June 27, 2016

I go for a run at the tail-end of the day, trying to run off my anger from this post-referendum collapsing tower of shit and self-interest. I make it through one song before I hear a wolf-whistle, from a someone too dim to wait until I’m further than arm’s reach. I take out one earbud, turn back to him. He is young, probably no more than twenty, with a slight, embarrassed-looking friend. They are only slightly more than my height, barely more than my build.

What did you say? I ask, turning back towards him. He smirks, and tries to walk around me. I put my hand flat on his chest.

What did you say to me? I ask again. Normally in these situations, my voice gets higher, my hands shake; I am utterly lacking in authority. But I have been deadened since the referendum result, bashed again and again by worsening news. The latest, that reports of racist incidents have gone up 57% since the result, makes my voice calm, low, firm.

Get your hands off me! he shrieks, smirking.

I’m sorry, I say, Don’t you like it? Do you feel like an object that I can just treat how I want? My hand is still planted on his chest, the tip of my fingers resting on his collarbone.

Get your hands off me! he says again. I’m going to call the police.

Call them. Do you want me to call them? I can call them for you, if you like. (It is full sunlight. There are at least ten people within ten metres of us. I do not feel afraid, for once.)

I’m going to call the fucking police on you. Leave me the fuck alone! he says. He comes closer to me, almost resting his forehead against mine, almost touching the tip of his nose to mine, suddenly serious. My finger-ends dig into his collarbone as I hold my arm steady. His face hardens. I don’t care if he hits me. His friend, over my shoulder, sniggers – it feels like at him, rather than at me. The man in my face looks at his friend, and his face softens, almost embarrassed, but not at how he behaved, more that he’s found himself in this absurd situation with this ridiculous woman.

I’m going to keep walking, he says, and you can follow me if you like, but you’re being mental.

Am I? I say. Am I? Is it creepy? Does it make you uncomfortable? I keep pace with him for a metre or two, but my legs need to run and the children will be home soon and I’ve got bigger fish to fry than this dipshit. Fine, I say, I’m going to keep running. But I’d like you to consider just taking five seconds – five seconds, that’s all – to think about what you did, and how much women hate that, and how it’s horrid, and it’s scary.

I can respect that, his friend says gently, and smiles at me.

Thanks dude, I say.

I run a better time that I’ve ever run that route before, making it home still buzzing, powered by adrenaline and the angry thought that they could have been meeting friends, and I wouldn’t have had the courage to do what I’d done if there had been eight of them, or six, or four, or if they’d looked thirty or forty or fifty, or six foot something, or mean, or drunk. I would have just run on, because I like being alive, and felt shit for the rest of my day.

I hope his friend recounts the story to their other friends. I don’t care how badly I come across. And I hope even one of them thinks about it, even if it’s only for five seconds.

Question of the day: How different do your friend’s politics have to be before it’s ok to not be friends?

June 25, 2016

One of my father’s many double-edged legacies is a political passion I can no more hide than I could hide my thin Binnie locks and burn-tastic Scottish skin. It’s one of the many reasons we did so little talking in later years: the importance of raising a child with strong political beliefs backfired when my politics leant further and further left, the distance growing annually from his own deep blue.

I woke yesterday morning to find two messages on my phone: an email from my friend in Canada with a link to their Immigration procedures, and a shocked text from my immigrant mother, furious with the Leave voters who, in her words, ‘are still craving the days of a poisonous, destructive Empire that is long since dead, thank goodness.’ I love those people, and my furious mother-in-law, my tearful, shocked friends, my twitter pals enraged and joking, all of us looking for a hand to hold in this fucking baffling disaster movie.

At the bar last night over many consolatory cocktails, three of us swore and sighed and held our hands up in loss. We pored through the Facebook posts of righteously indignant friends of friends lamenting the vitriol, the abuse, the unkind language directed at Leave voters. Isn’t this a democracy? they say. Do I not have a right to vote the way I wish?

Good news, guys! You do! That’s why you could freely walk into the voting booth with your pencil and vote exactly the way you wanted, with no coercion, no police brutality, no one keeping you from the polling station, no one burning your ballot box! But it also means that I’m allowed to think less of you for voting Leave, or for not supporting Remain because you ‘just didn’t know which side to believe’. That’s my right.

