The reception area in Orthodontics is very Early Learning Centre, and the walls are painted with a hideous multi-coloured mural probably painted by some work-experience kids with negligible talent, and a video of Postman Pat is playing in the corner. ‘Oh this is nice, darling,’ I say. Sarcasm escapes her still, but I enjoy it.
Conversation with her is a bit strained. As ever. And is naturally totally one-way. There isn’t anything she would ever want to say to me. Except maybe to ask where I’ve put her hair gel, or to ask for pocket money…sorry, her allowance.
‘Have you had a nice day at school, love? Much homework?’
‘You asked me that in the car.’
‘Oh, sorry.’
‘What did you have for lunch?’
‘Can’t you think of anything more interesting to ask me?’
‘What did you do in physics, then?’
‘We don’t do physics on Thursdays. Anyway it’s just science. Not physics. We don’t DO physics.’
‘He’s going to give me a brace like Veronica Bryce’s, isn’t he?’
‘You don’t know, darling. He might give you one to just put in at night.’
Sometimes I can be so two-faced.
‘I think it’s time we got these teeth straightened out, YOUNG LADY,’ says the orthodontist. At least other people get it all wrong with her too. And there it is. The little beauty. Gleaming and sparkling under the lights. Like a piece of postmodern metallic sculpture. Looking as if it might double as a waste disposer if you plugged it in the mains.
YOUNGEST looks as if she might pass out. Or be sick. Or both. Then I go and feel sorry for her. Because prolonging her childhood is perhaps the real reason why I’m keen on the brace – a way of keeping her (and me) together in her childhood which seemed a safer place to be than her imminent adulthood.
She starts to sob again in the car and now the whole thing is ruined. I’d hoped to swan off and feel all excellent about this, and now she’s made me feel sorry and protective. Sometimes motherhood is a tough old game.
May 5th
The HRT is still having the effect of increasing my libido. The GRUMPY OLD MAN is going the other way, sooner be sorting his vinyl collection or writing to Radio 4. Spiteful of God to plan things this way. It’s not exactly as though I can just go out and get some nookie of my own, like I might go out to the Garden Centre and get some climbing hydrangeas. Not without making a complete fool of myself. If you were some old fading celebrity, you’d have a toy boy, some squeaky clean young boy who held your hand at parties and then married you when you promised to give him a share of the loot. You can’t tell me they’d be a good lay. They’d be after all your nice moisturisers in the bathroom. But someone who found me utterly urgently irresistible again would be jolly nice. I don’t mean anything remotely complicated or too tiring. I can’t be doing with anything romantic or emotionally demanding, it’s more that I could fancy some good hard urgent sex – no questions asked. Wham bam, thank you, mam. So what’s a girl to do?
Found myself thinking about the postman the other day when I answered the door in my dressing gown and had to sign for a parcel. As if I was in a Benny Hill sketch with the milkman. But, you know, I am ashamed to see how it can happen, how a woman of a certain age could go for someone like that. I don’t want any emotional involvement or a silly affair, I just want the odd one-night stand. Probably with the lights off. With someone who looks a bit better than some saddo trainspotter with a personal hygiene problem who would be likely to pick me up if I was sad enough to go and sit at a bar somewhere.
I don’t want to lurk about in silly singles bars, or go speed dating…Strikes me that just plain being able to pay for it might be an idea. I mean buying the odd half-hour with the kind of bloke you’d have gone for in your twenties, or would have gone for you, more to the point. But where? It’d have to be somewhere totally respectable; obviously I couldn’t be doing with going into massage parlours or red-light districts, but say it was somewhere like the Ideal Home exhibition, or John Lewis. It could be in Haberdashery, somewhere no one would suspect was anything other than the kind of place middle-aged invisible women go to hang out and choose knitting patterns or buttons. Even if you went with the GOM you could say it was a broderie anglaise demonstration, say you’d meet him at Asda in half an hour, he wouldn’t know the difference. That way you could have some delicious young Adonises who might like to make a bit of money on the side. We could make sure it was nice and neat and tidy – half-hour sessions would be fine – and then we could get on. No one would be the wiser.
Of course in the unlikely event that I was on the pull, on the market, I’d have to buy some condoms. No getting away from it. Where from? Why can’t they sell them at Lakeland, never mind the biscuit carrier or the microwave splatter shield, what about something to put in your handbag that looks like an apple corer or a portable pan scourer but comes with some condoms in a hidden compartment. Not like those stupid tampon holders that are supposed to look stylish and subtle in your bag but look like nothing else but tampon holders in turquoise, something clever.
You’d still have to buy them though. I know, better still…Lakeland should just put some in with the postage and packing, there should be a subtle box you can tick on the form which doesn’t say condoms yes or no but something in code like, would you like your postage donated to hungry African elves, and you can tick it…and they know. Then when your bird-table tidy arrives and the condoms fall out you can tut and say, ‘Goodness what do they do that for?’ and then sneak a few away in a secret store.
Shocking, isn’t it? It’s just that people assume we don’t want sex any more. Well, we do…and then again we don’t. It’s a bit all over the place, like everything else.
