July 30, 2015

Only when I’m leaving the house, foot on the bike pedal, kissing the children before pushing down the front step and out onto the road, do I realise how little I want to do this on my own. My seizure was four weeks ago, and besides that midnight ambulance ride to the creeping, bleeping, whispering hospital - in the fresh morning light in our hospital room I say to J, “The night is dark and full of terrors,” and we laugh, like that can capture waking up to paramedics in my bedroom, or the drunk man threatening police along the hospital corridor, or my minutes-long vegetative state - I’ve felt fine, never better. But cycling away from the house, the children calling I LOVE YOOOUUU through the letterbox as they smell my fear, I am frightened. I focus on pedalling; cycling was a good idea, even if I can’t lift my eyes more than two metres in front of me, my heavy heart, my heavy head, my heavy eyes.

At the hospital I cycle round and round looking for the bike stands, marvelling at the bloody-minded dark humour of these places: the unavoidable decay, the unstoppable entropy, the inevitable death. Toppled laundry racks, broken beds, rusting tanks.

At the MRI unit, someone shows me where I can lock my stuff up. When she comes back in for me, I’ve somehow looped my bra strap twice round one arm with the other one wedged into my jumper sleeve, elbow-first. She says, “Apparently you can leave your bra on.” Inside the scanning room, the radiographer tells me how, even as a fan of the franchise, he nearly walked out of Terminator Genysis when they not only turned an MRI scanner off and on again (impossible, he explains, that’s weeks of refilling the helium), but also *up*. I laugh. He looks at my trainers as I lie down and says, Runner? And I say yes, because why the hell not. At the top of my head cage, there’s an angled mirror showing my feet, and the desk where the radiographer sits. I don’t understand why they give that mirror until I’m fully in the machine, and the roof and walls are inches from my face, and all I can think is Look in the mirror and breathe, just breathe, look in the mirror and breathe, and I can’t even fall asleep because if I close my eyes it feels most like being buried alive. At one point I see him take off his glasses to more closely examine something on screen - is he surprised by something? - and I wonder if I’m sick in here would they be able to get me out before I choked on it.

Tssssss tkk tkk tkk tkk unggghhhhhhhhhhhh it goes, for twenty minutes, while I try to stop swallowing and breathing and thinking and feeling. The body temperature air being blown over my face, and the hard plastic vibrations, and my chewed-on fear: all of these make me feel like I’m back on a long-haul plane. Then it’s done, and I’m out, and if I’m talking too loud it’s only because the device is so damn deafening, despite the ear plugs and pads he gave me. I cycle home. We eat Snickers ice creams in the garden and plan tomorrow.

July 8, 2015

The Alexander McQueen exhibition is just as stunning as I expected, but it’s also the worst possible place for me to be at the moment, all death and wings and departures and terrible beauty. I have just been taken to lunch and told, “This is a lovely day, isn’t it? FYI, just need to drop this in: in a couple of months I’m going to be sawing your arm off, ok? But don’t let this ruin your day! I just didn’t want it to be hanging over us, and for you to look back and be upset that I hadn’t told you about the arm surgery thing!”

Arm, hand, leg, whatever, family, whatever, it’s white noise once I realise what her face is about to say.

I think, We haven’t even got our cocktails yet.

Then I think, Seriously? You had to tell me, right now? You might have had to tell me, but I certainly didn’t need to hear it right now. I’ve had boys in our teens do this dick move, the I-thought-you’d-want-me-to-be-honest tap dance up on the moral podium, but never my own sister.

My skin is vibrating with distress. I can’t name the myriad ways my misery blooms. My fingers are tap tap tapping to match my pulse, because I have to stay calm; if my seizure last month was caused in any way by stress, my only priority is staying low-stress, for the rest of my life, and my fizzing cortex is cooperating by shutting down my systems, one by one. The waiter keeps coming to watch us. Neither of us are eating, or saying anything. I’ve spent the last thirty-three years trying to learn that no one ever regretted not saying something in anger, no matter how true that thing might be.

