long should/could we stay here?’ Which I suppose is my brain’s way of saying it’s having a good time.

July 26, 2014

I am taught basic differential calculus on our drive down, and when I fall asleep here on the sofa after a three-hour lunch of cheese, with one bent leg somehow balanced on top of a stiff cushion, I dream that I must calculate how to find a new father, that there is a new father waiting for me in one of the tiny dark doorways I must get my unanswering long limbs to visit. I think of the maths teacher telling me at eleven that Maths Is Everything, that anything may be calculated if we only know the variables with which to begin, and the two novels I’ve been reading today metastasise in my brain to shape my dreams into airless, endless puzzles to which the answer is “the Father”.

I might eat fractionally less cheese tomorrow.

July 25, 2014

Warm rain most of the day, which means I must just eat cheese and bread while reading under a blanket on the sofa. The horrors.

Three days of radio silence from my mother and I was imagining the worst. Just temperamental technology, it turns out. Isn’t it always.

July 25, 2014

We’ve taken le péage, mais je n'aime pas le péage avec les personnes, par ce que je suis sans culottes, partly so I can epilate while J drives, partly because it’s so damn hot and I somehow put on my thickest trousers to travel. Don’t stare at me, buddy, I’m just trying to pay your damn toll.

When we get to our destination the sky is lavender and lilac and peach, the same shade as the flowers by the pool, colour-matched perfectly, clouds darkening to distant booms over the hills. I walk from the shallow end to the deep end over and over, pretending to be the men in Under the Skin.

July 24, 2014

“Vader in German means father. His name is literally Darth Father.”

— Keep thinking of this Pitch Perfect quote as we drive along, for some reason. Sniggering quietly to myself.

Two cups of coffee. Three croissants. Plain yoghurt and watching the other guests at the hotel.

I’ve started reading an excellent book - oh, excellent books, how I’ve missed you - but that doesn’t quite cover up how I’m missing les enfants ce matin. (Not enough to head home already, but enough to be staring at a busy family a few tables over.)

But look at that sky.

July 24, 2014

Off on hols. Piles of books, Mad Men box set, a few swimmers, suncream, pack of cards. C'est tout. C'est bon.

July 23, 2014

English summer

July 18, 2014

Between me entering the shop and leaving three minutes later, the sky has bloomed from a dark bruise to the blow-to-the-head glow of a computer screen, and the rain is thick. The few people visible are clotted in shop doorways, staring up at the sky like peasants in an illuminated manuscript. I am alone on the pavements, John Wayne in a ghost town of pedestrianised shopping streets, feet sliding in his flip flops, plastic bag of M&S soup and Nice biscuits hanging from his curled fingers. All he’s thinking about is how quickly he can get back to the saloon, and whether his Amazon order of comic books might arrive there today.

Futile Self-Catering of the Day

July 17, 2014

Me: Do you want me to make you some scrambled eggs and smoked salmon again?

Cancer Dad: No… I’ll make… myself… some poached eggs.

Me and my mother: BWWWAHAAHAAHAHAHAHAHAHAH

Cancer Dad: [indignant] I’m… serious.

SMASHCUT TO:

[My mother making him poached eggs while he slowly zimmers to the table.]

FIN

For the record, my scrambled eggs are astoundingly good.