May 6th
Join a telephone queue to mobile phone company to ask why I still have not had a refund for returned fancy mobile. We go through the usual five or six options and I wait for as long as it takes to hear the calming music loop at least twice, and then they come on and offer a new option. I jump to attention because I think with flush of excitement that I am about to get through to a person. Joy of joys! Alas, no, it announces that they are doing a survey on customer satisfaction with mobile services and that this survey will not affect your place in the queue and that it will take 15 seconds. Dilemma. If you spend the 15 seconds out of the queue, will it mean that you get fast-tracked because you have been teacher’s pet, or is it a double bluff as it tempts losers like me to spend an extra 15 seconds and lose my place in the queue and they’ll have my postcode and that’ll mean more catalogues with Peruvian woollen socks on the hall floor?
So I go for it, out of desperation as much as anything else, and hey presto I get through fast as fast. Chirpy woman tells me her name is Rita, yes yes yes, like I care what her name is, like we’re going to be new best friends, and she asks me a series of stupid multiple-choice questions: am I more satisfied or less satisfied, is it a 6 or a 7 score, 6 being the least satisfied, it’s hard not to lose my temper but of course you play ball because you are still in the queue, or so they say. They do ask me for my postcode, which was the big one I was expecting, but in desperation I give it to her (if I had been thinking fast enough I would have given her someone else’s – like Jocasta’s or my mother-in-law’s). And they pass you back to the main menu…Marvellous. Back to the chirpy music, but now there’s a message saying you are…electronic pause…number 12 in the queue. Result. Only another eight minutes or so and you actually get through to someone who says they will look into it.
But there is fall-out like you would expect, and it’s a lot worse than Peruvian knitwear catalogues; you are contacted on a weekly basis from now to establish whether you are now more or less satisfied with their service than you were when they conducted the telephone survey. And by other companies that have been passed your number. I could cheerfully lob my mobile into a bog. And it would give me great pleasure. But for only about two minutes and then it would be extremely annoy
ing.
May 10th
Wondrous new fridge delivered, like the one in the background on all the cookery TV shows. Spent the afternoon organising where I am going to keep everything. Feel like Doris Day or Martha Stewart. My life is complete. Well, it would be complete if it was plumbed in. They didn’t mention that the thing needs a plumber to install it. Yes, right, so that’s going to be easy, isn’t it?
May 15th
Call plumber.
May 16th
Call new plumber.
May 17th
Plumber arrives. I have to sign a form which confirms the exact time of his arrival. When I say his exact time of arrival, I mean he looks at his watch and asks me to check with mine, and he puts in a big box on the form – arrival time – 17.12. He charges £75 for the first hour and then £50 for anything into the next hour. In my next life I am going to be a plumber; even poking around in people’s loos is worth it with this kind of money. He’s probably going to retire at 35, already holidays at Sandy Lane in Barbados with the Michael Winners of this world…and I think of poor ELDEST studying for A level Classics, Greek and French, why bother, makes me feel like suggesting she just becomes a lady plumber, she’d clean up – but literally, unfortunately.
I don’t offer him a coffee, what with the meter running so seriously. He hooks the back of the fridge up in less than five minutes, so in a flush of gratitude I do make him a cup of coffee. He chats to me, I feel like saying ‘How much is this costing me? If I didn’t think you were so arrogant and objectionable I might get my money’s worth and suggest some hanky-panky upstairs, kill two birds with one stone.’ But by the time he is packing up it is about 17.56. Suddenly I notice there is now a red light on by the water dispenser. It’s still not actually dispensing water. I hand him the manual, like he can have the miserable job of looking it up, but aware that I only have about 15 minutes left of his meter running. He hands it back to me, disinterested, unmoved – ’ You have to contact stockists to get a water filter.’ I sign the out time with bad temper. Could easily have toddler tantrum right here and now on the kitchen floor. If I really was a toddler in this sort of mood someone would put me in the high chair with the safety restraints.
I ring up the shop where we bought the wretched fridge, go through two idiotic assistants before I can get to someone with some sense and they say, ‘You have to go on to the website.’ Go on to the website, so that’s nice and convenient, isn’t it? Getting logged on and on to the website takes another 15 minutes. The whole thing seems to be based in Detroit and the help section is something only teenagers can navigate through, and naturally there is no phone number to ring. So I email them in the little box ‘contact us’ and explain my problem as politely as possible. Which is not very politely. Then I log on for the next three days in the hope that someone has answered. I might have known this fridge was cheaper than the other ones for good reason.
These days everything in the kitchen seems to be a battleground. Our mothers were thrilled to bits with their new Formica, Bakelite and high-level grills – tickled pink with their new Kenwood mixer and Tupperware – but as usual we had to mess with it. Turn it into rocket science. Space shuttles have control panels that are easier to operate than your average kitchen these days. Every new appliance comes with another stupid booklet to clog up the drawer. The oven’s complicated with knobs on. Hundreds of knobs. All devilishly pointless, 17 different ways to roast a chicken. Never mind reading the manual – you need to go on a course to use some of it. It’s only a casserole, dear. We’re not splitting the atom.
