December 31st
As a teenager New Year’s Eve was the bit of Christmas that you looked forward to the most. You’d been imprisoned with family for what seemed like an eternity, pretended to like vile novelty socks given to you, and received more bath bubbles and notelets with blackberries and squirrels on them than anyone could hope to use in an entire year. You deserved to be able to break out on your own a little bit, let your hair down and go a bit wild. As a child I occasionally watched my parents get a little bit wild on New Year’s Eve. When I say wild I mean they’d do the Twist to Chubby Checker. I saw them kiss one year, no, snog even, which was frighteningly shocking. The thing about being an only child is that you can persuade yourself that your parents only did it once, OK maybe twice, and in fact you do persuade yourself of this, that their sex life was entirely functional, entirely minimal. But the snog seemed to imply something different. It was a relief when someone turned the telly on and put a stop to it.
Now as I watch my own ELDEST DAUGHTER get ready for New Year’s Eve, I realise – as realise I must – that she is about to start her own life, that in seven months’ time she will have effectively gone, on her gap-year trip to Ghana, and then on to university. My nest is emptying. My stomach flips. I feel sick at the thought. She goes out, naturally, with a summer dress on, no coat, no tights and sling-back shoes, and looking simply gorgeous. How could any boy appreciate her? How could they ever know how special she is? How can anyone love her as much as I do? At her age, at New Year’s Eve parties I was probably snogging someone under a pile of donkey jackets in the spare room, so logic tells me she will be doing something remarkably similar. Which is something else to worry about, not least because she is staying the night at Laura’s which if I was doing an impression of her I’d say with some mimed inverted commas, because staying at Laura’s I imagine is code for ‘don’t even think about coming to collect me, I can do what I like now…and if I choose to stay out till 3am frankly you can’t stop me’.
I get wistful and nostalgic, think about how my life has changed over the years and how what I do on New Year’s Eve has changed with it. In my twenties I went away with friends at New Year. Rented cottages by the sea, with far fewer bedrooms than couples, slept in until two in the afternoon, drank bottles of red wine, got silly and giggly, stayed up all night…played drunken games of sardines. I called my parents at 12 and talked to them pityingly. I wore tight jeans, I looked good, I talked a lot. Smoked a lot. Flirted a lot. I had a ball. Then in my thirties New Year’s Eve was an occasion to chum up with close friends with small children. Staying at each other’s houses with a car full of Babygros and changing bags and listening devices and everyone pale and dizzy with exhaustion. Dancing with a baby on your shoulder to West End Girls, bouncing baby on the bed with you in the morning. Snuggling up to them. Smelling their hair, bathing them and blowing bubbles through the flannel, singing ‘Me and My Teddy Bear’, drying them after bath time on your lap in a warm towel with a hood on it, reading some Ahlberg Peepo or Bye Bye Baby. In reality I was too exhausted to appreciate it, but of course looking back now that ELDEST’s days at home are literally numbered, it seems in retrospect a golden time. Even something as awful as taking it in turns to do the early shift with baby (meaning post-4am) seems memorably wonderful. Reason tells me that my memory has played tricks on me, but it’s still hard.
And now I’m a Grumpy Old Woman, New Year’s Eve feels like just another evening, the magic has gone, all that false and alcohol-induced revelry simply makes me want to reach for a hot-water bottle and a good book. But you can’t. It is not allowed just to have a nice early night and a good night’s sleep. My mother calls. She’s in Devon with a friend. It is her first New Year’s Eve without my father. And she sounds surprisingly well.
We go to the Warburtons’ drinks party. I find the small talk overwhelmingly dull until someone tells me the Foresters have split up. It’s always the couples you think are blissfully happy that split up. It’s like the curse of Hello! magazine, the moment they do a feature about how much they love one another, or redo their vows or whatever it is celebrities endlessly do, you know it’s doomed…they’ll be divorced by the end of the year.
