by Gill Sims
‘God, we were so young!’ he said.
‘Too young,’ I said coldly, because I was still pissed off about the fight the other night.
‘Do you think? I do remember the pigeon by the way. I don’t think it’s possible to transport a pigeon 500 miles in a cardboard box, including across London on the Tube, and forget the experience.’
This did make me laugh, despite myself.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I don’t want to go away with things like this between us.’
I was still very, very angry with him, but it was hard to stay that way when there were all the photos spread over the floor of us looking so happy (and thin), and anyway, he had apologised first, so technically, I had won the argument. I didn’t say that, obviously, tempting though it was. But I knew that he knew that I knew I had won.
It was probably a bad start to the resolution about having a mature relationship and discussing things like adults, but I still maintain he was in the wrong and so I was totally justified in not apologising first this time. Even so, I do love him really. Apart from when I am fantasising about shallow graves in the woods, obviously.
FEBRUARY
Monday, 1 February
Sam is in luuuuuuurrrrrrrve. If Sam was any more of a besotted teenage girl he would be writing into the Just 17 problem page and asking how he could tell if a boy liked him or not. His current dilemma, which he spent twenty minutes debating after school this afternoon and then continued via group texts to Hannah and me, is whether or not he should celebrate the one-month anniversary of his first date with Mark in a couple of days, or whether he should hang on and go all out for Valentine’s Day. He literally shoe-horns Mark’s name into every conversation, it’s so sweet. I wouldn’t be the slightest bit surprised if he has been practising signing his name ‘Sam Evans’ and doing that sum where you add up all the letters in your names to work out your ‘compatibility’.
Hannah, meanwhile, has decided that if Sam can find love again after the cheating pig rat Robin, then maybe she too should dabble in the dating pond again (her analogy, not mine, personally all I could think of was pond scum when she described it thus).
Anyway, she has discovered a nice, middle-class website where your friends describe what a fabulous person you are and why people should want to go out with you, and has decided that it is a much better bet, because the men on there don’t look the dick-pic sort. Sam snorted at this and said all men are the dick-pic sort given half a chance, and Hannah took umbrage.
Poor Hannah, I really hope she knows what she’s doing. She definitely deserves somebody lovely, unlike dastardly bastardly Dan the Dick, but I’m not sure meeting men online is right for her. She has at least asked me to write her ‘blurb’ for the website, though I am not entirely certain what I should put: ‘I’ve known Hannah since we were eleven. Be nice to her and don’t send her photos of your knob, or I will find you and chop it off.’ Too much?
‘I’ve known Hannah for many years. She likes cheese and wine and films and having a laugh with friends. She enjoys reading and travelling and spending time with her family. She is a lovely person with a positive personality.’ Too bloody bland. That could be anybody. Oh God, this is much harder than it looks.
‘Hannah is great fun.’ Nope. I’ll be describing her as ‘zany’ or ‘madcap’ next. Maybe I shouldn’t try so hard to ‘sell’ her?
‘Hannah is kind, loyal and loving.’ Hannah apparently is a Golden Retriever now. Who knew writing a short paragraph about why someone should shag your best friend would be so hard? Maybe I should just go up to some bloke at the bar next time we’re out and tap him on the shoulder and say ‘My mate really fancies you, do you want to snog her?’ like we did when we were about fourteen.
I wonder if fourteen-year-olds still snog, or by that stage have they moved on to making hardcore pornos? I have all this joy to come with Peter and Jane. Mind you, I’m not sure Jane will ever find someone brave enough to shag her, and I pity any boy brave enough to try to sext her, as she will probably stab them through the heart or at the very least shove their phone where the sun doesn’t shine. She is still traumatised from the ‘how babies are made’ talk and DVD at school and has frequently announced that she is Never Ever Doing ‘That’, so hopefully she will stick to her guns once those teenage hormones hit.