They box up my lunch, and we walk to the tube in silence, then ride to South Kensington in silence, then walk the underpass in silence, then walk around the exhibition apart.

All I can think about is how soon I’ll be home.

The weekend is full of action: runs and rain and forests. We find a den in a wood, and while the baby sleeps in the buggy - rain dripping from cloud to leaves to her legs - the rest of us build a porch for it, and a front door. We pull branches across the forest floor and twist them and line them up, weaving in fronds of a curled ivy-ish plant someone has thoughtfully left piled up in the clearing. We work until my hands are green and there’s no more clean spots on my coat for the kids to dry their hands on.

Sunday sees the early period I was promised when I took the morning-after pill last week; I always forget quite how little my body appreciates bonus external hormones. The mood I’ve been in for the last four days - spiky-bordering-stormy - blooms in the evening into something apocalyptic, tipped with migraine in a way that makes the car journey home feel like it’s in eighteen dimensions. If I wasn’t worried my skull and mushy brain tissue were about to crumble into a pile of soft red dust, this strangeness of it would almost be enjoyable, an inverted feeling to the hash hot chocolate I drank before a gig as teen, that led me to cling to the arm of a friend’s boyfriend, saying, ‘I’m trapped in a dream. PLEASE, PLEASE, WAKE ME UP,’ while he chuckled softly and stuck me in the corner with some coats piled on top.

In the end, I get pretty much the same now, tucked into bed until I can remember my own name and I stop trying to escape to run with my wolf pack. I’m reassured to find that it’s still the best solution.

June 15, 2015

A friend from distant lands is briefly back in the country. I collect him from the local train station, and he explains that rather than bringing me what I’d asked him to pick up, he’s brought me half a breakfast burrito. I remember why I like him so much.

We sit in my garden and talk about life, while the baby eats mud and chuckles. When we’ve finished our coffees and the burrito, he says, Right, where shall we go for lunch? Pick somewhere you’ve always wanted to go to, but haven’t yet – my treat.

I think, This is the way to live.

We drive into the countryside to a pub, and he tells me about his French neighbour who got a woman pregnant and said, I want nothing to do with it, I will not see this baby, I will go back to France. The woman says, Cool story bro, it’s twins.

My friend says that really it’s his neighbour’s fault, since he’s actually one of triplets. We’re somehow both laughing so hard I nearly drive us off the road.

We eat everything at the pub: devils on horseback, olives as big as my thumb, little chorizo sausages as small as my thumb, herbed cod, rack of lamb, bakewell tarts, and under the warm sun and clear sky I even have a tiny glass of wine. The baby falls asleep after a mouthful of ginger ale. My friend and I make plans to write a film together.

I love Thursdays.

May 28, 2015

May 3, 2015

I’ve borrowed a Thermomix this week (good piece on the TM here - the price is now £950-ish, but the functions are much the same) and although I can’t justify spending more than my monthly mortgage payment on a kitchen gadget, I’ve sure enjoyed playing with it. Since getting it 24 hours ago, I’ve made olive and onion bread (grim), coconut butter (quite nice), pecan and almond bread (fantastic with the coconut butter and some sliced strawberries), raspberry sorbet (very pleasant), porridge (nowhere near as nice as mine), egg fried rice and veg (good), black sesame ice cream (oh my god it’s just magic I keep crying whenever I taste it), and chinese steamed buns (with a filling tweaked from this - extremely, incredibly, wonderfully good). I previously broke my lovely Magimix trying to knead dough with it, so I suspect I’ll be bulk-bread-making all this week.

I’m open to requests until Saturday.

I’ve spent the last fortnight in an evangelical Kondo haze, yet the house looks like it’s been hit by hungry burglars. In the last four days, I’ve dropped-and-smashed three precious items of crockery, done a full supermarket shop before realising my wallet was at home, sweatily hurried the children from school to a swimming lesson which wasn’t on this week, and watched through a mashy haze of exhaustion as the baby found a piece of crumbling polystyrene and entirely snowed the ground floor under. My brain is melting, and oozing into my clumsy joints.

