The usual rollercoaster of moods. One minute I am relaxed and content with the world, next I am in a filthy black mood, and all it took was switching on the telly and seeing America’s Top Model.
∨ The Secret Diary of a Grumpy Old Woman ∧
June
June 1st
It’s the first anniversary of my father’s death, and we don’t really know what to do as a family to mark it. There is no headstone or memorial statue or roundabout or road named after him, so we cling together, me and my mother, and are in a sobby mess most of the day, torturing ourselves looking at his diary during the last few weeks before his death. He hadn’t written a lot, most of it a string of specialist and doctor’s appointments, but on the last week he wrote in wobbly writing ‘I love you all’ and on the last day but one he wrote ‘Abide with me’, which was his way of saying he wanted that hymn played at his funeral. And I wish we had it on tape or we could go to church and ask for it to be played or something. Death seems such an awkward occasion to mark and of course that’s partly because we have allowed all the traditions and church to drop away from our lives. We go to the Abbey and light a candle and sob some more. You only get one Mum and one Dad and it’s only when they’re going, or gone, that you realise just how precious they are.
June 2nd
Read an article on IT information about how much your boss knows about you. It’s bad enough she knows I am rubbish at writing reports and leave early on Thursdays but apparently on top of knowing all about your emails, bosses can tell exactly how much time you spent logged on to which websites. Better stop shopping on-line at Tesco’s and Lakeland. Worse than that, apparently all the emails you delete get copied into a special top-secret deleted file for your boss to see – so all those emails you don’t want anyone to know about are picked out for special attention. Like for instance the ones you sent to chum in Manchester office about how much you detested your opposite number in Glasgow, or the one you sent to ex-boyfriend arranging lunch or – by far the worst – the ones you sent about Jocasta saying, ‘Have you seen what Jocasta is wearing today? I can see her bra. Get a room…’ Those are the ones that automatically get saved to a file and presumably are put in front of your boss quite succinctly in a manageable and rather interesting beginning of the day ritual. Am viewing her with new eyes. Will need to watch this. And plan to delete every email I send immediately so she is inundated with deleted data from my email address – that way she will get bored with it v. quickly. Mind you, she doesn’t look that busy at the moment.
June 4th
We’re all dashing about cramming a month’s work into one day, so if there’s one thing that gets us madder than anything else it’s someone holding us up for a second or two. Which means that the whole business of daily life is more stressy than most of us can cope with. AND the icing on the cake is that someone – probably a civil servant – spends their day thinking up 100 NEW ways to hold us up or catch us out, or dreams up a spitefully confusing set of speed regulations or parking rules that you’d have to be a member of Mensa to figure out. No waiting, maximum three hours, Monday to Thursday 8am to 9.30, what? Can I park there or can’t I? Speak in plain English please. Then there’s all the pay and display nonsense. Fiddling about with coins and stickers that you can’t get off afterwards. Why can’t we have free valet parking for all, like they do apparently in Hollywood. That’s what I call a party manifesto. Want the female vote, you can start with that. Failing that, put a grumpy old woman in charge. Have it sorted in a jiffy.
It’s all so tiresome and tedious…half the time you can’t even park outside your own house. I mean I don’t even live in central London, so I don’t think that’s too much to ask. It’s tempting to put your own traffic cones out. Suddenly I am drawn to one of those stupid signs people put outside their house, on their garden wall, which I always thought were tragic, NO PARKING or KEEP CLEAR AT ALL TIMES, the ones you see and immediately know are the work of some mad old Neighbourhood Watch warden or mad old bat, not by anyone official or important. The ones that when you were younger you ignored, or specifically parked in front of on purpose to annoy them.
If it’s not stupid parking rules that hold you up it’s the senseless series of holes in the road that are dug and then filled in again over and over and over again. They have to be doing that on purpose to annoy you too. Complained to woman from Happy Family next door about road being dug up again and stupid traffic-flow arrangements and she said hadn’t really noticed, looked at me pityingly, like I am mad. Is there no end to her happy serene disposition? What is she on? Think I might go through her dustbins to find out.
