It strikes me that the division of domestic work and responsibility is a source of great irritation and tension in our house. Maybe I could approach this like I am constantly telling people to at work. Like it’s a management problem. Make it like a job description, so that people in the family can be clear about where their responsibilities start and end, and so there can be more clarity about who does what and when. I start to make a mental list of some of the things around the house that drive me mad, and some rules that if followed by all family members would alleviate my grump. It’ll give you an idea of some of the stuff I carry around in my head, and it might explain why I am sometimes – OK often – in a bad mood.
Starting this list (it is only the tip of the iceberg incidentally) has made me realise how much domestic mess and muddle I carry around in my head (and how obsessed I am with the immersion heater). No wonder I am in a bad mood.
GRUMPY OLD MAN manages not to carry any of this around in his head at all. He doesn’t have to nag the girls about any of the above, because it simply doesn’t matter to him. If there is a pile of rubbish by the kitchen bin he doesn’t care, doesn’t even notice it, which means he wafts through life and the house oblivious, and seems constantly in a good mood. Maddening.
February 9th
Went into town and spotted v. expensive moisturiser cream I read about. It’s supposed to be totally and utterly effective on the wrinkle front. Helped myself to a great dollop of the tester in perfume department and smeared it under my eyes, scary woman there in an instant asking if I am interested in buying some. Well, I might be. How much is it? £200 a pot. She had to repeat it. Apparently it has some special ingredient in it which is unique to skin care, uniquely effective at zapping wrinkles, and when she told me what it was I couldn’t stop laughing, because the special ingredient is what a table full of marketing gurus would obviously put in a tub that they wanted to flog people like you and me for £200 a pop. The special ingredient is – wait for it – caviar!
February 10th
The snowdrops are coming up. Like magic. Next year when the snowdrops do their magical appearance ELDEST will be gone to university. I sob on the way to work and wonder where her childhood went and what life will be like when her washing isn’t in the basket, the house isn’t covered in her cereal bowl trail, her bed is permanently made and we look forward so to her Sunday evening phone calls with news and occasional visits – what I need is a hobby to take my mind off it all.
February 11th
The world has gone Valentine’s Day mad. There’s a Metro free paper big spread on what you can buy your partner, and among the chocolates and fru fru nightdresses and knickers is a ‘sex toy’, as they put it, which looks like a cross between a Henry Moore sculpture and a car jack. Am overcome with embarrassment and curiosity at the same time. There are other people looking at it on their way to work too, I can see because we are all reading the same free paper. I imagine if you did go in for such a thing the worry would be that it had an electrical funny turn and you ended up having to call an ambulance, or your loved ones would find you electrocuted in a very embarrassing position, probably quite literally…It wouldn’t be worth the risk.
February 12th
Hideous bloke at work with personal hygiene problem lingering in the office telling jokes. He’s from post room. I feel quite sorry for him, but really jokes are so not funny. Jokes send me into a panic. I often don’t understand them, which is not because I am Miss Innocent or Miss Prissy but more that I just don’t find them funny. I get in a panic. When should I laugh? Is this the punch line? Or is that? I have to wait for someone else to start laughing. Oh God! He told one about a one-eyed Eskimo that lasted about 20 minutes. I get all hot and bothered and feel trapped and want to kill him. Everyone else drifted off back to their computers and left me lumbered with him, like he might be my sort. I am going to tell the next person who asks me if I have heard the one about…that no, I haven’t, and no, actually I don’t want to hear it.
A sunny but freezing cold February day, I have started to resent being stuck in the office on sunny days at work, resent not being able to be outdoors, which is God’s way of telling me that at my age I should probably be thinking of retiring. No chance until I have saved up for proper pension plan and⁄or face lift and Botox programme.