My husband used to have a long-running debate with me. Do you think you’ll ever be able to separate a person from their politics? he would say. And I would say: I can separate a person from their loving or loathing of mushrooms, or of Mad Max: Fury Road, or of holidaying in Spain. These things do not contain a moral dimension. But if a person denies a woman rights over her own body; if a person denies rights to gay and trans people; if a person votes to maintain a government which penalises the poorest, which refuses to increase tax on the highest earners, which maintains secret courts and hidden trials, which systematically attempts to privatise the NHS; when a person talks only of their family, their home, their town, and cannot conceive of a world which is improved by understanding that we don’t live in a bubble, but in a series of deeply interconnected trades and experiences, that, for want of a better word, we’ll call ‘society’; if the way they vote indicates selfishness, and ignorance, and intolerance, and an inability to differentiate between headlines in right-wing newspapers and expert opinion expressed by, say, Unison, the head of the NHS, the governor of the Bank of England, Greenpeace, the leaders of every single major UK political party, the Institute of Fiscal Studies, Women’s Rights groups, LGBTQ groups, and David motherfucking Attenborough – then yeah. I can’t separate a person from their politics. And I’m ok with that.

I’m sorry that you’ve already found yourself on the wrong side of history. But I’m not going to play my tiny violin when people call you out for failing to support tolerance, togetherness, and gratitude for the multitudes you already have.

Rice pudding 4 eva

June 8, 2016

It’s really, really, really good, I promise. My recipe is here, but for some reason I’ve only just remembered how good rice pudding is with chunks of tinned pineapple, particularly as the weather gets warmer. The kids are looooooooving it (as am I).

I don’t give the final payment to the builder myself, as I’m sick of his creepiness and don’t want to let him into the house again. I make my husband hand over final envelope of cash at our front door, knowing he’s not been bred with any compunction to let someone in when they request it; to let someone put their arm around his shoulders momentarily, repeatedly, when they discuss plans for a business transaction; to let that paid transaction include any conversation about where my husband should sit in his garden and what swimwear he should be sporting when he does it.

The builder thanks me for the payment by text, then, 24 hours later – having clearly given it some thought – he texts me to say that, after we’ve paid him thousands of pounds to work on our house, maybe I just want to let him know if I want a hug. Winky face.

After several hours where I do some thinking of my own, I eventually reply that his message is creepy and inappropriate, and I block him. It feels good, compared to all the times, day after day after day after day, where I don’t say anything, too stunned in the instance, or too wary of consequences because of where I am and how drunk the men seem. Not all men, obviously: just the men I encounter at the supermarket, on the train, on a run, on the library shelves, on TV, in the newspapers, in parliament, in my local cinema listings, at social events, and online.

At lunch with friends, we talk about the terrible men we work with. Bosses who tell us to cancel our IVF as it’s something we’ll regret once landed with a screaming kid. Bosses who take all the young skinny white boys out for breakfasts, then send emails to their bosses insisting they should be fast-tracked for promotion. Bosses who tell us our own promotions are mistakes, our plans are wrong, our ambitions are foolish.

We talk about you, I want to say to those men. We all know what you’re like. You’re ridiculous. And you make the world worse.

At a PTA breakfast, other friends talk about trouble their daughters are having at school amongst their friendship group. Well, you know how mean girls can be! they say. I say, Look at us, guys! How great are we! I say, The friendship of the women in my life are the most valuable friendships I have. Men are hot garbage. Women are kind and hilarious and understanding and way more interesting. Don’t teach your daughters to hate each other already. Women are the best! Show your daughters how great girls are! If more girls learnt how fucking cool women are, we could make the world a trillion times better!

I am amazed I am still invited to these breakfasts, to be fair.

May 23, 2016

I sleep in the car, my nerves sedating me as usual. We drive past the American Cemetery on the way to the hospital – apparently – and when I wake up as we park in the multi-storey my husband says, I’ve always wanted to visit there. I was going to stop on the way but I thought if you woke up you would panic that you’d woken up in Heaven.