June 10th
The A level exams are in full swing…along with the inevitable heatwave. Endless glorious sunny days with temptingly blue skies just as my poor babies have to be sitting in exam halls.
Jane 12th
The annual travelling fair is in town. When I was young I used to worry about the odd thing, like whether Melanie Smith would get off with Graham Bostock, or how to get a tampon in, but on the whole life was a doddle. Now I could worry for a living. I could worry about everything and anything because the whole world is programmed to make me worry more, and when the fair comes to town my worry reaches its annual peak.
Curiously when I was a teeny-bopper I sought out scary things, scary was fun, scary was actually the point. Why else would you have gone to fairgrounds? OK so you might have wanted to know what a love bite was…But it was thrilling. You were excited. Now fairgrounds are my worst nightmare. Once a year the kids drag me off to a horrible muddy field with rides that are so dangerous you have to be strapped in like an astronaut. Rides have got bigger and bigger and bigger. The bigger, the higher, the more the kids want to go on it. I can’t even watch. Not even bribing them with more pocket money is going to put them off. Worse, they want me to go on some too. Maybe I could start off with the dodgems…Except even they look really scary…there aren’t any lanes, or lights, or helmets or safety belts. Maybe I could hog the outside lane, hog the edge and try to avoid everyone else – which is kind of missing the point.
The little kids’ rides then. I could offer to look after someone’s teeny-weeny. Could risk a little teacup – as long as no one pushes it too fast. Only one I dared to try was the trusty old-fashioned helter-skelter. The girls came on to humour me…Got halfway up and thought they must be infinitely bigger and taller than when I used to go on them as a kid, and had to come down step by step backwards and got myself clogged up and in a mess with upcoming toddlers. Help had to be sought.
Everything feels like the worst-case scenario. The rides run by a man who looks distracted and is more interested in page 3 of the Sun; it’s making you so nervous you feel sick, you could throw up. In your mind the whole thing could so easily change from a harmless sunny carefree day at the fair to a massive disaster, tens of people crushed inside the machinery. Trouble is that no one else worries properly, not as properly as I do. Which means I have to be worrying for everyone else too. The whole world has to be worried for by me. No wonder I’m worn out.
June 14th
At work I was in a particularly dreadful meeting today and found myself daydreaming about retiring, for the first time. When I was in my thirties retirement seemed so far off it was an impossibility. Tied in with pebble-dashed bungalows and scrimping and saving, saving margarine pots to grow seeds in and generally being on the scrap heap. Now the idea of planting little things in margarine pots and being able to listen to a play on Radio 4 in the afternoon seems like it could be fun. Well, fun is the wrong word – I don’t really do fun any more – but I can imagine myself doing all that and feeling rather at peace somehow, relaxed, chilled, together. Although those afternoon plays on Radio 4 can be a bit rubbish, especially when they involve someone pretending to be American, which is alarmingly frequent…Someone who can’t do an American accent to save their life. Evidently my grumpiness would be unlikely to evaporate. It’s why people of my age suddenly start re
ading the financial pages. Suddenly they wake up to the fact that they need to save enough money to retire. It’s taken me until middle age to realise that money is as important as it is in terms of giving us choice. I don’t mean masses of money, I mean enough money to be able to make some lifestyle choices once in a while like, hey, I’ve been doing this job for 20 years now and do you know I would really rather like to spend some more time doing not very much. Might have the odd day without a ‘to do’ list. Now I really am entering the realms of fantasy.