When it comes to Peter, though, I can see visits from angry fathers objecting to him besmirching the honour of their maiden daughters. Peter has been a shameless tart since he was a baby; Simon is still traumatised by the time when a toddler Peter leaned out of the trolley in the supermarket and pinched a lady’s bum, and the lady, understandably, thought Simon had done it and threatened to call the police. Simon still cites this incident as the reason why he can’t be expected to take the children with him if he has to go to the shops, even though these days Peter is more likely to just fart and then cackle as the whole aisle gags. Anyway, back to Hannah’s sales pitch.
‘Hannah is lovely. She is warm and funny; a great mum and a good friend. She deserves to meet a man as wonderful as she is. Who won’t show her his dick before he has even met her.’ Maybe not the last line. Oh God, it will do. I have been reading other people’s descriptions for inspiration and they all say pretty much the same thing. Everyone is interested in travel and reading, even if the furthest abroad they have ever been is a booze cruise to Calais or an 18–30 holiday to Benidorm, and the longest tome they’ve read recently is a takeaway menu.
Apparently they are all wonderful people who only drink socially (obviously, who is going to put ‘functioning alcoholic’ or ‘I enjoy sitting alone, wearing only my stained Y-fronts and guzzling Special Brew until I pass out’?) and are looking for someone ‘special’.
I do think Hannah is incredibly brave to be doing this. Simon might get on my tits sometimes but I don’t think I could face trawling through thousands of men trying to work out from one tiny photo if they look like my soulmate, and wondering if they describe themselves as ‘cuddly’ if that actually means they are really fat, or if they describe themselves as ‘athletic’ does that mean they are either a bit up themselves or would they be expecting me to do sporty things, too?
Simon, God love him, has never expected me to be sporty. I did join a gym once, when the children were very small, which was more to take advantage of the crèche they offered than a burning desire to get my figure back. For a while, though, I actually went to some classes and got quite fit. I rather loved a kick-boxing class, which was very good for taking out any pent-up rage and frustration on a punchbag, though apparently you weren’t meant to announce you were picturing your husband’s face as you battered seven bells out of it.
The thin end of wedge for the gym was when I went to an awful class where you had to try to balance on a wobbly board and do various exercises. The class was taken by a very over-muscled man in an unfeasibly small vest who kept caressing his own biceps in a most disturbing way.
Apparently, though, I was the only one not gripped by lust for his oiled pecs, as all the other women in the class were in full makeup and frantically batting their false eyelashes at him and trying to get his attention. I was in my trusty old baggy t-shirt and leggings, and was so appallingly bad at the class that he spent most of it trying to show me what to do, to the outrage of the Lycra-clad gym bunnies.
The final nail in the coffin of my fitness, though, was when I went to a ‘core’ class, where they made us kneel on those giant bouncy balls. I insisted I could not possibly do this, the instructor insisted everyone could, it was easy.
It was not easy. I managed to wobble on top of the ball for a microsecond before I fell off, but somehow I didn’t just collapse to the ground, instead I flew across the room at high speed, before I collided with a pillar and slid to the floor, somewhat dazed.
Everyone saw. Many people rushed to assist as I woozily scrambled to my feet, insisting, ‘Fine, I’m fine, ha ha ha, no, absolutely fine!’ and limped out of the room to grab the children from
the crèche and flee, never to return again.
I kept paying the membership for another six months, though, so they wouldn’t guess I was too embarrassed to return, until Simon objected to the waste of money and made me cancel it. Now the sportiest thing I do is run around looking for the bastard dog when he does a bunk after rabbits.
Of course, the lack of sportiness is another reason why I don’t think I could put myself out there like that. I just couldn’t take my clothes off in front of someone else, not after having two children and gaining rather more pounds than I care to think about.
Simon saw the stretch marks as they appeared, and the changes (ravages) of pregnancy and child birth and eleventy billion Mint Clubs on my body, and he was partially responsible for them (maybe not the Mint Clubs bits, in fairness), but how could I just whip my kit off in front of anyone else and go ‘Ta daaaaa!’, after almost twenty years of no one but Simon and medical professionals seeing any of my bits in all their glory?