A new doctor, an actual brain surgeon this time, rather than a consultant who invites you to consider his proposed brain operation with the words, ‘I’m not a brain surgeon, but I will perform the operation on your brain.’ This latest consultant has a colleague in the room for my appointment who looks like a young Mary Beard, and I am already fond of both of them. The brain surgeon has the air of someone who wears ties with miniature hippos on, like all brain surgeons should. He tells us: If I could be autocratic, if 100 people had your situation, I would send all 100 of them home and tell them to get on with living their lives. He looks momentarily wistful at the thought of clearing his desk so fast. But! we say, and repeat the words from the last appointment: catastrophic risk and life-changing and major trauma and constant bleeding. In a soft voice he says, Yes, you might, possibly, have a major bleed one day, that could affect the speech lobe in which this problem is located, but who knows? It might actually improve your writing.

As if I didn’t love him enough.

As we leave into the white sunshine, eating ice creams, giddy, high-spirited at the thought that maybe my death might just be like everyone else’s, unforeseen, unknowable, hopefully distant, and nothing we have choice in, I say to J, I think that other consultant just really wanted to do my operation. Maybe one more brain operation and he gets the cerebrum badge to stitch onto his white coat.

May 10, 2016

In bed, I fling my book away from me, and say almost thoughtfully, ‘I’m really, really frightened all of a sudden.’ I can’t tell if it’s the scene I’ve just read about people being buried alive in a mine; the vertiginous feeling I’ve had since lunchtime which I have no way of telling whether it’s a cold in one ear or a pre-stroke event; book deadlines not just whooshing past but sucking me onto the tracks as they race by; the death of my most adored comic writer and performer; or poor sleep patterns and eating habits. Whatever the ingredients of this dazzling cocktail, I’m focusing very hard on my breathing, on trying to force my brain to accept that I’m not really on the edge of a cliff, this aren’t really my final moments. Recognising what this must be doesn’t mean the fear is any less: in fact, this physical sensation is so overwhelmingly like the one bit of childbirth I really liked - knowing when it was time to push, an instinct so clear and true that it felt like an ancient godly blessing - that I’m convinced it must actually be my death occurring, since my body, when it spoke like this before, spoke the truth.

I know it isn’t though. I know this must just be a panic attack - although in 2016, can we not find a slightly gentler phrase than that, please? But it doesn’t stop me saying, ‘If I do die, can you look after the children, please?’ like it would otherwise be something that just slips off the To Do list.

Jack-rabbit-hearting and drop-limbed 18 hours later, I think: I need a warm holiday with a warm pool where I have no deadlines, only bread and olive oil, tomatoes and salt, J and the babies, sun cream and card games. Everyone feels like that, though, give or take the specific company. In the meantime, the baby and I watch this, listen to this, and sleep curled up under a hand-me-down blanket while the world continues on outside.

April 21, 2016

One day, I think, one day I’ll learn to ditch optimism at the door of the hospital.

It’s warm inside, full of sun-struck open corridors, Starbucks and welcome desks, still-faced paper-white patients in wheelchairs and walkers, smiling patients in hospital gowns chatting in familiar tones with receptionists, and couples where one of them sports a cannula in the back of their hand like a grim, slipped corsage. Glowing pregnant women roll around the wings like scattered pearls, lit differently to all of us visiting with our own personal decay.

The recent neurology appointment was so reassuring that I can actually read while we’re waiting. The neurosurgeon calls us in to say, Yes, hello, but have you thought about brain surgery? Because that cerebral anomaly is leaking, always, always, he says, and if it blows for good, the result could be - probably would be - catastrophic. And since it’s located in the area of speech, I’d not only be paralysed down my right side, but my ability to find words would be severely impaired, possibly forever.

I think, Seriously? My words? Are you kidding me? It couldn’t have been in my juggling lobes? I couldn’t be putting my Donkey Kong skills at risk? We ask more questions. I try to ignore the creeping sense of icy death spreading from the base of my spine, down my thighs, up my chest. I know I’ll fall asleep as soon as we get into the car; my usual shelter from the storm. The surgeon scoffs as we ask about mortality risks in the operation, which I suppose is the correct response, and we shake his hand and walk around the hospital and decide the best thing is probably to let him incise my skin, remove a section of my skull, and excise this stowaway from the delicate folds and walkways of my brain. I am so glad I am here with my favourite person in the whole world, even in this situation, even with this decision. I wonder what we’d do if I had a major personality change after the operation, as can sometimes happen, according to my vague recollections of fact-less Daily Mail articles. To be fair, my other half says, it’s 50/50 that you might actually end up with a better personality afterwards.

