by Gill Sims
7.15 p.m. Try to get children out of bath. Survey the post-apocalyptic wasteland of sodden towels and pools of water that is now the bathroom. Start mopping up the floodwaters, while shouting ‘HAVE YOU GOT YOUR PYJAMAS ON? STOP HITTING EACH OTHER!’ over and over again.
7.35 p.m. Bellow ‘Why haven’t you got your pyjamas on?’ at the naked children.
7.40 p.m. Tell Simon when he walks in the door that he will have to put the children to bed because they have asked for Daddy. Omit to mention ‘and also because I will strangle them’. Have another large gin.
8 p.m. Dump the slightly cremated chicken in front of Simon. Clench the carving knife very hard when he sighs and says ‘God, chicken again? Can’t we have something different? I’m so fucking bored with chicken.’ Put down carving knife in a calm and serene manner and take a tin of baked beans out of the cupboard. Slam the beans on the table in front of Simon and enquire if that is enough of a change for him. Exercise ALL my self-control and restraint when he says, ‘There’s no need to be like that!’
8.30 p.m. Look at Hobbs sale online. Buy shoes. Convince myself they are a bargain and actually investment dressing. Have some wine.
9.30 p.m. Watch EastEnders on my laptop while Simon watches Wheeler Dealers on the big TV. Look at the internet. Have some more wine. Spend another two hours reading about conspiracy theories.
Midnight – Fuck! I’m pissed and convinced the CIA are watching me and I have to get up and go to work tomorrow. Simon pretends to give me a ‘cuddle’ under the guise of trying to grope me in the hope of a shag. I threaten to bite him if he doesn’t leave me alone. Perhaps that is where Peter and Jane get it from?
DECEMBER
Tuesday, 1 December
IIIIIITTTTTTTT’SSSSSS CHHHHHHHRRRRIIIIIIISSSSTTTTTMMMMAAAAASSS!
I love the first of December. All the hope of the festive season stretching ahead of you, a whole month of cinnamon- and clove-scented potential for peace on earth and goodwill to all men. The joyous anticipation of a month of advent calendars, carols, cheesy Christmas songs, fairy lights, decking the halls with boughs of holly, mince pies, sleigh bells ringing are you listening, Bing Crosby, old films, pristine snow, all deep and crisp and even, roaring log fires and apple-cheeked moppets tumbling around, giddy with excitement.
This is possibly the best day of the whole of Christmas, because all of that potential is still there and the dream has not yet been crushed by pissing rain and wanting to tear your own ears off if you have to hear ‘Last Christmas’ again in one more shop or lift, even though when you hear it today you will be singing along with all your heart. Before you realise that the apple-cheeked moppets are actually just off their tits on sugar as they have been for the whole month, and you have already drunk all the Christmas Baileys by the fifteenth.
But today, today the vision is still intact, as you imagine the whole family carrying the tree home together through snowy darkened streets, before sipping hot cider (what is hot cider? Is it just cider that is hot, or do you need a special sort of cider? I’m imagining just microwaving a bottle of White Lightning would not give the festive vibe I am aiming for?) while you sing carols around the piano.
It is mildly unfortunate that I can no longer hold the threat of Santa not coming over the children’s heads, because Olivia Brown’s older brother told her that Santa doesn’t exist and so she told the whole class this. Then, of course, once Jane had stopped complaining about being lied to for all these years, she felt the need to enlighten Peter, so I can no longer claim that the smoke alarms are Santa cameras and he is watching them (which is mildly pervy when you think about it), in a desperate effort to achieve one month of the year where they behave like normal and civilised children. I may threaten to withhold their advent calendars instead, if they do not toe the line.
But even so, today, we still have everything to play for. Bring on the festive cheer!
Thursday, 3 December
Jane has just handed me the fourteenth version of her Christmas list. I have added up everything she wants and it comes to £2,378.73. Jane, needless to say, will not be getting much from her list. Peter, feeling that writing is too much like hard work, has taken to just standing glassy-eyed in front of the TV, shouting ‘I WANT THAT!’ when the adverts come on. Yesterday, he was so sucked into the Vortex of Consumerism that he shouted ‘I WANT THAT!’ at an advert for women’s products. I’m still not entirely sure which part he wanted – the roller blades, the pretty blonde girl, the beach or a packet of Tampax – he just looked baffled when I asked him if he knew what the advert was even for and mumbled ‘Want it. Want it.’