At the party, YOUNGEST DAUGHTER hangs out with all the other young people playing pool, and I am a little envious. Envious that they’re having more fun, have some loud music on and there is a lot of giggling, whereas with the grown-ups there are a lot of dull groups of people talking about their ‘nice quiet family Christmas’ and their loft lagging, garden features and skiing holidays. Dull dull dull dull. Trouble is at my age you can’t take the edge off it all…you can’t drink too much (you’re driving) and you don’t take drugs, so you get bored very quickly. Or I do. I am trapped in a body that people think means I am dull. Look 20 or 30 and people assume you’re fascinating, even though you’re not, but get to my age, get a bit of life behind you and frankly something interesting to say, and young people assume you are a non-person. You could tell them something really outrageous, like pretend you once used your Rampant Rabbit to make a meringue, really startle them, and they’d still just look through you. I can’t be bothered, I feel wasted on them. I wander into the teenagers’ room, which I feel is my spiritual home, in the hope that they will take me in, assimilate me as an honorary adolescent, which is what I feel like, and ask me to stay. They don’t. Actually YOUNGEST asks me to go away.
Lost and feeling I don’t fit anywhere I open the back door for some fresh air, wanting to go home, and find a group of smokers, standing out in the freezing cold, with a bottle of red wine and some malt whisky. They are pretty drunk, and they assume I’ve sneaked outside for a ciggie too. There is a lovely camaraderie that happens with smokers now that they are despised and told to stand outside; they bond and become the naughty smokers, feel a bit wicked and behave like overgrown teenagers. Sometimes I find this irritating, but tonight I actually find them fun. I find myself having a cigarette for the first time in 15 years, and a very large glass of red wine. Talk gets on to sex and there is a lot of giggling. Tall flicky-haired girl says her friend is in terrible relationship – sex happens twice a week – I sympathise, feel a bit dizzy, a bit hazy round the edges, say, ‘God, how awful, I can only manage once a week and sometimes that’s a bit of an effort.’ Soon realised flicky-haired woman and the others means twice a week is appallingly infrequent. Felt stupid and took hasty retreat back inside but not before I had had two cigarettes and about three glasses of red wine, a beaker full of malt whisky – and this on top of the white wine I had already consumed when bored out of my brain earlier.
Text ELDEST DAUGHTER ‘Happy New Year, love you loads’ and send it, then realise I sent it to someone at work- must put my glasses on when I text in future.
Had a nice dance to ‘Hi Ho Silver Lining’ with the GRUMPY OLD MAN, caught YOUNGEST watching horrified at the old man’s Mick Jagger impression and my evident lack of embarrassment at anything. Spared her the sight of us kissing, knowing the damage done by my own equivalent.
Stagger out of party and YOUNGEST tells me off like I am naughty teenager and she is huffy mother: ‘You’re drunk, have you been smoking, God it’s disgusting. And at your age…’
Got taxi home and driver looked strangely unfamiliar – he’d picked us up loads of times before but looked different. I asked him what had happened? He said he’d shaved off his moustache, apparently everyone keeps telling him he looks ten years younger. If only shaving mine off would have the same effect.
By the time I follow the old man to bed I can hear him snoring from the landing already. So much for life beginning at 40.
New Year’s Day
Woke up and felt perfectly OK, got downstairs, put the kettle on, let the cat in and the dog out, and congratulated myself on being able to take my drink nearly as well as when I was in my twenties, instead of being incapacitated with one glass as of late. Then suddenly and without any warning the hangover kicked in, felt like I had walked into a plate-gla
ss window. It was then I noticed some of the things that I had done the night before on coming home, some of the tell-tale signs that mean that yes, I was indeed extremely drunk. In my attempt to convince myself that I was absolutely fine and in control I had laid the table up for breakfast complete with cereal bowls, spoons, serviettes and milk jug (something I would never do sober) and had tried to put the cereal packets on the table but scooped up just about everything in the cupboard, flour, risotto rice, couscous, lentils and topped it off with scary bucket and mop arrangement like a drunken youth would put a traffic cone on a statue.
