Playgroups and Prosecco

by Jo Middleton

  ‘Thanks for being so understanding!’ he said.

  I didn’t reply, imagining that to be the end of what was possibly the shortest relationship in history, but then I saw that he was typing again.

  ‘So, what does the rest of the week have in store for you?’ he wrote. ‘Any fun plans?’ I told him not really. Again with the typing. ‘Do you reckon you’ll be getting into yoga now? You were a natural!’

  I didn’t quite understand what was happening. Had I just imagined the dumping? I thought the whole point of telling someone that you didn’t have time to date them was that you didn’t want to talk to them any more. Why was he still messaging me like nothing had happened?

  I told him maybe I’d consider yoga if I could find the time. We went backwards and forwards for a while, with him asking questions and me giving one-word answers before I decided I needed to step in. I’d dragged out the initial dumping, I should let him off the hook with this bit.

  ‘It’s OK, you know,’ I wrote, ‘you’re allowed not to talk to me any more, it’s really fine.’

  He seemed surprised. ‘Oh,’ he wrote, ‘but I like chatting to you!’

  ‘Um …’ I replied, ‘but isn’t it a bit pointless if you don’t have the time to meet in person? Not that I’m not interested in you as a human being and all that, but I don’t need a pen pal.’

  ‘I guess maybe it’s a bit weird,’ he conceded.

  Yes, it’s a bit weird, Dustin.

  Wednesday 3 October

  I thought a lot about Goat Man last night.

  Honestly, I don’t mind that it was possibly the quickest ever dumping in the whole of history. I don’t mind that he turned out to be a bit hopeless, because I feel somehow reignited. For a start, it’s nice to know that perhaps my bum isn’t the disaster zone I imagined it to be. Maybe I could actually meet someone new at some point and feel desirable and sexy.

  Also, though, I feel really positive about my reaction to it. I didn’t feel especially upset or angry, because I hadn’t run away in my mind with fantasies about us travelling the world with our herd of goats, so I felt very relaxed and positive about it.

  I like that, as I get older, I feel more in control with relationship stuff because I was pretty intense when I was younger. When I was in secondary school I would get these all-consuming crushes on boys that would last for months and, while I had them, I couldn’t think about anything else – I’d spend hours at home, gazing out of my bedroom window, imagining that I could catch a glimpse of my crush staring back up at me, too shy to come to the door but obviously completely in love with me.

  I remember when I was maybe twelve or thirteen, there was a boy in school I liked called Mason. I knew that he lived in a flat, which was glamorous enough as I didn’t know anyone who lived in a flat, and he used to cycle to school every day from the other side of town. I imagined a romantic but tragic backstory for him – why didn’t he go to the school closer to him? Why was he so impoverished that he had to ride a bike? I found out his address, I can’t remember how, and I sent him a letter.

  I say letter …

  I copied out all of the words to that classic 60s hit ‘If You Could Read My Mind’ by Gordon Lightfoot – I must have felt the song described the passion and desperation of my feelings for him – and sent it to him anonymously. The lyrics included stuff about fortresses, chains and ghosts.

  Mason must have been terrified.

  I imagined that he would read it and just know that it was me, and we’d embrace in the maths cupboard and swear our undying love.

  Like I say, intense.

  Saturday 6 October – Flo’s birthday

  Flo has plans with some friends tomorrow for a birthday trip to the cinema and then to Starbucks to see how long they can make Frappuccinos last, so today she decided that she wanted to go into Exeter and spend her birthday money on clothes.

  We started off in Topshop.

  In case you’ve never been into Topshop as a chubby thirty-eight-year-old with a Bambi-like fifteen-year-old girl before, let me set the scene.

  For a start, everything in Topshop is tiny. I don’t just mean as in they don’t do larger sizes – which they don’t – but just genuinely small. You pick something off a rail thinking, ‘Oh that’s quite a nice blouse’ and then you realise it has a belt and is actually a dress. T-shirts are just scraps of fabric, more J-cloth than T-shirt. Most lack key components like sleeves or shoulders or mid-sections.