After three days of advent calendars, I have decided I hate the person who thought it was a good idea to put chocolate in the damn things. Bad enough that the darling children get hit with a sugar rush before they have even had their breakfast, then refuse to eat anything but super-sugary cereal as everything else apparently tastes ‘horrible’ after their calendar, but then you get smug twats like Simon who ‘forget’ to eat their calendar for several days and then sit there savouring their chocolate in front of you and refusing to share.
Every year I threaten that I am not going to get bloody Simon an advent calendar, telling him that he is far too old, but then I remember how he threw a massive hissy fit the first Christmas we were married because his mother had not bought him an advent calendar, so he had a tantrum that would have done a toddler credit. He didn’t quite lie on the floor, kicking his legs and screaming ‘ADVENT CALENDAR! WAAAAAANT ADVENT CALENDAR NOOOOOOOWWWWWWW!’ but it was close. His mother informed us that she had assumed his wife would be buying his advent calendars for him, now he was married, which came as something of a surprise to me, as I did not remember anything in our wedding vows about ‘To Be Your Bloody Mother From This Day Forth …’
I bought him a calendar the next year as a joke, but he didn’t seem to realise the joke part, going so far as to tell me that for future reference, he actually preferred a Thornton’s calendar to a Dairy Milk one, but he appreciated the thought. And so I continue to buy my forty-year-old husband an advent calendar every year, because apparently I am his mum now, and he is a spoilt child.
Friday, 4 December
Email from Louisa:
Hi Ellen,
We are all looking forward to our Christmas break. Can I bring anything?
Namaste,
Amaris
How do I tactfully reply ‘Please, for the love of God, do not bring your dried placenta’?
There was also an email from Jessica:
Hi Ellen,
I have been thinking about the Christmas pudding. Do you think I should get a Fortnum’s one or a Harrods’ one? Apparently the Heston Blumenthal Waitrose one is not very good this year, though it’s sold out anyway. Mum says you have a good recipe for one, though, would you rather make the pudding?
Best wishes,
Jessica
‘Fuck off, Jessica. Just fuck off. You have dumped the whole of Christmas on me and now you are turning THE ONE THING YOU HAVE TO DO into a massive performance and trying to make me make a Christmas pudding, and anyway, I don’t actually have a recipe at all, I just lied to Mum because she was making such a fuss one Christmas about how much stuff I had bought pre-prepared and so I told her I had made the sodding pudding to shut her up, and then she just went on about how I should’ve got the Delia one from Sainsbury’s, because that was by far the best one she’d ever tasted, even though IT WAS A BASTARDING DELIA PUDDING FROM SAINSBURY’S! Ellen x’
I should probably redraft that before I send it. I’m bloody tempted not to, though. But the momentary bliss of telling Jessica to fuck off is probably not really worth her looking martyred all Christmas Day.
The wretched Christmas emails have quite ruined my pleasure in Fuck It All Friday, as I seethe and mumble to myself about puddings and placentas and beetroot. Christmas never looks so complicated on the TV – even the Iceland advert makes it look idyllic. Why is it so much harder in real
life?
Monday, 7 December
More letters from the school. Letters and letters and letters. I am drowning in letters. Letters about nits, which make my head immediately start itching. Letters about book fairs, and Christmas fairs, and Christmas concerts, and the complex ticket lottery for the concerts. And, of course, the festive letter that all parents love – the one detailing the costume required for the school Christmas concert.
This year, the letters tell me, Peter is a space ghost and Jane is a stable mouse. The Christmas concerts have got increasingly strange in recent years since the arrival of a rather progressive drama teacher who writes her own productions. So instead of the old format, where each class got up and sang an out-of-tune rendition of ‘Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer’ or ‘When Santa Got Stuck Up the Chimney’ (I always sniggered at the line about him getting soot on his sack. I am a bad person) and then all the nursery tinies came on and did a nativity and sang ‘Away in a Manger’ and one could have a lovely little Christmas cry at them, instead we have had Christmas in WW2 (which was as full of festive joy as you would imagine it to be, with moping evacuees bemoaning a lack of bananas) and Christmas in the Big Brother House. God knows what this year will involve, with its winning combination of space ghosts and stable mice.