I’ve discarded - after saying my careful thank yous - more than 75% of my clothes, seven binbags of children’s outfits and more than 500 books. (So many books. So. many. books.) We held a weekend book sale in our front garden that the infants manned; a teenage girl, brought by her father, hates Ian McEwan and I just kept pressing books on her, Free gift, just take it, and this one, oooh, and this is brilliant too, and oh! you must have this. Joyful.

I’m now on to paperwork. Despite the fact that it spreads through the house, I’m reasonably good at this, having monthly clear outs of the drifts on my desk. But this is by far the hardest section yet. My birth notes from the last labour, with handwritten messages from the midwife on the front. Three different leaving-card books from beloved colleagues. The recipes I’ve spent years collecting. There’s a bubble in my chest and my throat, and I want to cry more than I thought possible, these days. But when I actually look at them, the bubble shrinks, then dissolves. That birth is in my memory, and always will be. The colleagues I loved then I still see now. The recipes, if they haven’t been made by now, sitting in plastic wallets in a file in my office under the box of photos, are unlikely to ever be. They all go in the bin.

I wonder if it’s just rude to throw my father’s Orders of Funeral Service away, or the newspaper notice of his death. Would the kids ever want to see it? What secrets do they hold that we haven’t told them ourselves?

But others are strangely impossible. I give up at the calendars I’ve kept at the end of each year. I thought they would be the least sentimental items, but they are thick with changing identities and coded references. When M is 9 months old, I am still going out at least once a week, every single week. When F is born, he gets simply an understated set of his hours-old initials against the date. Friends I didn’t think I was ever that close to pop up almost daily after each baby is born, bringing me magazines or bread or hand-me-downs. The grown-up meetings as I start freelancing. And in those days they weren’t family calendars - J and I had a colour each, and the babies fitted around whatever we fancied doing; now they get their own columns in a grotesque display of a pint-sized calendar coup. But the tearing, biting wind of time makes me feel like a savaged teenager again, aching from an inexplicable gut-punch nostalgia.

M comes in to the office to tell me she has to write a poem, that it should rhyme, shouldn’t it? Does it start with a capital letter? Is there a comma at the end of each line? I show her this. It lulls us both, in the piles of papers and the bags of rubbish. I can be nostalgic later.

April 14, 2015

Another country house at another country park. At the end of a long lake is a round pavilion, lined inside with trompe l’oeil all the way up to the skylight. The room has doors scattered around the edges, tiny doorways leading to tiny circular stairs, each step even at the widest point only big enough for the children’s feet to fit fully on. M says, Can we go everywhere? Can we explore? Can we adventure wherever we like?

The stairs go up and down - the first one we try brings us out into the large basement, with a huge doorway leading back outside. We race around the front and try another. Heading up this narrow stair I’m suddenly aware of the closeness of the walls, and there is a heartbeat of panic before I can see them opening up into a small room, with a small window, glittered with shiny-winged flies. Back down again.

Another staircase, down, and alarm bells are firing up in my amygdalae, and we come out into a doorless basement this time, fully underground, with only a slit of a window at the top of one wall to reveal where we are. Other children are coming down now, ones I can’t just trample past, so I have to wait, my heart in my fingertips and my earlobes, the thick brick walls gently pouring into my lungs, my glands filling up with the weight of trapped blood. When the staircase is clear again I leap up, blind, to the sunlight and stand in clear space, door mere steps away.

A Peacock butterfly has died on top of the display describing the hunting parties hosted here in another lifetime, and I can’t help momentarily rolling my eyes. Dude. It’s not that bad.