I should really stick better to my resolution to be nicer to Simon. He has never once grumbled that I am no longer a lithe and youthful sexpot; he laughs and tells me he thinks I am gorgeous when I grumble about how fat I am or obsess over the horrible stretch marks, and if he doesn’t bring me flowers very often, he does bring me a lot of cups of tea, which, to be honest, are probably more welcome. And if he spends too much time in that bloody shed, or filling my house with pointless gadgets that he claims save time and effort but actually waste time and effort, with the trouble of finding the right remote or app that controls them, well, that’s got to be better than him being out shagging other people and breaking my heart, like Sam and Hannah’s horrible exes.
Tuesday, 9 February – Pancake Day
There are pancakes on the ceiling. There are pancakes on the floor. There are pancakes on the dog. I watched YouTube tutorials on tossing pancakes for an hour last night. A whole sodding hour. For this.
Admittedly, declaring I would have a pancake party and inviting Sam’s children round after school as well was perhaps overstretching myself somewhat, but how can a few pancakes go so far? My cunning plan was I could call the pancakes crepes and it would be one step closer to my ‘learning French and becoming a cultured and sophisticated international style person’ plan (apparently ‘fuck my life’ in French is ‘baise ma vie’. I think I prefer ‘FML’ as ‘BMV’ sounds like something catching).
Unfortunately, my crepes were another reminder of why I don’t cook with the children, as Sophie and Jane carefully sifted flour all over the floor and then Peter and Toby managed to break five eggs and not get a single one in the bowl. So, after innumerable attempts at making the batter, there were no more eggs or milk and I snatched the bowl off the children and threw it all in the KitchenAid and hoped for the best.
The best was still rather lumpy, but I ladled it into the frying pan nonetheless, where obviously the first three pancakes stuck, probably due to me casually disregarding the stern instructions from both St Delia and Nigella that one absolutely must buy a special frying pan for one’s pancakes, available from their selected supermarket of choice for a very reasonably enormous sum of money.
Eventually I scraped something semi-edible out of the pan, and once the children had finished fighting like a pack of rabid dogs over it, they pointed out that I was not tossing the pancakes, merely flipping them with a spatula and obviously this was completely wrong, and I must try to toss them (or ‘be a tosser’ as Jane suggested, with a suspiciously straight face that made me think she knew exactly what she was saying).
As the tossing had been the subject of all those YouTube videos last night, I decided to give it a go, but it was my poor tossing technique that was responsible for the pancakes stuck to the ceiling. Meanwhile, the children insisted they could do better, and thus their tossing attempts resulted in the pancakes splattered all over the floor and my poor dog, who was somewhat nonplussed.
Sam, as ever, tried to be a good sport when he arrived to pick up his cherubs and found them so liberally coated in flour, eggs and batter that you could be forgiven for thinking I had planned to deep-fry them, like some sort of Glaswegian version of the Hansel and Gretel witch. A Surrey witch would probably have a special, expensive, Mary Berry-approved grill from Lakeland to cook children on, whereas a Northern witch would probably be too busy arguing whether the bread roll to serve them in was called a barm, a bap or a cob to actually get around to cooking the children.
Sunday, 14 February – Valentine’s Day
Ah, and they say romance is dead! It is dead here anyway. Simon has always refused to participate in Valentine’s Day as it is also his birthday. Apparently his mother was quite keen to call him Valentine but luckily his father talked her out of it. I am not sure I could have married a man called Valentine. Does that make me shallow? No, probably not: a boy named Valentine would probably of necessity grow up into a very different person to one with a sensible name like Simon.
I am not desperately keen on Valentine’s Day myself, as for me it still carries with it the tang of desperation of going to an all-girls school and having to slouch in on the morning of Valentine’s Day pretending you had left before the post had come, while all the swishy-haired, blonde popular girls (who would inevitably grow up to be School Playground Bloody Perfect Coven sorts) waltzed about fluttering their sheaves of cards and, if they were in possession of a boyfriend, a nasty, cellophane-wrapped single rose.