Crawl upstairs and find more evidence of very drunk behaviour, shoes taken off and placed neatly by wardrobe, mobile on charge (but on wrong charger), and Vaseline Intensive Care smeared all over carpet and bathroom floor after major feet moisturising attempts – it’s a miracle I didn’t fall and crack my head open on the bath…all of it signs of me trying to persuade myself that I am not only in control but very very sober indeed, but a drunken ‘to do’ list written out for tomorrow in big scrawly writing barely legible – saying ‘chill out more’ – final and clinching evidence of total drunken brain type thoughts. Scary.
Have to spend entire day in bed, as not able to cope with sudden neck or head movements. What sort of a mother role model am I turning into?
Weight Watchers are sending me irritating emails every day presumably because I once went on to the website and they know at this time of year it’s hard to find an excuse not to try to lose weight. They’ve been saving it up and now have a whole special sales force targeting the greedy en masse, getting them to sign up for their classes. Because they know at this time of the year you are vulnerable, and – face it – you’ve eaten so much over Christmas you hardly came up for air. Of course worrying about my weight is nothing new, not something that has plagued me just since I hit middle age. I only wish that I had appreciated my lovely upper arms before they turned into the dreaded bat wings, wish I hadn’t worried about my thighs so much because – hey – that was nothing compared to the stuff that’s happened lately – the midriff bulge has now hit big time.
I’m getting fat all over, fat stomach, fat arms, fat neck, fat chin, I look sort of beefy, bigger all round; sometimes I think my head’s getting smaller so that if I wore a floral summer dress and some high heels with American Tan tights, I’d look like a transvestite, like Dame Edna or Dick Emery.
Young male colleagues at work, I notice, seem a bit reluctant to be alone with me, avoid eye contact if we are in the lift or in the stationery room alone – maybe they think I’m going to pounce.
It’s a tough one to accept that your powers of sexual attraction are frankly dwindling, and that the men who do look at you now are slightly better looking than John McCririck. It’s all so hard when evidently in my thirties I was so gorgeous, I really was – I’ve seen photos – although tragically at the time it didn’t seem so. I could manipulate men with my sex appeal. I mean I wasn’t some sort of mad sex pervert, but if I wanted to get a man to do something for me I could generally turn it on and get my way. Now if I did get off with a bloke younger than me or very good-looking indeed the dynamics would have changed fundamentally: they’d assume I was grateful rather than the other way round. But it’s taken me ages to realise something totally obvious. Somehow I always told myself that being attractive to the opposite sex had nothing to do with your looks, men fell for women who made them laugh, interested them, that they like…fell for women in particular with personality, vivacity and humour. I always rather pitied girls who were dumb blondes, good-looking but either indifferently clever or indifferently interesting. Until now. Suddenly I have woken up to the fact that men, old and young, fat and thin, tall and short, like women who look good. They like women who look good more than they like women who make them laugh, or are one of the lads, or buy a round of drinks, or can kick a tyre or work a Black and Decker, and now my life seems to have been a bit of a wasteland sexually. How could I have got this so wrong? And what seems so unfair is that it works for men the other way: all the polls say that women find men attractive who make them laugh, who have an engaging personality…nothing to do with their looks.
It doesn’t stop me wanting to be more attractive to men, even though I am frighteningly middle-aged, so like everyone else I am endlessly trying to lose weight. I do want to be skinnier, but I also want to eat Kettle chips and have a glass of wine once the dishwasher’s on and the day is done. Because life for a grumpy old woman is – let’s face it – more exhausting than pulling along a juggernaut with a rope round your waist. Result…The middle-age spread is settling in.
January 3rd
What is it with me and personal admin? I am incapable of doing it. The bank statements come and I put them in a safe place, the credit card bills come and I put them somewhere prominent to remind me to pay them, and then they all promptly and spitefully disappear. I really think I should be excused it all. I have enough to do already – can’t the police do it for us, or our grumpy old men? I think grumpy old women, without whom no kitchen bin would be emptied, no bed would be changed and no towel folded, should be exempt.
It’s not just the stuff from the bank and the insurance company, it’s all the dreary but time-consuming things that come home from school, endless forms and letters with bits to tear off at the bottom, and Miss wants £6.50 in a named envelope in cash by tomorrow, and a packed lunch without nuts sent on Friday week along with a full Elizabethan costume for the Macbeth production and a donation for the spring fair. Can’t they run the school themselves? Some days I think they might as well give me a desk in the staff room.