No doubt whatever weird fantasy Miss Elliott the drama teacher has plucked from the drug-crazed dreams of her misspent youth, Peter and Jane will excel at their roles as usual. Back in the happy nativity days, Jane’s starring role was as a ‘Person of Bethlehem’, which involved her standing at the back and glaring murderously at the audience. Peter, though, Peter made my heart almost burst with maternal pride when he was in nursery and was cast in the coveted role of Joseph. I bustled into the hall, pushed my way to the very front, loudly announcing to everyone I passed, ‘Sorry, my son is playing Joseph, I MUST be at the front, yes, excuse me, Joseph’s Mummy coming through, make way, I AM JOSEPH’S VERY PROUD MUMMY!’ On they came, Peter adorable in his tea towel and Simon’s old shirt, surrounded by tinsel-decked angels and a rather gloomy Mary, and I almost wept with the sheer loveliness of it all. Once Peter was centre stage, he jammed one finger up his nostril and spent the rest of the Nativity having a thorough root around. Despite my hissed threats and attempts at violent sign language to try to get his attention, he only occasionally removed his finger from his nose to munch on a particularly juicy morsel he had found up there. I was mortified. When I asked him afterwards why he had done that, he just looked at me in surprise and said ‘Done what?’
So, to be a space ghost Peter will apparently need silver body paint, a roll of tin foil, old white leggings and a t-shirt ‘that you don’t need back’ and a ‘space pack’ – whatever that is. Peter helpfully informed me it was ‘a pack you wear in space’.
Jane needs ‘old brown leggings and t-shirt’, to be cut up.
Funnily enough, Peter doesn’t possess white leggings, and Jane doesn’t have a brown t-shirt, so now I am going to have to go to Primark to buy brand-new ones to be trashed in the name of mouse-haunting space ghosts.
Oh FML, just looked at the letter, it is from last week and they were supposed to take their costumes in today. On the plus side, as it is the Festive Period, weekday wine is perfectly acceptable, isn’t it?
Wednesday, 9 December
I have finally finished my ‘Why Mummy Drinks’ app game (I may have done quite a lot of it while I was at work, but we won’t mention that part …). I am really quite pleased with it. From Level 1, where you have to get out the door in the morning while gathering children, lunchboxes, homework and forms for the school, while preventing the children removing them from your bag, to the second levels, where you have to find your way to school in an allocated time, dodging dog poos, stopping children hurling themselves under the wheels of passing 4x4s and answering questions on long division and homophones along the way, to the mid-levels, where you have to make your way across the playground without being kicked in the teeth by the scary blonde Ninja Mummies who are lurking behind the play equipment, armed with organic quinoa muffins to floor you with, right up to the final level, where you have to find your way home from the pub while pissed, including stopping to buy chips and then not dropping your chips. It is a poorly animated digital snapshot of my life, but it is the first thing in bloody forever that I have done for myself and which is even vaguely creative. It was also very therapeutic, as I put every arsehole that has ever pissed me off in it. I particularly like the special challenge where you have to dodge a flying cup of soy latte at the school gate. If it doesn’t hit you, a Yummy Mummy’s yoga pants split up the back and you earn yourself a G&T. I may have sniggered out loud to myself as I did this.
I have paid my $100 to register it and am thinking of adding ‘App Developer’ to my CV. In fact, sod it, I shall. It takes a day for it to be approved, while they make sure I am not an evil internet genius planning on bringing down civilisation with my seemingly innocuous platform game, although, if I WAS clever enough to disguise digital Armageddon in a game about baking and homework and wine, I’d like to think that I would manage to outwit the checks by the app people. Obviously I am none of these, I am a bored borderline alcoholic trying pass myself off as a semi-functioning adult.
Oh God, oh God, what if they reject it? What if they think it is pants? I have been checking my phone obsessively ever since I pressed the magic ‘submit’ button this morning, even though I knew it would take a bit of time, but now I am pacing the floors.