I fall asleep as soon as we get into the car.

In the evening, I speak to my neurologist brother-in-law on the other side of the world, who reassures me that I desperately need a second opinion, that I shouldn’t go flinging myself under a brain surgeon’s knife without a little more information. My sister knows how impatient I am to have difficult situations done and dusted, and understands that I would have had the surgery this afternoon if it had been an option.

I would have been calling you right now from my hospital bed, I say.

Yes, but using only your left hand, she says, both of us gurgling with laughter.

With my new vocabulary of twenty words, I add.

Oh my god, she says, I’d finally be able to best you in an argument! I’m beginning to think this operation has no downsides.

March 7, 2016

February 24, 2016

The more concerned everyone is for me, the worse I feel, like I’m just about keeping my own sloshing supply of panic under control but every time someone offers me a top-up it threatens to spill out and flood us all away. This morning, J and I take the kids to school together, and I find myself humming the alternate version of the alphabet that I was taught at 9 years old by the teacher who did our school plays, that we were encouraged to sing when we felt anxious and mouth-dry in the moments before we stepped onstage. Stuff learnt early beds in deep.

At the hospital, there is a similar delay to my last visit, but this time I have someone with me, and we both are laughing, and when we’re finally called in, I feel almost like a normal person might feel in this situation.

The neurologist seems different this time, although maybe it’s just the bright blue sky behind him; the golden-blue light of the promise of better days, I think afterwards, in hyperbolic giddiness. I work through my list of questions, each answer surprising us: not that serious, low risk, long term danger minimal, until we’re just pummelling him But are sure and But what about and But how can you tell, on and on until we have to admit a beautiful defeat, and I want to cry even though I don’t seem to be able to do that anymore, goddammit.

Afterwards, I go for a run in the cold bright day and a flock of birds turns above my head, a whole lace curtain of tattered, feathered underbelly sweeping over me, welcoming in a New Era with such cartoonish positivity that as I run, along the river, along with the sun, my upbeat new playlist in my ears, I would cry again now, if I did cry, which I still don’t, for the sheer joy of good health and good family and good hope.

And my brain says: That’s all well and good, until we see the neurosurgeon and hear whether you’ve got to have your skull opened up.

And I say: Who do you think you’re kidding? You had me fooled for a minute, but the verdict’s in: you’re on my team now, buddy.

February 2, 2016

“A Hollywood tearjerker or a harrowing news report, you can’t claim that being a parent makes you any more emotional – and it’s insulting for people who don’t have kids”

—

Jonathan Dean, The Pool

We’re had a couple of conversations recently with various friends who are considering having kids, and the thing which comes up again and again is that there’s never a switch-flicked moment where you can say everything is different. Is it when you choose to try and have a kid, if you make that choice? When the pregnancy test comes back positive? The first scan? Birth? First words, first steps, first food, first night away, first favourite book, first joke; the experiences don’t stop, and that child never stops developing. But is there some kind of End of History assumption that because you’re the adult in charge, you do?

No one would discount my assertion that my experience with this film was different when watching it shortly before my father’s death, rather than if I’d watched it when it first came out, before he was even ill. But to admit that having a baby — the most mundane, bourgeois, boring and everyday event from some angles; the most missed, mourned-for, hoped-for, agonising event from another — might actually have some effect on the filter through which we view the world? Ha! No way, dude! I’m cool! Havin’ a kid ain’t never gonna change me! Art is a simple objective event with no personal experience brought to its consumption!

If your child is a healthy one/two-year-old, and you aren’t the primary caregiver (I have no idea about whether either of these is the case with the author of that piece), might I be so bold as to suggest maybe JUST MAYBE you haven’t got the final word on How Parenting Affects Everybody? That maybe your friend who’s experienced an event for longer and and in more depth than you might occasionally have something valid to say? That maybe after eighteen months you haven’t yet discovered all that caring and raising another human has to offer? That you, too, might have some developing to do, just like every other single person still kicking around the planet?