  If you make it as far as the underwear section, then be prepared to fall into a pit of despair.

  ‘Mummy, why do you look so sad?’ asked Jess as I fingered a lace bralette.

  ‘I’m not sad!’ I said cheerily, crying a bit inside. Even when I actually was fifteen there was no way my boobs could have been in anyway supported by the underwear in Topshop. I have always longed to be a lacy bralette type of woman.

  I imagined myself briefly in another life, long-limbed, lying on a large double bed, propped up on my pointy elbows, flicking through Vogue. A tall, dark, Parisian man brings me a tiny cup of coffee and I sit up, folding myself casually into a cross-legged position. I am wearing his shirt over my lacy bralette, done up with just one button.

  ‘Mummy!’ squawks Jess, shattering the fantasy, ‘are these pants my size?’ She is holding up a scrap of silk that I feel I’d be hard pressed to get around one thigh.

  Just when I thought I might have to have a little lie down under the cropped hoodies (Why? The point of a hoodie surely is to keep you warm), Flo came over with an armful of clothes. ‘I’m ready to try these on,’ she said.

  Oh joy!

  The changing rooms are the very worst bit of Topshop. Changing rooms generally aren’t exactly fun. If I were listening to one of those relaxation tapes that asks you to picture your ‘happy place’, it definitely wouldn’t be a changing room.

  Topshop as a mum is pretty bad, though. You’re forced to sit on one of those plastic stools in a corner, where you can’t help but slouch and look sad. Every few minutes a size six teenager will emerge from one of the changing rooms and look at herself in the full-length mirror disapprovingly.

  ‘My thighs look way too big in this,’ she’ll call out to a friend in another changing room, and all of the mums will look at her with tears in their eyes. You can’t help but look creepy because you find yourself gazing longingly at these waif-like teenagers, so beautiful and yet so full of self-loathing. It’s not the girls, though, that you are yearning for, it’s your youth.

  You imagine yourself at fifteen, obsessed with your weight and the single spot on your forehead that’s barely visible, and you long to travel back in time to give yourself a good shake. ‘You’re beautiful!’ you want to yell to your teenage self. ‘Please just notice it now before it’s too late!’

  Flo looked stunning in everything she tried on. Fortunately, she doesn’t seem to hate herself with the quite the passion of some girls her age, so she was pretty happy with her purchases.

  Yo Sushi for lunch – Flo’s favourite – where I spent about fifty pounds on seventeen teeny-tiny plates of food.

  Sunday 7 October

  Fantasies about having the hallway of dreams – 3. Aspirational interiors catalogues found on pile of unopened post – 0. (Unless Screwfix counts, which it does not.)

  Decided to tackle ‘the area’ this evening.

  ‘The area’ is that place in the house where things just sort of get left while you are having a little think about what to do with them. I’m pretty sure everyone has an ‘area’ – it’s just that rich people can afford a house big enough to disguise it as a utility room.

  My area is the top of the sideboard in the hallway, which is extra bad as it’s the first thing anyone sees when they come into the house and it really isn’t the first impression I am striving for. Ideally, I see the sideboard as home to a tastefully arranged bunch of seasonal flowers, an artisanal, locally made bowl for keys, and a casually arranged pile of post, preferably including a couple of
high-end catalogues from interiors companies. The addition of the post would show that yes, I am stylish, but I am also approachable and down to earth because I’ve not got around to opening my post yet.

  (At this point in the fantasy I toss my head back and laugh about how I’m so busy I’ve not even had chance to browse the latest rug trends. In the fantasy, my hair is also much thicker than in real life.)

  I would allow a reed diffuser at a push.

  My area currently has none of these things, so I poured myself a smallish gin and tonic – for stamina – and set to work.

  Items found in the area and rehomed:

  Two overdue library books (unread)

  Missing baby Sylvanian beaver (won’t mention to nursery that it was here all along)

  Packet of cucumber seeds

  Half a bag of Wotsits

  Screwfix catalogue (not really living the catalogue dream)

  Two nail varnishes

  Three Calpol dispensers (useful)

  Loaf tin (?)