The whole personal admin nightmare is at its worst this time of year, more or less precisely this time of year. You’ve been too busy doing secret Santas and making chestnut stuffing to do anything other than chuck bank statements, visa statements, direct-debit forms in a big pile on the dressing table for the last six weeks. Bad enough. Then those stupid ads come on the telly telling you cheerily how easy it is to do your tax form on-line…and you can ignore it no longer. The tax form has to be done. Which is to personal admin what root-canal work is to a scale and polish. This wretched form has to be done. Now. Dozens of maddening pieces of paper and numbers and spreadsheets have to be found. Like the annual scramble to find the form the building society sent you with your interest details from your savings account has self-destructed and disappeared, along with all the rest of the documents that it is going to take you days to find or replace, like your P45 or whatever they call it now, and your endowment policy. The whole thing is beyond tedious.
I get on the phone to the building society and, guess what, I am in a queue, with dozens of stalling tactics and holding patterns. The first one is fill in your account details and your sort codes and so on, and then your password and then you get to another menu, and another and another, and then when you do get through to someone they ask it you all over again. Truth is the whole nation is ringing up for a copy of their interest statements. And, guess what, they charge you £20 for the duplicate. Next year I am going to do it early.
January 6th
Back to work. Obviously work is meant to be annoying, but going back after a two-week break is enough to make even the non-grumpy very grumpy indeed. Back to the world where everyone talks in a silly office language; when you have been away from it for a week or two, you notice it even more. Everyone’s talking about initiatives that ‘innovate change’, or how to do ‘360-degree feedback’, or how to ‘manage delegation’ or, my favourite, ‘noisy ideas’. The older I get the more infuriating I find the whole thing, everyone talks about ‘levelling playing fields’ and ‘bringing things to the table’ (or, worse, ‘to the party’), or ‘synergy or ‘blue sky thinking’. You can’t just have a good idea, you have to ‘think outside the box’, or ‘push the envelope’ or ‘run it up a flagpole’. What a load of old tosh! I heard someone today answer the phone and say that Robin had just ‘stepped out of the office’ like he�
�d just dared to put one foot out of the door into the corridor and then rushed back again. What’s wrong with just saying he’s gone out? Robin and Jocasta (my she-who-must-be-obeyed boss) are having a bit of a thing, everyone thinks. He does a lot of simpering and laughing very loudly at her (not very funny) jokes and says she looks lovely when she so does not. When we were away at conference there was a lot of ridiculous talk at breakfast from them both about their ‘individual’ rooms. Gosh does yours overlook the car park, oh mine’s really rather nice, etc. Obviously to try to put us all off the scent. Just makes it all the more obvious in my view.
Bloke I sent text to on New Year’s Eve looks sceptical when I tell him I sent it to him by mistake, like it took some drink to tell him I loved him loads and fancied the pants off him, and then I sobered up and lost my nerve. Wouldn’t mind but he is rather good-looking and no doubt will have emailed his young colleagues that I am scary menopausal woman on the sexual warpath.
The sheer hard work of being back in the office is a shock. A relentless non-stop round of emails, texts and messages. You can’t even get away from it all at home. In the old days you just had the answer machine to check when you got home, now you have the email and the voice mail on the mobile and the answer machine in the kitchen. There is simply no respite at all. And what is it with people and their mobiles? They have to be on them or pretending to be on them at all times, look busy, everyone has to look busy, all the time. Not to look busy would be a crime. Seeing someone with the Blue tooth thing walking along apparently talking to themselves, I mean we will all have them surgically implanted in our brains soon, got to happen…I’m so old I remember public call boxes. Haven’t seen one in use for years. At least you could pretend the queue was too long if you didn’t want to talk to anyone. These days everyone can be contacted at all times, on the bus, in the loo, everywhere. People are starting to have two mobiles I notice, presumably one for work that they get paid for by the company, and one for social. Or as someone put it the other day, one for work and one for sex. I think I know which of mine would ring the most.
The Secret Diary of a Grumpy Old Woman Page 2