Ultimately, articles like this annoy me because a) they smack me so much of ‘I’m not like those awful parents, I’m a COOL parent’, b) son, you — just like me — don’t know shit about all the ways parenting can change you, and c) setting one set of people’s emotions against another set of people is just bad egging. We feel how we feel. It’s not tactless to say life changes us. There are no enemies here. You don’t have to win anyone round by being Just Like A Normal Person and throwing parents under the bus. No one’s saying parents experience things more, only differently. Just like it’s OK to say that a divorcée, a retiree, an orphan, a widow, might experience a piece of art differently after an event which is echoed in that art.

Either way, lazy generalisations are just the worst. As a parent, I’m uniquely qualified to judge.

A wonderful holiday. Not for the first time, I wonder if I’m in BTL, trapped in my own Bedford Falls, where our beautiful children share their presents and gently wrap each other in their blankets and say please and thank you and make me laugh until I’m choking and reassure me during Stick Man and voluntarily watch at least one hour of a silent reindeer-sleigh documentary before taking it in turns to dance on my head. To add salt to that chocolate ganache, however, I’ve got my book deadline, work worries, money worries, mortality worries, worries about my Aged P, worries about others’ worries, guilt, tiredness, and Pringles overdosing. Talking to someone with their own brain adventures makes me realise that I’ve never let myself be bothered by it for more than a moment, and perhaps that’s not a good thing. I’m so busy reassuring everyone that everything isn’t a big deal - a discovery in my MRI scan; my father’s death; my sister’s emigration; an ultimate inability to google the next few decades of mine and my loved ones’ lives; and always always always money worries - that maybe I don’t find time to work out if any of them are a big deal. Or what to do if they are. How do people hold themselves together in the street, when absolutely everyone is going through some version of this? I’ll occasionally find myself close to tears and thinking, ‘Wait, I don’t have time for this now, I’ll have a good weep later.’ Only later I’ve got a deadline to meet, or a kid to stuff into bed. We all have our row to hoe.

Any kind of introspection momentarily blots out the blistering fear to replace it with a literally paralysing rage: I find myself staring out of windows, teeth and muscles clenched, burning at the potential injustice of my early death, and the hundreds-and-thousands of wrongs sprinkled liberally over the rest of the world. I suspect it’s my seizure meds. But I doubt I’ll take the time to find out.

January 5, 2016

December 24, 2015

My oldest friends come over for a Christmas meal, and things tumble in that December way so that it becomes only the men who can make it. At one point, they sit around the table with my husband and cheers each other, while I’m standing at the other end of the kitchen, preparing our food. I say, Are you fucking kidding me? and we all laugh, but I feel for a moment like I’ve slipped into some kind of parallel dimension, or a time warp to twenty years ago where I wouldn’t have said anything because I love them all so much.

I go to bed so early the next night that every time I wake up and realise it’s still dark, I tumble back through the blissful blackness like I’m falling with no danger of impending impact. I feel human in the morning, so much so that I go to see Star Wars again, taking the eldest, and cry so hard at the final forest scene that I frighten the two teenage boys next to us. I realise at the climax that this film is exactly what I needed in a month of constant, expected, unnoticed emotional and physical labour, and I squeeze my daughter in the dark of the cinema, and feel such joy that she can see a world where the heroes look like black men and young women.

December 18, 2015

My urge is always to sleep when I feel stressed, and the urge is even stronger now I worry that any anxiety will trigger another seizure. Consciously accepting that Christmas will be ruined by having my overdue book hanging over me means that I want to take to my bed immediately. When I receive a shitty work email, cancelling a job I’d been really looking forward to, I don’t even make it off the sofa, but just wrap myself in a blanket and lie down with heavy eyes.

The babies turn it into a bedtime game, tucking me in and giving me extra cushions, fat-bash kisses smudged on my cheeks and forehead. The smallest one slaps me on top of the head and babbles a song in my ear. I think: Maybe I should commit to this. Give up writing altogether and just hang out with these guys, my mind fully on them for once.

Then I realise I’ve been ignoring the last few minutes of their plans as I try to think of the exact words to capture their cream-cheese-and-sweet-soil scent, and think: I couldn’t give it up, even if I wanted to.