February 14th
Every year is the same. He leaves it until he comes home from work, which means that I am in a potentially cross mood all day, I mean a girl needs flowers on Valentine’s Day. And not from the Shell garage. Mind you, you wouldn’t want it to go the other way – get a huge bunch of flowers from a really posh florist, or a romantic surprise weekend in Paris – not after 18 years of marriage – could only mean he was having an affair so best be grateful for normality. Even my mother has had a card. Rang me up to tell me, as though I’m her new best friend. Sounded like she’d been at the sherry. Feel ridiculously a bit jealous.
Find Valentine card under my pillow. Hadn’t looked this morning. Apologise.
February 16th
I’m becoming the kind of woman who shops in supermarkets and dumps her unwanted goods anywhere. Boot polish by the cream crackers, hair mousse by the fresh meats, I don’t care. They make so much money out of me and everyone else I figure it’ll give them all something to do. If there’s a queue at the checkouts I ask someone who seems slightly less gormless than the others and looks older than 12 if they could possibly open another lane, which is code for I’ll cause a riot if not. And why don’t any of them know what anything they sell actually is? Don’t pretend you know what sundried tomatoes are when you don’t, young man. Don’t direct me to the freezer section when I ask for some Haloumi cheese.
February 17th
Finally go to library and tick it off my ‘to do’ list with a flourish and a lot of scribbling out – almost tearing the paper. Must be five years since I set foot in the place – when we used to sit on the little chair in the children’s section when the girls were small, when they were still mine, when they still adored me…still liked me even. Like most public libraries ours has an overwhelming smell of flatulence, mixed with wet coats, and is full of tramps sheltering from the rain and a lot of people who look like they just got made redundant and are scanning the jobs pages on-line to save buying them.
I ask if they have the latest Jamie Oliver, and that I’d heard that if they didn’t they would have to order it for me since I am a fully paid-up member of community and library to boot. Unsurprisingly it is not that simple. They have to try all the local libraries first to see if they have it, and then, if they do, you have to wait your turn in the queue to see if someone returns it. Plus it costs 90p to do a search. Libraries are evidently not the sort of place for an impatient cow like me. I turn my attention to the videos, something educationally sound for the girls, tease them away from America’s Top Model and the annoying Paris Hilton. I browse along the carousels – I was hoping for all those nice David Attenborough series, or something on architecture, or even a really good film like Love Actually, I was thinking The Office, 24 series 3, that sort of caper, but what they have is a miserable selection of things which might tip you over the edge. Live alone and have an evening in with one of these and you might just lose the will to live. T’ai Chi for Arthritis…Farming Equipment in Yesteryear…Painting with Acrylics…Understanding Falconry-you’d have trouble shifting these at a car boot sale. Lug them into the Oxfam shop and they’d make you take them back to the car in disgust.
The romance section catches my eye. The books have the kind of binding I recall that my mother and her sister used to take to Bournemouth on holiday, Mills and Boon type stories but obviously not so ‘common’. The sort of thing I should be reading too – perhaps – a woman of my age and standing…some of them in large print…even better. The titles are marvellously atmospheric: A Bride by Accident, In His Tender Care, His Virgin Secretary, His Very Personal Assistant. On second thoughts, they sound a bit dodgy. Maybe my mother was reading
a bit of soft porn on the quiet.
I borrow five books which all seem like they could lead to some hobbies. A woman of my age should start to have hobbies for when the kids leave home, your husband is too old for any hanky-panky and your sciatica is playing up. Some crochet. Some needlepoint, or some nice gentle yoga exercises for the over forties and some nice easy rambles for a Sunday afternoon. They weigh a ton, but I feel sorted.
Get a parking ticket outside the library. Could have bought three books of my very own for the price…including the latest Jamie Oliver. Instead of which I have borrowed five books I sort of half want to read or feel I might find useful. Which is very bad indeed. But worse than that the mess it has made on the windscreen is horrendous. Get home and go inside and get soapy water and green scourer and give it some elbow grease. Only half of it shifted.