I will cry if they hate ‘Why Mummy Drinks’. Even if they don’t hate it, I will still cry if nobody buys it. Hannah will buy it. And Sam. But what if no one else does and it was all for nothing? I suppose at least I can take some satisfaction in sitting and playing it myself and laughing hollowly every time Game Me outwits the Game Coven, in between weeping bitterly into my wine and contemplating the general futility of life. Or maybe schools will buy it to discourage teenage pregnancies?
I wonder if I am having an existential crisis?
Friday, 11 December
My Fuck It All Friday was sacrificed on the altar of the work Christmas party tonight, ever the glittering highlight of the social year. Because who doesn’t love having to fork out £57.50 to be crammed into a function room in a third-rate hotel, along with twenty-nine other office Christmas parties, all of which seem by law to be forced to include one very drunk middle-aged woman in a rather too-tight polyester party dress and flashing reindeer antlers, who spends the evening cackling raucously at the top of her voice before trying to snog a colleague young enough to be her son, then throwing up, and eventually being put into a taxi while she loudly tells everyone within earshot, including strangers that she has never seen before, how much she loves them? Surprisingly, I do not fulfil this role in our office, it having been bagsied long ago by Sandra from Sales. Throw in a lukewarm Christmas dinner and the ‘complimentary wine’ which everyone races to neck as much of as possible in a desperate bid to get their money’s worth out of the evening and, really, who could fail to be excited by such a night?
What was the best part of the evening this year? Was it Jenny from Marketing calling me a Grinch and trying to forcibly cram the flimsy paper crown from the cheap crackers onto my head, before telling me to ‘take a joke’ when I snarled that I would cut her if she ever, ever touched me again (my personal space issues are sorely tried by such evenings, due to the venue allocating approximately six square inches per person in an effort to rake in as much dosh as possible).
Or perhaps it was Iain from Accounts spending forty-five minutes giving me a detailed account of his health problems leading up to his gall bladder operation and then a blow-by-blow account of said op? Or was it Pizza-faced Paul from the post room grabbing me on the way back from the toilets and dragging me onto the dance floor, where he pressed his suspiciously bulging crotch up against me while he panted moistly, ‘I’ve always fancied you, Chrissie …’ There is no one called Chrissie at work.
Ho ho and b
uggering ho. And tomorrow, I get to do it all again at Simon’s Christmas do, although that tends to be a slightly classier affair, which means better-quality crackers and a ‘jus’ instead of gravy.
And there has still been no word about whether the ‘Why Mummy Drinks’ app has been accepted, despite obsessively checking my phone approximately every twenty seconds, along with checking websites that tell you the average wait time to get your app approved, which all say ‘a day’. Maybe it is to do with time differences? Maybe it is not work time in America? Or maybe they just hate it.
Saturday, 12 December
Simon’s work do was actually very posh, and alas came complete with my nemesis – a free bar. I do love a free bar. I am assuming the day will eventually arrive when I do not treat a free bar as a challenge to drink as much as I can in as short a time as possible, but unfortunately for Simon that day has not yet arrived.
Getting rat-arsed wasn’t entirely my fault, I found myself at dinner sitting next to Simon’s colleague Brian’s wife. I think she was called Soozie. Actually, I know she was called Soozie, because Soozie was sufficiently self-obsessed that she felt the need to spell her name for me, so I knew exactly how quirky Soozie is. Soozie has just had a baby. Soozie also has a toddler. Soozie apparently is the first person in the history of the world to ever have had a baby, and therefore Soozie felt the need to tell me all about her amazing children, and how they have changed her life, and how she has decided to bring them up, and the incredibly funny thing Gabriel said the other day even though he’s only two, and look, that’s Gabriel there, isn’t he gorgeous, and that’s Gabriel with Celeste, the new baby, yes, we did think the names were clever, because they are our angels, and there’s Gabriel on the swings, and there’s Celeste’s one-month birthday … and her two-month birthday … and her three-month birthday … And there’s Gabriel using the potty for the first time, we were so proud, and that’s the contents of the potty, and don’t you think breastfeeding is so important, what sort of monsters bottle feed and then leave their children in cages to be raised by wolves while they return to work? Oh, you’re a working mummy, are you? Gosh, I don’t know how you find the time, I just couldn’t leave mine like that, they are my life. Oh, I must show you the photo of the amazing drawing Gabriel did, even though he’s only two.