Grit

"It will be alright", I said. "Daddy and I will be good friends. It's a big house, and we can all live here and do the things we enjoy. Probably the only difference you'll notice is that Daddy and I won't be fighting so much now".

"It won't be alright though, will it", she mumbled flatly, eyes downcast.  I felt awful.  "We'll be a fake family. It will be like actors who look just like us, are in our house, pretending to be a family".

I don't know whether it would be better or worse for her to know it was the time before that was fake. That now for the first time in a long time we are having honest conversations, my feelings and views are being taken into account, we are discussing not arguing.

I feel so much better now, and everyone else feels so much worse. So many ways to fail, aren't there?

What News on the Rialto?

One grey and rainy day in Somerset last month, we decided to entertain our large number of small girls by taking them shopping to the Clarks Retail Outlet.  Or, more accurately, to bung them £20 and let them spend it on tawdry last-season garments while we lolled around in Starbucks.  Don't worry, I'm not going to write about that day, it can be imagined all too easily. Too much rain, too little parking, too many children to supervise  -  and the fatal mistake of buying heavy things from the cookshop at start rather than the end of the session. I'm a slow learner.

On the drive across from our cottage, we approached from the west a drab grey town hunched gloomily against the rainy horizon. Where were we? we wondered.  We came closer and a sign informed us that we were arriving at Bridgwater: The Home of Carnival.

Excuse me. The Home of Carnival? Surely there are other places that can lay better claim than that? Rio de Janeiro, Venice, Notting Hill, even? There is obviously some essential truth I've missed about Bridgwater, with its pound-shops and its closed-down pubs and its absence of bypass and its bypassing of quaint charm.

The interweb informs me it was 44th on the list of Britain's Crap Towns, with Hull coming at number 1. This is quite, quite wrong. Hull is chockful of history, and fine buildings, and river front and heritage and white phone boxes - and is soon to have an achingly funky History Centre to prove it. 

So I tried to find out why Bridgwater is the Home of Carnival. It seems the town has a procession on Guy Fawkes evening. This is, according to the website, the largest and best illluminated procession in the world.  That's the whole world, right, not the whole world of Somerset. So it must be better than, say, the Christmas Parade at Disneyland.  This seems rather unlikely but I'm prepared to suspend my belief. In fact I'm making it a Quiz Of The Week. Right hand side, down there.

I know you can't wait to go, so here's the website. Party on, dudes.

Enttauschung

I have my own private things to get angsty about. Don't we all?

I'm hard to categorise, pin down. Even to myself. This means that sometimes I can tear myself up with worry about how to behave. What is authenticity? And how would The Real Me come across (whoever the heck she is?)

Here's an example. I'm at a very informal supper, with a good friend and some arty people I don't really know but seem nice. Peggy Lee comes on the sound system, with her beautiful disillusion (see the link in yesterday's post). We talk a little bit about the song.

I'm getting a bit stressed. I want to say, "Do you know that this song is inspired by a Thomas Mann story?"  But I'm worried. On the one hand, I'm worried that everyone will look at me with indulgent scorn: everyone knows that, of course they do.  How sweet of you to remind us all that coffee comes from a bean.

On the other hand, I'm worried that everyone will look at me as if I am a pretentious Oxbridge arsehole of the first degree (although mine was only a mediocre 2:2). I hummed and hawed inwardly, said nothing, the conversation moved on. Sometimes I am about 15 years old inside my head. Ridiculous.

And so I said nothing. And that was a shame, possibly, because they might have been interested. 

Unleashed

When I got home on Friday night, it was the first time in years that I had come back late without offering an explanation as to where I had been, who I was with, what I was doing, what time I would be back. I don't need to do that now, do I? As long as I have made sure the au pair is going to babysit, it's not his concern now, since we're "not in a couple" any more.

And, boy, does he hate it.

Not the "not in a couple" part of it  - at least I'm assuming not, since it was his idea. It's the loss of control. Not knowing the whereabouts of his chattel. It's only recently I've begun to realise how creepy he can be about this, trying to know absolutely everything I do, who I know, where I am.

Although I think I must have been aware at some level. I've always made sure to have my secrets, to have little corners of time, of life, that were just for me.

When I got in on Friday night, the house was in darkness, although it was before midnight.  I have been sleeping in the Little Un's room, as the two of them like to bunk in together (there is a troll behind the wardrobe, apparently, but I don't let that deter me).  I went in and started getting undressed.  Then he walked in. Walked over. Made a clumsy grab for my breasts. What the hell? I made it clear his sudden advance was most unwelcome.