April 5, 2015

The day starts in an unlikely vein: by 8am, I’m not only up, but have been to the supermarket and made coconut porridge for the gang, rather than hollering from my bed at some time after 9 for a child to bring me tea. The sky is blue, the sun is warm. We pack up a picnic and toss a few coats in the car, just in case, because the sky has gone from golden blue to a shallower powder blue. By the time we get to our destination, it has become a disloyal shade of dove grey. I push away my nagging tiredness - who in the name of God gets up with a spring in their step at 6 fucking 45? - and try to ignore the fuzzing edge of my brain. It’s so incredibly beautiful here. That staves it off for a while. As we walk among the marble statues, I explain to the others about the hypocrisy of much female nudity in Modern Classical Art, the unpleasant legitimacy of buying and owning a nude woman who looks at you over her shoulder while vainly clutching a thin cloth over one breast, and how the same patriarchal path leads to the current dissing of selfies, where women and girls have in many cases reclaimed ownership of their image. My party asks if they can start on the picnic yet.

We shuffle around the gardens and the terrace of the big house, but it’s already too cold for me to joke to J that I’ll definitely have my second wedding here. Inside, a volunteer apologises that the house will be closing at 2 today, due to a wedding. Oh! I say, How lovely! The seating is laid out for the ceremony, two flanks of yellow-cushioned chairs filling a drawing room. I photograph the wallpaper and the mouldings, and I walk down the centre aisle and stand where the bride will be in a few hours. I look down at the chair right by me, aisle seat, front row. When I check a moment later, yes, the rest of the cards are printed - but this one, in careful biro writing, has the name of our flatmate from our first flat in London, nine years ago. Her name is reasonably unique, her spelling even more so.

Whoah, I say to J, I only just spoke to her, after years of companionable social media nods. She was looking for a reading for a wedding she was going to ohhhhhhh.

If this was a book, I add, this plot point would be savaged for its unlikeliness.

March 14, 2015

My father’s birthday. I meet my mother at Ikea and we eat chocolate doughnuts while we walk around, picking the final details of the kitchen she would never have been permitted in his lifetime. We talk talk talk all the way around and through the morning, and into lunch, when we go back to the last place the three of us had eaten together.

His favourite eaterie was usually Frankie & Benny’s, something I saw with leaden disdain as yet further proof of the interplanetary distance between us, but that day he’d wanted moules marinière, another optimistic chase of his fleeing appetite. I stayed for lunch. We were together that day because of another hospital appointment, another meeting where another doctor had spoken to my father’s brick wall face, and my father had left the meeting feeling upbeat, prepared to insist on further chemo. More time, he said, cancer ticking away in his liver, his bowel, his kidney; I just want another ten, twenty years. Other people have done it.

I was shaking with rage by the time we got to our table. His stubbornness. His deafness. No, he didn’t want a party, he didn’t want his friends over, he didn’t want family visiting from far shores - he would beat this thing first, then he’d think about all that stuff. My vision was blossoming with all sorts of deep purples and reds. I ordered the lobster, the most expensive thing on the menu, and sat in a furious silence that made me feel young again. His appetite wasn’t up to the mussels after all, and the kitchen put them in a discarded lidless plastic box for him to take them home. In case things changed.

This time, my mother and I both order the lobster. I also have oysters. I’ve been craving them since halfway through my last pregnancy. Because it’s just us now, because she is a widow, because she is alone, I permit my mother a single solitary oyster from my outsized plate of iced shells. I finish the oysters, and we finish our lobsters, wiping the frites around the mayo on our plates, planning holidays she might take, the yoga she’s meaning to take up again.

That night, and the night after, I chase away the overwhelming horror of death by sitting in warm rooms with funny women, and we talk about books and our skin, travel plans and marriage, bullying and food, comedy and ambition. I think about making lobster bisque with the shells I took home in a lidless plastic box.

March 6, 2015

February 24, 2015

Hot damn, it’s nice to have my sister back in the country. As we approach her birthday, let’s celebrate my annual gifting tradition.