I arrive early for lunch, and the woman at the table next to ours lets me hold her newborn while she finishes her food, and we talk about contractions and breastfeeding and self-employment. Coffee from the Southbank food market with a pal at the weekend, our kids ricocheting around the Royal Festival Hall. All-you-can-eat breakfast with old PTA colleagues at our regular haunt. Cocktails with the bookclub, a sneaked cigarette, a peek into the Tinder world on a single friend’s phone. Another lunch, a few days later, in a high marble room filled with harried French waiters, where we order extra extra frites and rub our bellies.

When I get home, J says, You look happy.

I say, I do, don’t I? There’s just something about hanging out with these smart, funny, ambitious, kind women. I didn’t get it for ages, but it’s… magic.

He says, All the women you hang out with are smart and funny.

And I say, Yup. Aren’t I the lucky one.

December 16, 2015

November 12, 2015

My consultant seems angry with me — a cancelled appointment that I’d considered duplicated but he thought I’d missed; neither of us had understood the significance of results he hadn’t seen — and it takes me a while to understand what this anger’s for, right up until he softens and says, ‘I only saw your MRI this morning, and we found something.’ He beckons me around his desk and pauses, then asks, ‘What’s your background?’ and I snort, either in my head or out loud, and say, ‘Not neurology?’ and he smiles at me like I’d been trying to make him laugh, and frrrrrrrps with his mouse through the slices of my brain on the MRI before a cluster of darkness comes up, spreading through several layers, and I walk back around the desk before I fall down, and think, How is no one here with me?

He talks slowly and calmly, and I hate him; it’s an argument I’ve had in relationships that this tone isn’t calming, it’s controlling, and I don’t need control, I need empathy and information. But he says we’re in no rush, it’s not an emergency: it’s blood vessels that have probably been that way my whole life, and they irritated a nerve and caused my summer seizure. He hesitates to use the word ‘stroke’ in our conversation, but I make him say it.

I try to think of the questions I asked in Cancer Dad’s appointments, try to think of the information the people who I should have insisted be at this appointment with me would want to know. He mentions surgery, and uses the phrase ‘cutting it out’, which, frankly, when I’d prepared for a three-minute meeting where they’d just gently chastise me for even wasting their time by showing up, is not something I’d really anticipated. I forgive him, though, because he answers my same questions three or four times when, rather than listening, I keep looking out of the window and letting my thoughts bang against the opposite brick wing of the hospital.

When I get back home my mother is there, playing with the baby, and she and I try to hammer this diagnosis into some kind of acceptable development. I tell her that I’m jealous of Cancer Dad for getting all the way to see his children grown up, happy, settled, with children of their own. How lucky he was. She reminds me of a summer cocktail party on their RAF base that he’d taken her to when she was pregnant with my eldest sister; how by Christmas he was the only man from that party still alive. He had plenty of tastes of early mortality, thanks very much.

Shortly afterwards, the neurologist in the family gives me a call, all the way from Australia, and uses my favourite tone: no-nonsense, factual, conversational. He describes the blood vessel cluster as simply a kind of birthmark, and when my sister hisses in the background ‘a birthmark that could kill you’, I’m utterly reassured, knowing that she can read his body language and see the joke is OK.

When she hears that one potential treatment is glueing the grape-cluster of vessels, my sister offers to post me a glue gun for Christmas. I’ll just have to trust my brain to behave in the meantime.

I adapted this from an American recipe that was full of the weirdest powdered shortcuts, but showed utter horror at the thought you’d use sweetcorn instead of hominy. I used not only sweetcorn, but *tinned* sweetcorn. Ha.

Cook this in a big pot, over a medium heat. You can adjust everything according to what’s in your cupboards - put in more or less sweetcorn, more or less beans, different spices; I like it spicier, but it can fit whatever you’ve got lying around, really. It’s magic.

Good Cheap Soup

Big glug olive oil
500g turkey mince (substitute or forego as you wish)
1 onion, chopped
1 red chilli, minced
2 cans chopped tomatoes
1 can cannellini beans (or whatever beans are in your cupboard)
1 can sweetcorn
Finely chopped clove of garlic
1 tbsp paprika
1-2 tsp cumin
1 tsp caraway seeds
1 tsp chilli flakes
1-2 tsp salt
Big grind of pepper
Chicken stock (I used one single pot of that jelly-ish stuff)
2 cups of water

To top:
1 avocado mashed with 1 lime and salt
Sour cream
Corn tortillas, hunks of bread

Heat the oil, and cook the mince, onion and chilli until the onion is soft and the mince browned. Add in everything else - adjust the seasonings to your taste.