Saturday morning we had arranged to have a Big Talk while the girls were out doing their thing. However all day long (I'd arranged for them to be out for the afternoon too) he was bustling about, ostentatiously fixing long-overdue problems in the house. Just as an example, the waste disposal in the kitchen has been broken since November. This means I have had to use the sink plunger every time I want to pour water down the sink, drain vegetables, wash things. To say it has been inconvenient would be an understatement.  All this sudden handiwork meant he was too busy to talk. Or too scared.

I saw later that in spite of all that busyness, he'd still found time to go through all the emails in my Personal folder of Outlook. 

Then he announced he would like to come to my poetry reading in the evening. Since he's resolutely refused to go to anything like this before, I was somewhat taken aback, but in our new mode of careful politeness, I didn't feel able to say no.  So along he came, and I did my reading.

It was less awkward in the car than I thought it would be, me, him and the Pet Poet. In fact he seemed to be looking forward to it, in an odd sort of way, and was eerily cheerful. The reading went well. He raved about it afterwards in the car.

"You were really great! Amazing! You sparkled, you came alive. You were funny and clever and full of life. And I thought that's the girl I used to know, where has she gone?"

There was a silence. That stretched and stretched.

The Pet Poet said to me afterwards, marvelling at his behaviour, "But that's the girl we all know. She's been there all the time. Why couldn't he see her?"

The theme for the evening was tigers, and she had penned a Tiger Triolet that was very close to the knuckle in her current personal circumstances. It did not escape his notice that it was close to the bone for me too. Another uncomfortable silence.

I am getting on with getting on with it. I reckon he's been an enemy of promise if ever there was one, far more so than the double buggy in the hall. I went to Homebase this morning and got some bits and pieces that will enable me to move upstairs to what will become my funky writer's lair. I'm looking forward to it.  I already feel like I'm starting to be me again.

And how do I feel? Peggy says it better than I ever could.

 The best way to explain how I feel

Dry Dock

I used this image recently in a Pecha Kucha presentation I was doing (pretentious, moi?) It’s the offices of a computer gaming company, and they describe it as a “steam-punk submarine”. How very timely – I am needing to revamp my submarine as it seems to be headed off on a new and rather exciting journey. This place looks like fun happens in here, doesn’t it?

Are you wondering why I’ll still need a submarine? I thought that would be obvious. I’ll need it to enable me to negotiate the reefs, the shoals, the shark-infested waters. There is some tough territory to get through on this new trip, and there are a number of things I will need.

I will need ports, havens, places of sanctuary. I will need friends to keep me company, give me encouragement and lift my spirits along the way. I will need the correct fuel (can a submarine run on vodka-shots and cheesy pasta? Probably not, I’m thinking). I will need portholes for perspective. I will need a hard outer shell for protection. I will need Polaris missiles, as a deterrent but also as the ultimate sanction if that is required. I will need my own space, my own time, the chance to learn how to please myself again, rather than constantly trying to please someone else.

I need to be brave and I need to be bold. I would also like to become brazen, beautiful and breathtaking. As opposed to becoming bulimic, bitchy, bitter, bedridden, babbling and burnt-out, for example.

I need to keep my spirits up. My plan is to make my newly funked-up sub a party place, selected invitees only. It’s going to be a blast, I’m sure of it.

Glass Houses

When I read and loved this poem a couple of weeks ago, I didn't realise it would turn out to be about me.

Tempered (Jo Bell)

I won't bore you with what happened on the first and second days. You can leave that to your imagination. But I made it through to the end of yesterday, bloody but unbowed, and thought, "You know what? Actually I don't give a fuck. He's been so mean for so long, that not having to try and please him all the time will be a great relief".

And I did what all women do after they've been dumped or duped. I went to London and got my hair done.

Handbook For Husbands

Ok gentlemen, here's the lowdown.

• Select yourself a clever, strong, feisty, hardworking wife.
• Set yourself the life-challenge of beating these qualities out of her through sustained psychological warfare over a number of years.
• Suck up professional, personal, emotional, practical, financial, sexual and domestic support like a sponge until she is bled dry of all life force.
• Tell her repeatedly that she is rubbish at her job, letting everyone down, not keeping the house nice, letting herself go, being boring and all manner of other criticisms until she almost has a nervous breakdown and suffers from clinical depression.
• Completely ignore the fact that she is ill from depression and make no adjustments whatsoever apart from telling her she is acting like a loser.
• Wait impassively until she heaves herself back unaided except by the magical forces of Prozac from the brink of complete collapse and finally feels normal again.
• Then unceremoniously announce you “don’t want to be in a couple any more” and dump her.
• Tell her you don't want anything else about your life to change, though.
• Wonder why everyone thinks you’re a bastard.

Life can be so confusing when you’re a boy, can’t it?