June 20th
Big programme on telly last night about woman with breast cancer. Sobbed uncontrollably, and so when I got out of the shower I took a look in the mirror and did a bit of checking for lumps. Nothing nearly as systematic as you should, but better than nothing…I put my bra on and I notice my skin is bulging under my armpit – there is a little pushy-out sort of lump that bulges over my bra. Am so shocked that adrenalin starts pumping round my body so much I have to go for a poo. Still in my dressing gown I get the book out. Find well-thumbed breast cancer page…One of the things you should look out for is a different shape of breast, some lump or pucker or bulge that is not normally there. Sweaty palms now. Am writing mental letters to the girls, thinking through what I should do first, go to India, resign in an attention-seeking flurry, make a speech in the middle of the office perhaps, send a moving email that is tragically emotionally charged.
Call the doctor’s surgery and they say there is nothing till Thursday week. I pull out my trump card: ‘I have found a lump.’ You can hear in her voice that she has been taught to put people like me straight in, straight to the top of the list. Feel absurdly pleased with myself. ‘1.30 this afternoon.’ I feel like air punching, I beat the system, got up the queue! The euphoria dies down when I remember why.
Spend the morning at work unable to do anything constructive but Googling ‘breast cancer’. And look out my pension plan and prices of flights to India just in case I don’t have time later. It’s not that I actually positively think I am dying – yet – it’s more that I am mentally preparing myself for the fact that one day I will, which of course is irrefutable and so might as well get some of the stuff done now. It doesn’t help that every five minutes someone writes another book about all the things we are supposed to do before we die, or things we are supposed to see or the things we are supposed to say…It all makes me feel restless and even more stressed than usual. Endless books and TV programmes which only add to our ‘to do’ list, because most of us are too damn busy to get round to it. And I seem to have spent my whole time as a mother basically worrying about whether I am going to die, or the kids are going to die. When ELDEST was born, the stakes suddenly felt higher than I could possibly have imagined. I had to say to myself, if only she lives until her first birthday, her first party dress with a sash on the back, her first day at school, her first length at the swimming pool, if only I can live until she leaves school, until she goes to university – her very existence was so precious.
It’s not entirely because I am neurotic, it’s partly because I have experienced death in the family at first hand, and of course until you have you don’t really have a handle on it. My father was one of my favourite people and I was the one to receive the news, the one called into the specialist’s office; my mother was too scared. I remember walking in and doing my touch my collar, touch my toes little superstition routine, and saying to the specialist something jaunty when I went in like ‘hope it’s not going to be dreadful news’, and him not correcting me, so then I knew, and then the Macmillan nurse came in…You know it’s not going to be good news when they show up. My father only had a very short time to live, they didn’t say how long, but suddenly, life was measured in a cup I couldn’t get the measure of and neither could he. There is never a good time to die. Never a time when you think oh well, it’s a fair cop. Life is simply something everyone clings to.
I get into the doctor’s surgery with my breast lump worry, and blurt it out, and with it come tears. She examines my breasts and gives me the strange all-over circling, stroking thing with her hands and I have to concentrate very hard not to think about the sexual connotations, concentrate on not giving her eye contact while she is doing it, and trying not to let my nipples go hard. And then she says, ‘Where is this lump?’ I sit up and say well my skin is bulging, look under my left arm there’s a little pleat. I assume she is going to say, ‘Oh yes, you’re right, let’s whisk you straight into hospital, and by the way have you thought of burial at sea, I hear it’s all the rage,’ but she makes me stand up and put my bra on. Says, ‘Have you thought of getting a bra fitted in M & S?’
‘What do you mean, a special bra?’
‘No, just a bigger bra. The skin is pushing on both sides, you need a bigger bra cup.’
I could kill her. As I’m getting dressed she puts the knife in and says, ‘Next time can we assume it’s something ordinary?’
June 24th
YOUNGEST comes home with project work to do with musical production, which involves going to museum, making a gangster costume for her and for one chorus member, and a suggestion for private singing lessons with local tutor. Great, that’s about a week’s work then. Thanks for that.