1. Buy her a present. It’s so good, I have to get it now even thought it’s months until her birthday. Plus it’s on sale at the moment, and I don’t want to blow my gifting budget so early in the year*.

2. Lose the first present in the intervening months. Buy her another one. This one is even more fantastic. It’s so completely her.

3. Start wondering if the second present is so fantastic I should actually just keep it, and just buy her a bunch of flowers or something.

4. Have a horrible creeping feeling that the reason the gift feels so her is that she’s already got something identical to it. It’s so completely her that she already owns it.

5. End up just showing her the present/describing it to her in great detail. She wants it, but she also wants whatever my alternative present was going to be.

6. Get her both, and some socks, and a book I think she should read but know she never will. ££££ :((((((

FIN

*LOL budget LOLLLLLLLLLL

A holiday. For the first three days I am so ill that I think the heating’s broken at night, as I talk and toss and tear at my skin to make sense of where I am and who’s with me in the hot air and dizziness. I ride down water park rapids with our wild otter children in my waking hours and feel my legs and arms being pushed by currents hours later, back in bed, dry and still.

I reread Lucy Wadham’s The Secret Life of France, and marvel yet again how much sense it makes, and how much it explains my mother and her family, and the light years that yawned between her and my Scottish Protestant father. As ever, anything French makes me think about the levels of grooming la femme française is assumed to engage in as her duty as a woman. I think about how much I love face creams and washes, Liz Earle cleansers and Clarins serums, Eight Hour Cream and REN exfoliators, Bobbi Brown eyeliners and NARS blushers, Revlon lip crayons and Rimmel nail polish. I love the packaging, the smells, the rituals. But the trouble is, I can’t think where in my day I would find five minutes to groom more than the very bare minimum I do. In our seven-day break I brush my hair three times, and put mascara on twice. I want to be better groomed, I really do. Blow outs and skin care and classic, well-made clothes. But when it comes to the end of each day, I don’t know what I could ditch to make space for even washing my face. Less reading? Less work? Less sleep?

Inconceivable.

February 20, 2015

February 11, 2015

Yesterday somebody asked me if my three children were “all different”.

I’ve spent the last 24 hours trying to work out if there was any possible way the answer to that question could ever have been No.

February 8, 2015

Children are magical cherubs who appreciate every birthday you’ve gifted them with

Back to a hospital, back to a cancer centre, but purely for professional reasons this time. I wander around the back of the hospital for a while, the bit I like the best - cages of laundry and boxes of shrink-wrapped equipment in the sun, all the functioning innards that show this place is working correctly - before I head into the beautiful Maggie’s centre. My meandering route brings back the dizzy, detached, hurrying, comfort-eating horrors of last summer, spent at a different hospital while Cancer Dad was sleepily swelling and shrinking and sealing up for good. I see the point of these places. Warm and bright, full of voices and comfort, soft lighting, soft cushions, space, and time. You could sit there all day, eating biscuits and talking to other people about lymphoedemas, or their childrens’ jobs, or a courgette cake recipe, or the knitting you’ve never quite mastered, or the cities you’ve lived in across the world. I think of the cups of coffee and slices of cake we’d eat in the John Lewis cafe, anything to get away from the hospital (everyone in a dressing gown or in tears or both) and how we’d talk only to each other, going around and around in circles, never really saying anything.

On the way home, a song on the radio reminds me with such Proustian heaviness of a single particular day from my teenage years that I’m amazed I can drive the car at the same time as remembering. It makes me think that maybe the reason I haven’t cried since his death is simply that his not being around any more is a great deal less sad that some of those days when he was.

February 6, 2015

A life filled with good things. My dear mother gives me one of her Reverse Pep Talks (“I alwayz know zat wheneffer everysing iss going well, zat’s when sings start going wrrrrong”) (she doesn’t even speak like that, but I know she loooooves my, frankly, inspired impression of her) and even putting aside the fact that the very nature of Things Going Right is that you then notice when something, anything comes up which isn’t great, I make a conscious choice to put that parcel of gifted fear aside.