Somehow I never ever managed to have a boyfriend for Valentine’s Day, or even a secret admirer. Some of the girls got Valentines from their fathers, and I was never sure if this was better or worse than not getting any at all – my father certainly had no truck with such notions.
My first year at university, though, I got no less than four Valentines! I was delighted. I swished my hair and I waltzed with glee. I was a popular person. I would find true love. The next year I got some, too, but by the next Valentine’s Day I was going out with Simon, and since then the only Valentine’s card I have received was made by Jane at playgroup. It was very sweet, they posted them out to all the mummies and Simon was quite outraged at the thought of me having an admirer, until I explained where it had come from. I wasn’t sure whether I was flattered that he was jealous or insulted that he was so surprised someone might have sent me a card.
This year, though, I have the joys of dealing with Peter and Jane’s respective takes on Valentine’s Day, as well as various meltdowns from Sam. Peter has declared his undying love for Poppy Hodgkins, an overly perky little girl who reeks of synthetic strawberries (‘She smells lovely!’ says Peter staunchly), who I suspect will grow up to be a complete slapper, but Peter nonetheless has given her a Valentine’s card and asked her to be his girlfriend. Poppy is ‘thinking about it’ (tart).
Jane, meanwhile, was appalled and incensed that Freddie Dawkins had the temerity to give her a card (none of them seem to have really grasped the concept of Valentine’s cards being anonymous), because Freddie is, in Jane’s words, ‘a stinky, ginger, speccy four eyes’.
I have tried to tell Jane that she shouldn’t judge people on their appearances and Freddie is probably a lovely boy, but the truth is that he is a most unfortunate-looking child, with more than a whiff of stale cabbage about him and a very odd manner that makes me suspect his true path in life will involve burying people in shallow graves in the woods.
It’s likely that Jane has not helped Freddie’s social awkwardness and possibly will be the catalyst that leads him to embark on a lifetime of dysfunctional relationships at the very least, as apparently her reaction to his card was to tear it into tiny pieces and stomp on it (and his heart) in front of everyone. Unlike Poppy Hodgkins’ parents, I definitely don’t think we need to worry about teenage pregnancy being an issue with Jane.
Sam, meanwhile, is trying to cook a romantic meal for Mark, and it is all going wrong. Finally, after the seventeenth anguished text because his Coquilles St Jacques had gone awry, I told him to just go to M&S and hide
the packaging. It’s what I did for Simon’s birthday dinner, as he refuses point-blank to venture into the world on Valentine’s Day, but it gives me a night off from cooking while he thinks I have lovingly prepared a gourmet meal for him.
Simon has spent the day oblivious to his children’s emotional anguish because he was busy playing happily with his birthday presents. Simon and I agreed long ago that I would stop buying him presents because Simon is a bloody picky bastard, and if something is not exactly the thing he wants, it is dead to him. Which would be absolutely fine, if he would only return the offending gift to the shop and get a refund, or the thing he did want, but he refuses, instead putting whatever it is aside and insisting that no, it is fine, yes he likes it, no, no need to exchange it, while it lies, unloved and never touched again.
So when offered the choice of having the expensive watches, shirts, scarves and gadgets I have bought him over the years shoved up his arse or buying his own present and giving it to me to wrap up for him, he chose the latter.
I still buy him the odd bottle of posh gin or cashmere scarf to make it feel like I’ve made an effort, which I then steal back for myself, so it’s win-win for everybody. This year he has gone for a variety of little black boxes to plug into the TV so we have even more remote controls to lose, thus making turning on the TV a Krypton Factor-style challenge, and a jig saw, to keep the holy mitre saw company and make Simon feel manly and Bardo even more envious next time he visits.
The lengthy argument with my precious moppets over why they really did have to go to bed and were not staying up to join us for our romantic meal unfortunately led me to have a bit too much of Simon’s birthday gin while I was lovingly reheating his M&S dinner, and so it was that I gazed into his eyes over the tiramisu and said, ‘Do you remember the first time I cooked you dinner, darling?’