Simmer for 10 mins to make soup, or 15-20 to thicken it up enough to heave huge mouthfuls in on a fork, or wrapped in a tortilla.

Top with the mashed avocado & lime, and sour cream, eat as fast as you can.

November 10, 2015

October 20, 2015

‘You must be a nightmare to live with.’

I blink at the woman next to me, thinking a) I beg your pardon? and b) how the hell did you know that?

It takes me a moment, fighting through feverish memory-resets and the ceramic echoing-ringing-ears of this flu-ish bug, to remember we were halfway through talking about this flu-ish bug, the same one that she had had, the one that hangs around for two weeks, she tells me. She was, she says. I totally am, I think. I laugh harder than I have in days, blushing at how truly nightmarish I am at the moment, and hoping desperately that this laughter doesn’t tip me over the edge into actual vomiting because I have to come here every week for at least two more months, or whenever the older two kids can swim without armbands, whichever comes first.

I’ve been thinking recently about this piece on Nora Ephron’s way of befriending people, and have been kicking myself for still not having my business cards made, months after I’d had them designed. The number of times I’ve wanted to platonically ask someone out, and lacked the props, in both senses of the word.

But this dizziness, this nausea, this need to grind my teeth together so I don’t fall forwards from the narrow bench while we watch the children swim back and forth together, turns out is all I needed to swallow my self-consciousness. Right at the start of the lesson I start talking to this woman - who, let’s face it, next to my sticking-up hair (napped next to the baby) and my smudged eyeliner (sweats) and my face like a haunted bag of tiling grout, is waaaaay out of my friendship league today - and end up wishing again that I’d got my business cards printed up already, because, to lie down with a passive-aggressive groan and a Berocca-stained old blanket in Patrick Bateman’s shadow, they might be the most impressive thing about me right now.

The cardiology consultant asks the nurse to give me another ECG, so I lie on the bed and let them stick wired patches on me, from ankle to breastbone. Afterwards, he explains that any heart irregularity I have is within normal parameters, but — he scratches his belly, gutsily bursting out between a popped button just above his belt — do I have a fear of MRIs? Only his lack of English would make him ask me so honestly, so simply. I shrug. I’ll have one if I have to; I didn’t enjoy the last one, though. He watches me for a moment, his head tipped back and to the side, then abruptly, he says, No, we’ll do something else instead. I won’t make you go through that again if we don’t have to.

He checks me over, and I feel him jolt, discovering something. What is this? he says, holding up my wrist. It’s paint, I laugh, and point to my toes, my face, my other forearm.

Ok, he says. You’re fine.

II.

One of the kids says to me as I tuck them up, How was your hospital appointment? A whole thick book flicks from front to back while I take a breath: how beautiful they are; how thoughtful; how separate; how our bodies are all disintegrating; how stories about accidents and illness fur up the arteries in my brain for days; how every momentary faintness, every headache, every forgotten word or prickling finger is a black cloud, waiting to burst; how I could never, ever leave them; how I’d ask for nothing other than to see them grow up, healthy and happy and good; how painful it is to love them, bruising and sharp and suffocating; how I want to pour my love in their ear, rich and treaclish and golden, and have it sustain them whenever they’re in need; how I wish when they’re short on good dreams — sometimes they can’t sleep because, they tell me, they can’t find any good dreams — I could light up the inside of their eyes with how I see them, funny and smart and kind and brilliant, so they would glow in their beds; how I wish I could show them, too, all my mistakes, on a gleaming white projector screen, so they can learn at 4 or 8 or 12 or 16 or 21 what it took me cold, aching, marble-lined decades to discover; how jealous I am that I already know Cancer Dad got to see his children grown and well.

Fine, I say, Thank you; it was fine.

October 1, 2015

To weigh down the other end of the see-saw — against a fresh, crushing terror of my own mortality — my seizure at the start of the summer has given me a six-month driving ban which actually has worked out pretty well so far; it’s meant I’ve cycled a hundred times more than I otherwise would have done, to parks and friends’ houses and errands. My bike is rubbish, with tyres that flatten within weeks no matter what we do, and the size and weight of the bike locks means I can barely collect anything on those errands, but the joy of pedalling doesn’t seem to fade. Push down with one foot, balance, away.