June 26th
Glued a drawer back together as fed up with waiting for GOM to get round to it on his list of little jobs I have given him…and in any case likely as not if he does do it, it will come apart again. So I got the super glue out. Left it for five minutes in the pantry to set to find it had and, hey, what do you know, it has already come unstuck. Like it always does, unless presumably you stand there for 40 minutes holding it together with your fingers, in which case you would have successfully glued your fingers to the drawer as well. I just wish glue would work. Just the once would be nice.
June 27th
What is it with phrases and sayings? When you get older you are more prone to things getting on your nerves – it just happens, and the things people say generally set you off. And once you’ve noticed something that is annoying there is really no going back. Phrases such as ‘no problem at all’ when you ask for a coffee at Starbucks, well I didn’t think there would be a problem – what with it being a café. I have started to say ‘you take care’. People say, ‘Gosh what a great idea, do you know I think I will from now on.’ And one that just bugs me and I fear I will pass on to you once you realise, the phrase ‘PIN number’; surely ‘PIN’ means ‘personal identification number’, so it’s just a PIN not a PIN number. And breathe…
Happy Family house next door is for sale. Must be moving.
∨ The Secret Diary of a Grumpy Old Woman ∧
July
July 1st
Instigated brilliant new system in kitchen, which feels like the domestic equivalent of discovering penicillin. My brilliant new system is a solution to a daily problem, namely that no one knows in our house whether the dog and cats have been fed because there is no specific rota for who is responsible for feeding them. And we all end up having to text, phone, call up the stairs or down the garden to find out whether the animals have or haven’t been fed at any one sitting, which is very annoying indeed. So I had a fantastic idea…I have typed out a big neat sign to keep by mission control next to the kitchen phone, which says ANIMALS ARE FED. This way the first person down in the morning (by person I normally mean adult, the children don’t even think about feeding their pets) feeds all three animals and then props the sign up leaning on windowsill by the phone, thus avoiding overfed or underfed pets. Brilliant. So brilliant that I popped into the stationer’s in town and had the sign laminated. Crikey, my whole life suddenly felt SORTED!
Inevitably I started to get carried away…I might laminate some signs for upstairs too. Like one to say the immersion is on, or one that says lights and darks for linen basket. Then – alas – GOM points out big problem…the bubble bursts…because the animals all need feeding twice a day, so now the sign is propped up by the phone saying animals are fed, but if i
t is still there at 4pm does that mean they have been fed a second time, or just that no one has turned the sign back over again? There is a dangerous period between feeds, and between the sign being turned back down again and being put back up again, where system breaks down. Because, come four o’clock in the afternoon, whose responsibility is it to turn it back round the other way so that we know at teatime that the animals have in fact NOT been fed at all? Just as I start to feel my life is in order and I am in control, the whole thing falls apart again. Of course I could make two different laminated signs, one which said animals fed am and the other which said animals fed pm – even I can see that this is verging on dysfunctional behaviour, actually never mind the verging on…People would come and see the signs and think I needed help rather than want some signs of their own.
I decide to stick with the one original sign and now there are no phone calls from home in the morning about whether I have fed the animals, but still phone calls in the afternoon. Have you fed the animals? No, have you? In short, we are no further on, plus we only got the pets in the first place for the children, and we shall be joining the grumpy band of middle-aged empty nesters who walk the dog, feed the cat and take the hamster to the vet long after their darling children leave home. It’s the empty nester equivalent of being left holding the baby, or the Labrador or the poodle or the gerbil. Only babies are interesting.
July 2nd
A small ad saying MYSTERY SHOPPERS WANTED caught my eye – a large retail chain is looking for people to be mystery shoppers to record on hidden camera the service their staff are giving. Sort of restaurant inspectors but for shop staff. This job has my name on it, I could do it standing on my head, and I could certainly do it for a living. I ring the number to find out more about it, but answer machine is bleeping that it’s full. Other people, eager to wreak their revenge, got there before me. Damn!
The Secret Diary of a Grumpy Old Woman Page 9