  Week-old letter from preschool informing me that 8 October is ‘World Cook a Sweet Potato Day’ and could Jess please bring a sweet potato to nursery with her

  Arse!

  Messaged WIB in desperation, thinking a sweet potato would be exactly the sort of thing Louise would have knocking about, but apparently she’d just used her last one to make a rustic farmhouse risotto.

  Monday 8 October

  Emergency early morning supermarket visits – 2. Number of recipes created by Instagram chefs for ‘potato brownies’ – I’m guessing none. Glasses of wine drunk to take the taste of potato brownie away – 2. (Legitimate.)

  Left early for preschool to track down a sweet potato.

  Tesco Express distinctly lacking on the sweet potato front. Risked the five-minute drive in the opposite direction to try the Co-op, as they always seem like the most wholesome of the supermarkets, but there was just an empty green plastic crate where the sweet potatoes were meant to be.

  Time was not on my side, so I was forced to instigate Plan B – I bought a regular potato and then, using a sticky biro I found in the glove box, I drew a very smiley, kind-looking face on it. One sweet potato.

  I presented it to Jess nervously. I watched her face tensely, looking for signs of mistrust.

  ‘Are you sure this is right, Mummy?’ she asked.

  ‘It’s not quite right, I said, ‘but it’s the best I can do.’ I explained the joke, and luckily she thought it was very funny and clever of me.

  Work gets worse and worse. My working day is only meant to be seven and a half hours, but I swear it’s actually about three and a half weeks. The newsroom is so quiet it makes you want to scream just to hear a human noise. The only person who really speaks is one particularly arrogant newly qualified reporter who walks with a swagger that implies he’s just doing his time at the local paper until he gets the call to become editor of The Sun, where he’ll work for twenty years before retiring to Jersey with his inappropriately aged wife and his alcoholism.

  What can I do, though? I need to stick it out for a few months at least – it’s not going to look great at interviews to have only been in a job for a month, is it? I need to just hang on in for a while, to show I’ve given it a good go, and then I can start looking for something else.

  Spaghetti and pesto for tea, followed by potato (non-sweet) and cinnamon brownies. (Grim, but I tried.) Seriously considering the family villa holiday.

  Tuesday 9 October

  Please God, don’t make me have to write another obituary.

  Wednesday 10 October

  Went into Chapter One at lunchtime to see Dylan to stop me attempting to take my own life through a series of tiny paper cuts administered with report sheets from local football matches. Dylan made me a cup of coffee, which was also a nice break from work, and I admired his new autumn window display. He’d made a big tree out of large twigs and sticks and had hung books from the branches and scattered them around the base like fallen leaves. He’d chosen books with covers in autumnal colours. It looked pretty ace.

  Dylan suggested that, to try to make work less tedious, I think about other things I could do with the rest of my time to balance it out. ‘You love books,’ he said, ‘so how about joining a reading group.’

  ‘I’ve tried the Barnmouth Literary Association,’ I said, ‘but as you can imagine from the name they’re terribly earnest. They only talk about books and they just drink tea, even though it’s in the evening. The week I went one of the women had prepared a short essay on the book, which she read aloud to the group.’

  ‘Ah,’ said Dylan, ‘I can see that might not be your thing. Especially the tea.’

  ‘How about if we start one here?’ I suggested. ‘We could hold it upstairs, or even down here, depending on how many people there were to start with, and you could have a little display in the shop every month and everyone could buy the book from you?’

  ‘It sounds like a great idea,’ said Dylan, ‘but I’m not sure I can really spare another evening away from the girls.’

  ‘I’d run it!’ I said, starting to get excited. ‘We can ask the mums from upstairs and Flo would do us some posters, I bet. It would be fun!’

  We agreed to give it a go.