Even the microwave – designed with the slovenly in mind – has gone all fancy pants and multiple choice. What with plated meals and crispy tops and fast boil, the usual pointless palaver. Which is convenient for whom exactly?
Eventually Detroit fridge filter mission control replies saying I have to go to registered stockists of filters, which doesn’t include the shop where I bought it, so I have to ring directory enquiries – a joy in itself. I go through a million options on the recorded menu and eventually leave a message. I could kill, I really could. The red light will still be on by Christmas, I know it.
May 20th
Come home from work to find house in a chaotic mess, not because the kids have wrecked it but because GOM is off work using up his annual leave. He’s had a massive onslaught on the garden. Which means that he has weeded but got bored with it, so borders that were perfectly OK are now a mess.
May 21st
Come down in the morning to find that kitchen is hideous blood-splattered murder scene. Dog looking sheepish in her bed and on further examination reveals remains of a dead bat. Bad enough, but in her excitement at chasing the bat around – presumably in the middle of the night – she has shat herself, which in addition to the blood everywhere on the walls, is a great start to the day. Having to get on your knees with some rubber gloves on to clean it all up and then bag it all up and take to the bin – and all before 7am.
May 23nd
Now we have bats in the house. They are all over the place. I mean it’s one thing to have them swooping around in the garden, but on the landing it’s a bit much.
Watching Desperate Housewives last night, just minding my own business and one swooped right in my hair. Every time one appears, all three of us females in the house start screaming and covering our heads like we’re in Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds. GOM caught one in a fishing net – could have kissed him I was so impressed. Had a look at it when it was captive in net and was shocked to see it had a face; I’m sure it winked at me. Had to call in the Bat Protection Society and a strange woman with shoes that looked like tractor tyres, long hair, patchwork hippy trousers and red satchel turned up. Apparently we are not allowed to get rid of them or even disturb them because they’re a protected species so we have to live with them in the house, they could be swarming for months…Far from realising how we are all under house arrest, afraid to open any door in case one or two of them come swooping out at us like the Red Arrows, she seemed quite envious. She probably goes to Glastonbury.
May 30th
I have developed a bit of an obsession about the family next door. ‘Happy Family’ I call them. Since they moved in I’ve taken to looking into their kitchen more than is probably good for me (the kitchen is the only easily visible room unless I stand at the bottom of the garden where I can see directly into their living room, but a woman of my age who snoops into other people’s houses easily turns into Hilda Ogden and it would not be good for my image at all). She is in her early thirties, with long dark hair that she plonks up in one of those plastic bulldog clips – very good-looking in a motherly I’ve-been-out-for-some-fresh-air sort of way. She’s a stay-at-home mum as far as I can see, and husband is dark, very good-looking and smiles and laughs a lot. They are obviously blissfully happy and I have even seen them dancing in the kitchen. When do we ever do anything as joyous as that?
The bit of the kitchen in my viewfinder extends from the sink backwards to the kitchen table (half of) and the noticeboard behind. You can tell an awful lot about a family from this particular slice of their environment. Or I can. I never see any takeaway cartons stacked up on the draining board, and there is endless evidence of creative play for the children. Lots of gorgeous kids’ drawings and things made out of paper plates and plaster of Paris stuck on the noticeboard or on the kitchen table for all to admire for weeks on end. Home-made bread on cooling racks. She has a sewing machine that I can sometimes see half of on the kitchen table – curtains, girls’ dresses, all sorts of gorgeous home-making activities that make me feel profoundly useless. The kids look untidy but cheerful, and are often cuddled up with Mum or Dad over a bowl of hot chocolate or a good book. Sometimes I think I’m peering into this kitchen just in order to find something wrong, some evidence of unhappiness or dysfunction that would make me feel better. I never find it. Today in their kitchen is something that looks like home-made Father’s Day cards and on the drying-up rack are fou
r bowls and a soup ladle – probably the aftermath of some organic wholesome home-made soup. I was never that good a mother. Makes me sick.
Go to beautician for usual waxing ritual, bikini line has become a spreading mass of hair. Once it was really only just around the line of my pants, now just as it’s all thinning round my front bottom it’s on the move, all growing rapidly like a lot of ground elder towards my knees. Spiteful beautician says it was really now more of an upper leg and lower leg wax than the usual half leg and bikini job. Would have argued with her if she had not been on the action end of the waxing strips in what I can only describe as an excruciating area. She also suggests a non-interventionist facial, which effectively is getting yourself plugged into a load of electrodes and pulling faces to tauten and tighten up your facial muscles which in my case are – I notice with horror – starting to sag. All very depressing. Then, cheek of it, she says would I like her to deal with some of the blackheads. If only I had known being a beautician would have meant such a thing I, wouldn’t have bothered going to university at all. The idea of earning a living popping other people’s blackheads would have been all the job satisfaction needed.
Home, and I am in the pyjamas and slippers in a jiffy. I think when I get into my dressing gown of an evening I actually make a kind of sighing noise like the one my mother makes when she takes her first sip of tea.
The Secret Diary of a Grumpy Old Woman Page 8