February 20th
My periods are going berserk again. One month there’s nothing at all and then the next I am virtually housebound; sitting on someone’s cream sofa would be out of the question. I go to the doctor and she says I am peri-menopausal. Which sounds like it’s something to do with Perry Como. Then she asks me to get on the scales. I hate the way she wears her cardigan draped over her shoulders, makes her look stuck-up and pleased with herself. She sends off some blood tests to see how near I am to the change, and shoos me away with a prescription for some sanitary towels that look like French bolster pillows and are as large. If I wore some skinny jeans I’d look like a transsexual on the front bottom bit.
She tells me to do a daily menstrual mood chart and put on all details of periods for the next four weeks and come back to see her for the results of the test. Plan to make it juicy reading for her, pity I can’t put in samples.
Spend a jolly half-hour filling in mood and menstrual chart first of all retrospectively over last 48 hours. Just put block letters all through both days saying IN A FILTHY FOUL MOOD FROM MORNING TILL NIGHT AND THEN ALL NIGHT TOO. Am becoming more of an adolescent than my teenage daughters.
Obviously I can’t do this on all 30 days and anyway it would make for very boring reading indeed. Might have to make up some really chirpy days. As in ‘had a lovely day today making quilt and walking in the fresh air’. Yes, right.
February 21st
Making the beds this morning, doing my daily bad-tempered Mary Poppins impression, folding-towels-and-putting-things-away routine that no one else does or cares about, and I find YOUNGEST’s diary. Under her bed. It’s a Dalmatian one with a lock and key, and it’s locked. Which of course instantly makes me want to read it. I prised it open enough to want to see more but not enough to know whether I need to proceed or not.
Lots of text words like ‘I h8’, and ‘hitting on someone’, which for those of you who don’t have teenage daughters means flirting to you and me, and I think I could read the end of ‘condoms’ because I could see ‘oms’, and wonder what else it could be – ’ pompoms’? ‘toms’ as in ‘tomatoes’? I don’t think so. Am I the sort of mother who finds the key and reads her daughter’s secret diary? Not sure. Will ponder.
February 25th
Go to hairdresser’s for highlights to cover up stupid childish purple daubings, and while I’m at it get the grey bits covered up again with highlights. Highlights are now crucial rather than simply desirable because of the spreading grey bits.
Why it takes so long is beyond me.
Faffing on with bits of silver paper, cooking under something that looks like it was in Bleep and Booster, you’re there so long shifts come on and go off again. Most of the time you can see they are thinking, ‘This woman is in her late forties…like it matters what her hair looks like, anyway.’ And they will insist on talking to you. All of them, the one that washes your hair, the one that ‘takes you through’, the colour technician (impressive job title or what?) and the hairdresser herself. Talk to you about the kind of things that you can predict to the letter. Are you going somewhere special tonight? Where are you going on your holidays? Are you all ready for Christmas? I want to shout, ‘SHUT UP SHUT UP SHUT UP! I don’t want to talk to you, I talk to people all day. I just want to read the paper and anyway to be honest I don’t feel like telling you about my holidays; you are eight and a half and look silly with your hair extensions and you’ve been out the back having a fag when you pretended you were mixing shove off.’ I take newspapers in, I take work in, sometimes I take my laptop in still they ask me if I’m going anywhere nice. Not that being rude would do you any good, they’d only take revenge and leave your colour on for too long.
Hairdressing salons aren’t the female refuge they used to be. Today there’s a bloke in an orange Day-Glo jacket who looked like he must be coming into the salon to tell us about a gas leak, but no, he checked in after me and to my astonishment he was at the next station with his own silver foil having highlights. Feel disorientated. Not sure I have ever slept with a man who’s had highlights just like mine, not ones to cover up the grey obviously, but some blond highlights, or a tattoo. Better get a move on.
