The Secret Diary of a Grumpy Old Woman

by Judith Holder

  September 17th

  We drive ELDEST up to Aberdeen, the car packed full of her clothes, jewellery, shoes, mugs and little knick-knacks she is taking to personalise her room. GOM manages the drive all the way up there without any nagging or interrogation at all, talks about politics, Africa, pop music, and it is left to me to ask her about registering with the student doctor, checking her insurance and to remember to buy fruit regularly. I know it doesn’t do me any good, but I can’t stop myself.

  Once we get to the Hall of Residence it becomes very hard indeed. Seems like the day before yesterday that I was going through the exact same thing with my own parents. We get to the second floor and the moment she sees another student she wants us gone, urgently. We bring the stuff up, the two of us in shifts, and know that we need to be gone as fast as possible. Your parents are a liability in this context. We scarper fast. But as soon as we are out of sight GOM pulls over in a lay-by and we both cry our eyes out.

  Get home to find my mother has left some flowers and a note for me saying, ‘She’ll be back, and when she does come back she’ll appreciate you all the more. Love Mum.’

  September 23rd

  The HRT pills don’t seem to be making any difference to my mood, but if anything I am more weepy. Prone to sobbing at the most ridiculous things like soppy adverts, or soppy birthday cards, or to my astonishment Rolf Harris singing ‘Two Little Boys’. Go back to doctor and say I might need to stop the HRT since it’s not working – I go from high as a kite to down in the dumps in about three seconds flat, can cry at the drop of a hat, and it is still making my libido go berserk. Assumed she would get me back on the menstrual mood diary-keeping again, but she simply tells me to go home and take up a hobby. I suppose some of my menstrual mood diaries were a bit over the top. Came home and made some plum jam, put it all in neat, clean little jam jars and then whizzed into town to buy some of those cute home-made jam labels – I put two of the best jars on one side to take up to Dundee for the first time we go to see ELDEST. It’s spookily just what my mother did. Hormones have a way of overriding even HRT it seems. Perhaps I am turning into a nice old lady.

  September 25th

  The farmers’ market comes to town. I see some like-minded women running a stall called the Farmers’ Wives. They have those nice ruched white collar blouses and Barbours on, and they’ve made some wonderful home-made lemon and apple tarts and home-made Bakewells. I envy them. They probably all have a large kitchen with a big Aga and some lambs warming, and a strapping farmer for a husband who comes in from the cold at 4pm and flops in front of the telly. A bloke who knows how to bleed a radiator, is good with his hands and has a ruddy complexion. Life would be simple, if a little predictable, the Farmers’ Wives meetings would be cheery, the profit going to their annual cheese and wine evening, or a ploughman’s lunch quiz night. But being a farmer’s wife you could man the teas and coffees, be busy putting up the ploughman’s lunches at the hatch while everyone else was trying to answer the difficult questions. I recognise the fact that this little fantasy of mine is not real, but I imagine that their lives are relatively simple compared to mine. That they don’t have to bother with too many emails or reports or deadlines, or office politics or anything of that nature. And that they live on the edge of some gorgeous wood or coppice and their children come home for Sunday lunch with their families. You’d think at my age I would have stopped thinking that the grass is always greener, stopped thinking that other people’s lives are more perfect, more happy than my own. Alas, with age it hasn’t got much better. The only thing I have learned is that the simpler your life the happier you are. The simpler your targets, the happier with a capital H you are. And their Bakewells are to die for.

  ∨ The Secret Diary of a Grumpy Old Woman ∧

  October

  October 1st

  Activity on the bird table is becoming rather sparse, only a couple of robins and a black thing with an orange beak today. I suppose with it being a bit colder they are hiding in their nests and stocking up for winter – or is that squirrels? I point this out as a matter of educational interest to YOUNGEST, saying how fascinating that they are probably spending more and more time in their nests, are about to hibernate, and she tells me with a mouth full of cereal, ‘They’ve migrated, dur’ (yet another biology lesson I did not pay enough attention to at school it seems), so I tidy the binoculars away upstairs.

  Once you have a pair of binoculars in your hands it’s hard not to use them. On anything at all. Inevitably I find myself looking over next door’s fence, poindessly scrutinising their hosepipes and lawnmower, and then pan over the back hedge and into the garden of the people whose house we back on to. They have a shed, so I try to see what they keep in it. I’m not even really that interested but the fact that I might be able to see in makes me want to see in.