  We talked a lot about book choices but decided we’d make it more of a group-led decision. For the first meeting we are going to ask people to choose one book they really love and would like to recommend. We’re going to have the first meeting in November, after half-term.

  Thursday 11 October

  I sparked controversy at Chapter One parent group today when I casually mentioned that I thought rich tea biscuits were definitely the best for dunking. The clue is in the name, right? Rich tea – they’re made for tea.

  Sierra was aghast. ‘No way,’ she said. ‘If you’re going to be as monstrous as to dunk a biscuit in a cup of tea in the first place, then you need something that you can rely on, something sturdy. Like a gingernut.’

  ‘A gingernut?’ I said. ‘Are you mad? The fun of dunking is the element of risk. Where is the excitement and the tension with a gingernut?’

  ‘Personally, I prefer a piece of fruit mid-morning,’ said Louise.

  ‘Bollocks,’ said Sierra. ‘No you don’t. You love a Hobnob as much as the rest of us – you just don’t want anyone to know about it.’

  Lou looked shifty.

  A fourth voice piped up from behind us. It was Ricki, Alfie’s mum. Ricki is usually pretty quiet, so clearly this was a subject she felt passionate about.

  ‘I’m actually an advocate of a party ring,’ said Ricki. I gasped. ‘Hear me out,’ she said, turning around in her chair to face us. ‘Think about it. A party ring is designed to be tossed about at kids’ birthdays, isn’t it? It’s robust.’ We nodded, conceding the point.

  ‘Absorbency is low, so it’s not as risky as a rich tea, but it’s not up there with the gingernut – there’s always an element of surprise. And then there’s the icing – it’s sweet, but not sickly, and the tea dissolves it in a fun way, giving it an edge. A party ring has a lot going on.’

  At that moment Alfie fell into a box of Meccano and the debate was cut short. She’d given us a lot to think about, though.

  Friday 12 October

  Spent some time this evening lying down, studying myself from different angles, in anticipation of, at some point, getting a new boyfriend and having to be seen naked. The very thought of it fills me with horror, but I felt it was probably best to know, at least.

  Fully clothed was not too awful, although I must remember never to let a man look at me from below when I have my hair tied back as basically I look like a fat, bald man with three chins. If any man should ever find himself lying on top of me with his chin nestled in my cleavage, trying to gaze up into my eyes, he’s probably not going to be doing it again soon.

  Ideally, I want someone to be looking down the length of my body from above my head, while I wear a push-up bra, so that my boobs look pas
sable and my legs are far enough away to have a semblance of slimness about them.

  Potentially, a difficult situation to engineer at all times, but not impossible.

  Then I decided to try the naked version and almost immediately wanted to start using my full name and actually become a nun. ‘Sister Frances, welcome to the blessed church of St Mary, here is your body-length sack. May no person ever set eyes on your puckered, saggy body again.’

  (Question: is this why nuns become nuns, so that they can just let it all go and never have to worry about that bit of fat that insists on hanging out over the top of your pants? I feel like it’s probably a bit more faith-based, but this must be a perk.)

  Honestly, I can barely even bring myself to write about it. I know I am meant to love my body – Oprah (or maybe Trisha?) once told me that stretch marks were just ‘scars of motherhood’ and that we should love them just like we do our children – but it’s hard, especially sometimes when you’re single. Ian always used to tell me how much he loved my body and, regardless of how sceptical I was about it, it does help to have someone reassuring you, someone who you know genuinely does love seeing you naked, no matter how hairy your legs.

  Lying naked, on my back, I had to keep my arms pressed against my sides to stop my boobs disappearing into my armpits. I don’t feel like that is going to make for a liberating new sexual encounter, is it? Without the arm barriers, the right one in particular doesn’t stand a chance. Since I stopped breastfeeding Jess, it’s like the last lot of milk went and they couldn’t be bothered to refill themselves.

  You know how sometimes, when you do the washing, one sock gets inside another one and when you hang it on the line you notice a lump in the end? Well, imagine two socks like that, hung on the line.

  That is my breasts.