February 27th
Told Jocasta that I was working at home. Doing my visuals for the presentation next week, but spent a happy two hours cleaning the Venetian blinds in the bathroom with new special gadget from Lakeland. Happy happy happy! Will have to catch up tomorrow.
∨ The Secret Diary of a Grumpy Old Woman ∧
March
March 1st
YOUNGEST opens front door wearing shortest skirt to date, more of a belt than a skirt, says she’s going ‘shopping’…which judging by the outfit involves meeting some boys. She’s spent the morning soaking in the bath, straightening her hair and yelling at me for – apparently – hiding her favourite top. Which I haven’t. But I might hide that skirt, or better still ruin it in the wash, or iron it and singe it ‘by mistake’, oops silly me. Like my own mother did. Only I would cover my tracks better. My mother denied confiscating my red patent stack-heeled slingbacks in the 1970s, the ones that made me look like Dave Hill in Slade…and I believed her, till I found them in the dustbin. And now here I am, one generation on, and I find myself shouting that I will not allow her to go out like that, and when she asks why I say she looks common. Which is just what my mother would have said to me. And when she ignores me and says I am sooooo sad, I resort to telling her she can’t because I say so. So much for all the anger management sessions at work.
For some reason at home I am incapable of using any of those skills, because I am resorting to just yelling at the top of my voice to tell her not to. With no visible effect at all, since she goes out in the outfit just the same. Must be more to this than meets the eye.
Decide to have another go at getting into her diary once the coast is clear. Get the pliers out and, hey presto, I’m in. Feel ashamed of myself intruding into her private thoughts in a way that I utterly disapprove of but apparently cannot override. In fact there is nothing but harmless girly talk about her friends (and enemies) and some boys she fancies. Shock horror. The ‘oms’ that I thought was the end of ‘condoms’ is in fact the end of ‘Toms house’, ‘Toms hair’, ‘Toms friend’, ‘Toms part in the play’…So yes, there is a boy involved but it all sounds reassuringly harmless. I am more disappointed that she still can’t do apostrophes than anything else. Stupid idea of mine to crack it open, and now I have to try to get the lock back on before she notices.
March 2nd
Jocasta sends us all down to head office in London for big all-day meeting. Audrey and I sit next to one another on the train. Audrey is even older than me. Lovely Audrey from accounts: I look at her and think that frankly she’s looking a bit older, a bit ragged round the eyes, she’s got the wrong shade of pink lipstick on, and a lot of it, and a jade-coloured top that if I’m honest doesn’t do her any favours, but then why would anyone in their right mind buy any clothes in the colour jade? She does that flappy thing and mouths ‘hot flush’ conspiratorially so the others can’t hear, like it’s meant for me, which it is, and I feel like moving seat
s and saying, ‘Look, I’m not as old as you, Audrey, I’m still young, still with it’ and realise how childish and futile and frankly how inaccurate that would be. Audrey, the very name defines her as middle-aged, as does mine; truth is we are in it together, there is no fighting it, we are the oldies, we are old girls, we need to embrace it and get on with it.
Doesn’t stop us having a good old bitch about Jocasta though, especially the ridiculous outfit she has on today for head office. Slitty skirt, heels that are so high she will be in agony, and bare legs which can only lead to heel blisters and some tragic plasters tomorrow. We decide to look out for them. She is holding forth on the train, the others are laughing a little too readily at her jokes, and Robin is going completely over the top fawning away and virtually sitting on her lap. Ghastly display. Sometimes being older means you can rise above such things, pretend you haven’t heard or go for a wander and say your back’s playing up. Looking forward to seeing –
Jocasta show off in front of her boss and having to do some sucking up herself.
Get there and the meeting is full of people trendier and younger than Jocasta. But Boss’s boss is in fact about my age. Felt good. Jocasta struggling when asked by him to kick off brainstorm on noisy ideas for next quarter. Saw her go a bit red and flounder for her notes. Worth the trip alone.
The Secret Diary of a Grumpy Old Woman Page 4