At one set of traffic lights, BMWs revving behind me, I watch as the cyclist just ahead of me kicks his pedal up and backwards with one foot, preparing himself for the lights to change. I do exactly the same at exactly the same moment, and I wonder if the drivers behind notice that choreography of cycling each time a few bikes get ahead of them.

On the bridge, I indicate right and slow the traffic behind me as I get into position to turn. The cars all stop for me at the junction; the white van behind me gives me plenty of room and neither hoots nor calls out abuse; I arrive in one piece, cruising down the road on my rusty bike to my friend’s front door. In the boundless blue of the day, my hands are shaking, my thighs are aching, and my heart races, as I smile, and Pollyanna the shit out of that driving ban.

September 25, 2015

Friends from overseas come to visit in the summer, and their family of five is balm to our souls: funny, smart, kind, with excellent appetites. We talk about parenting - what we’ve received then, what we try to practise now.

And we slip up. Of course we do.

Generally, though, I think this and particularly this sum up our overall view of trying to raise a decent person: don’t badmouth them, and *never* badmouth or laugh at them in front of them. Stop forbidding them arbitrary actions. Don’t deny their feelings. Allow them a private life. Get them to help you.

The key idea for me, which I’m thinking more and more makes up about 80% of a good person, is helping them to understand consent. Don’t pick a child up and pass them round like a doll; don’t force them to kiss or touch someone they don’t want to (I remember my grandfather making it clear the money on his bedside table was for grandchildren who were well-mannered enough to say good morning to him politely, with two kisses pressed to his sweaty cheek. NEVER have I felt so righteous, even at the age of ten or eleven, in my refusal to go near the fucking creep). Teach them that any kind of contact needs to be consented to by the other party - a hug in the line for assembly; a kiss in the playground; a playful smack on a sibling’s bottom. Teach them - now! It’s easier if you do it now, surely? - about ongoing consent, about enthusiastic consent, about withdrawal of consent. Teach them that if someone does something to *them* without their consent, they themselves have done *nothing* wrong. If someone doesn’t want a second slice of cake, then leave them alone. If a guest chooses an early night (AND FRANKLY WHO WOULDN’T WHEN THE CHAT IS AS FUN AS THIS) then that’s their choice. Let people make a decision, and respect it.

We try to stick to those rules too. But oh the challenge when one of them wears an outfit that makes your teeth fizz with loathing, or another really really really really doesn’t want to go to a sports session with all their friends, and you *know* they always have a good time there, always, and it seems a lot like they only want to stay because they know you’re about to cook a cake they can lick the bowl for, or the other wants the cup with no lid even though they’ll just slowly pour the contents into their meal… But we have to live by our sword. So I admire the outfit, or sit and listen about why they don’t fancy the sports session, or give them the cup and put a towel under their plate.

Anyway, the friends and J and I spent those evenings drinking gallons of gin gimlets and that also makes anyone feel like they’re doing everything a-OK, so, good.

Gin Gimlets

2 oz gin

¾ oz sugar syrup

¾ oz lime juice

Shake over ice, strain, drink. All is well in the world. Good spirits will continue to ooze from your pores in the morning.

September 21, 2015

I always take at least one book, one magazine and my phone to the hairdresser, just in case they try to talk to me. But today, with the rain hammering down outside and a hot cup of coffee and a head filling with foils, my hairdresser and I talk for almost an hour about, of course, holidays - we’ve both just had holidays from which we need to warm up, and she shows me her secret holiday place, which is exactly where I need to go next time - and end up on families. Her former stepfather and my Cancer Dad seem to have been cut from exactly the same cloth, and we both spent years on eggshells, tiptoeing round mood swings and manipulations. We talk about how we didn’t know how relationships should work, for the longest time. By the time we compare notes on how they’d both pretend to be leaving our families for good, bidding us goodbye and good luck as we sobbed, only to turn up hours later baffled at our tear-stained faces, we are smiling. When we describe how we now imitate their darkest moments, their cruellest words and their scariest actions, exaggerate them to make other family members laugh, we are doubled over with our own laughter, unable to speak. She finishes my foils. ‘We’re fine now, though, aren’t we!’

They are the best highlights I’ve ever had.

August 13, 2015