The baby turns her head back and forth on the bed to Taylor Swift, giving me perfect deadpan side-eye in time to the beat. Youngest siblings, right? After a long nap, she hangs out in my office and takes all my carefully ordered drawers to pieces, scribbling over my handmade gift tags and slowly shredding invoices. Tonight, almost two hours after all the buns should be asleep, when I’m desperately trying to finish the urgent work I had to put aside this afternoon to rescue my wireless box from her redesign, I can still hear bright, jolly singing from her cot.

It’s a great pleasure.

February 2, 2015

Dumsnet Episode 1 →

January 14, 2015

Episode 1 – In which your two hosts attempt to find their feet, talk about what having a kid might do to your identity, and change their minds loads about their definitive, iron-clad view on parenting

Dumsnet episode 1!

OH YEAAAAAAAHHHHHHH!

Listen to me and Nikesh Shukla talk about babies and parenting and identity and Jurassic Park III and all sorts of other shit. FUN TIMES TO COME.

A double swimming lesson at the end of a pleasant, exhausting day. So many bodies to look after, in and out of the water. And into this place that usually just sees me sweating (the changing rooms of children’s pools are rarely kept beneath Lightly Roast) and chivvying my infants with various Gothic endearments/threats, kind strangers step in. A four-year-old hands the baby her pens and lets it colour all over her careful bright pages. A mother with a face like a Botticelli angel produces an Ipad mini for two others in my gang, and an older girl arrives just in time to keep the baby from eating all the pens.

In the changing rooms, while I sweat myself into moderate-to-severe dehydration and the baby puts on a swimming cap which, combined with chronic ink mouth, brings a young Zandra Rhodes into our presence, one of M’s friends declares to the whole room that They Don’t Have A TV. M – like anyone who’s generally only ever really watched TV when Clockwork Orange-d by her mother into consuming family favourites from two generations ago – doesn’t know how to respond. Her friends says, What? What’s weird about that? And I say, in an attempt to help the situation, Wow, that’s cool. It’s not even out of my mouth before I can hear how sarcastic it sounds to the rest of the room. Her friend says, Does she watch TV? M is apparently paralysed by the two of us. I know the feeling. I try to explain that she doesn’t really, maybe… once a fortnight? Maybe? to try and normalise whatever it is this six-year-old is seeking to shock us with, and I can feel with an audible click the room turn against me. I want to explain, No, I love the Square Au Pair, she’s the best, I just… I… but everyone drifts out and I’m sweating so hard it’s stinging my eyes.

I resolve to try again next week.

January 13, 2015

January 9, 2015

I can’t stop watching this video. It’s a running joke in our family about how me liking a song means that I’ll listen to it (and only it) over and over and over again, for days and days, until someone else snaps and forces me to switch, at least to headphones.

I’ve been thinking recently about how often when I have conversations with men about art, they tell me what something means, or how clever a piece of symbolism was. And I think, Is that really how art works? It’s not always a quiz, to answer; or a puzzle, to solve. (And of course, it really can be. It really can be something to be read, and interpreted, and parsed. And that can be fantastic - I’ve read hundreds of beautiful essays on great albums and films. I just don’t see the value or necessity of that for my own enjoyment of every single film, or book, or song.) I haven’t been able to verbalise what the alternative was, until I started watching this video earlier in the week.

I can’t explain what Maddie Ziegler’s gentle punches to Shia LaBoeuf’s forehead does to me. I can’t explain why his funny faces make me want to cry more than my father’s funeral ever did, and his furious face through the bars, and his incredulous face at her physical contact. I can’t separate the love I feel for his strength, swinging from the roof of the cage, from the fire I feel with her wild rage, and I can’t tell you what the role of identity is in here, or youth, or fear, or conflict. I know that the video’s director could, and co-director Sia could, and tonnes of men who are passionate about art and music and culture could.

But that deadens it for me, that leaden hand of Solving The Artwork. It’s not an exam I’m sitting. I’m flying on that gut feeling I still get when I watch it for the tenth, fiftieth, hundredth time, and it’s something to do with fatherhood, and it’s something to do with trust, and it’s something to do with almost finding out a little bit about myself from watching it again. And again. And again.

And again.

Happy new year!

Christmas was filled with feasts and gluts: tables groaning under enormous spreads, my mind creaking with the unwilling weight of new realisations, new ideas, new ways to make my life better. A pagan festival of lights and hyggelig, if I may mix my erroneous cultural references, seasoned with a light sprinkling of Painful, Brutal Truths.

And there were friends I hadn’t seen for years, or who had never been to this (no longer) new home, or who I had missed for huge swathes of their lives. And it was magical. All these people! Whom I loved! And who made me laugh so much! And knew me so well! To have a friend at our table who had kicked around with me as young teens, planning our lives with perfect self-importance, as now we sat discussing job plans and home decoration because, shit, man, we love that now. But still also discussing our families, because no one ever outgrows that. Or the entire clan of ex-colleagues, like a bank of blown-out wild roses, dancing and drunken at a wedding, two of whom bundle me out of the back door after the bride and groom have left like I’m Taylor S heading for her blacked-out SUV. Lunch dates and dinner dates and coffees and staying up late playing Mario with old friends and only having little, ever so little twinges about the final moments with my father that I’m not sure will ever stop creeping up on me when I least want them, but then the children, reading to each other, knocking over the rack of drying clothes to build a giant den, starting every sentence when they play among themselves with this moment’s request to Pretend…

For maybe the first January in my life, I’ve taken some New Year’s advice and have made no resolutions. I’m looking forward to events, and people, and possibilities. But I’m making no promises. And it feels good.

January 7, 2015

I promised myself a quiet December this year. Fewer huge Christmas feasts; less time in the supermarket; longer days under blankets with books and biscuits and babies. Yet somehow I’m so busy I had to cancel my therapist appointment this week - almost comically bad self-care - and my days are split into hour-long segments of ‘Jesus, where am I supposed to be once this has finished?’ Publishers seem to be having end-of-year panics too, demanding blurbs on tighter deadlines than normal, which suits me fine; I might actually be able to afford the presents I’ve got piled up in various cupboards.

Even in December, I really don’t drink. In our book club, the joke is how excited I get about having a whole bottle of Schloer to myself because everyone else is on the prosecco. But our Christmas meeting is at a restaurant, and it seems sociable to have a glass of wine with our meal, then another, and another, and then the chef is sending limoncello shots and someone’s googling niche sex terms and we’re tumbling out into the street, trying to get into closed bars like we’re teenagers instead of members of a local playgroup, and we find an open pub and drink flavoured sambuca shots and someone’s carrying the half-pizza we liberated from the restaurant then we’re inside a club where everyone is either underage or looking like they hope their wife doesn’t catch them there, and when I leave at 2am I realise that I’ve overdressed for the weather, in hat and mittens and coat and scarf, and I think of those New York winter evenings out with my sister where we’d be in layer after layer after layer, sometimes two hats, two pairs of gloves, huge shawls, squinting against the icy wind until we bundle with her friends into bars or galleries or brunch joints, defrosting slowly, the blood prickling its way back into our cheeks, not caring about anything. The weather here is milder. I walk by the river in the dark and the quiet, remembering all the times I did this as a student, and I wonder whether I really was naive to do it then, a young woman alone in the dark, or whether I just wasn’t frightened. I wonder if I’ll ever be not-frightened again, without the aid of sambuca and some house red.

At the school gates in the morning, I am disconnected and chaotic. I get several people’s names wrong. I cry through the school nativity. Afterwards, a bright beaming star of a friend takes me for a cooked breakfast.

Man, I love December.

December 12, 2014