  Apparently blokes use their sheds for soft porn, so look for evidence of such. Then scan over and I can see someone digging in garden two doors away-1 watch undetected…experience shameful thrill, have to get a grip and realise that this newfound interest in binoculars could get me in serious trouble. Maybe this explains why middle-aged people get into birdwatching in the first place, a harmless excuse to wander around with a pair of binoculars round your neck. It almost certainly explains the popularity of the Neighbourhood Watch scheme. Nothing to do with dreary meetings about dog fouling and everything to do with having an excuse to sit at the spare-room window with a pair of binoculars poking your nose into other people’s lives.

  October 2nd

  The first day of my two-day induction course as First Response Officer. We have all been sent to Leeds – I assume that since I am the most anxious catastrophiser person I know that I shall be top of class, maybe get home early since so much of the looking out for danger in everyday situations will be second nature for me, since this is what I do already. But alas, we are handed a huge introductory pack to familiarise ourselves with for tomorrow morning. Already I am beginning to think that the pitiful annual increment on offer will hardly be worth the hassle. Judging by the weight of the pack which we are told to read for tomorrow, which covers everything from do-it-yourself tracheotomies to basic midwifery, this course is not really meant to teach you anything but to tick boxes. OK it stops short of do-it-yourself amputation, which is thankfully unlikely in an open-plan HR office. Fair dos I suppose someone might conceivably fall out of the window down all six floors…but one would hope that someone would have the sense to dial 999 instead of calling the resident First Response Officer.

  Apart from anything else, I might be good at worrying about potential dangers in everyday situations, but am pitifully squeamish, so I would almost certainly have passed out either with the sight of the blood or the sheer scale of the seriousness of the situation. I’m having trouble even looking at the diagrams in this manual. No one could be expected to read this tome overnight. No – this is about companies covering themselves for blame. They send someone on a residential course, give them a badge and a pay increase, and then if someone did trip over someone else’s filing or electrocute themselves on the hand dryer in the ladies, the employer would be able to reduce their liability. Trouble is, I could do with the pay increase like everyone else, so here we are, all 15 of us, gathered at the bar, away from our families in a dreary out-of-town motel. I stay as long as is necessary and leave, having had considerable trouble balancing on the bar stool – I shall soon be so old people will bring me a chair to sit on at social gatherings and then abandon me. Which if I’m honest sounds quite good, then I wouldn’t have to make so much small talk. I guess the next step on the I-am-too-old-to-be-sociable scale is pretending you are a bit deaf. Neat idea.

  I loll in bed watching Newsnight-1 say watching but now that ELDEST is back in the UK and I’m not on third world disaster alert, I don’t really concentrate on any of the proper news. I’m really just looking at Jeremy Paxman and wondering whether his cute ties are ones he chooses himself or does his wife or partn
er do that for him, and if so what does that say about him and their relationship? Have never noticed him with wifey in the gossip columns. Even if she’s indifferently pretty she’ll have a Double First from Oxford – Paxman’s not stupid. Fall asleep not having got any further than the section on Strain Injury and wake up at 02.16 to find the telly’s still on and hideously hot room. Wish I was at home and that I hadn’t agreed to do this silly course. And also wish I hadn’t eaten Pringles from minibar.

  October 3rd

  The woman who is running the stupid course is a little gender unspecific. She’s wearing ghastly gabardine trousers and has a belt with a leather attachment for a mobile, a toggle would not look out of place or a whistle, and she’s a bit scary. Hope there’s not too much practical role play work. The first thing she does is she gets us to close our information pack and look at her, then she holds up a felt tip marker pen, and she asks us all to tell her what it is – no one says anything. Let’s start again. I repeat…What is this?’ It’s like being at the panto but without the choc ice. ‘A pen. Thank you, yes, a pen, at last.’ Then she throws the marker pen on the floor. And then she says, ‘OK, now tell me what it is.’ We look even more perplexed than when she held it up in the first place. One of us sheepishly says, ‘A pen on the floor.’

  ‘Come on, you lot, wakey wakey. What is it now?’ No one has the faintest idea what she is getting at. ‘A hazard. Repeat after me, a hazard…A pen on the floor is a hazard. Why? Because someone can slip on it, someone could have a fall, and who’s fault would it be, whose responsibility is it to look out for such things? Yours!’

  On and on she goes, bossing us about and flipping over charts and doing Powerpoint presentations about hazards and potential hazards, and then she shows us a risk assessment video. We all look like we might have a bit of a snooze in the dark, but apparently an exam follows…We have to watch it and assess the potential risks; we have to imagine we are setting up a circus tent in Harrogate, and it is the most complicated scenario imaginable involving crowd control, toxic gases, seat scaffolding and wild animals. Which all seems absurdly irrelevant since the riskiest office procedure we are likely to be assessing is changing the photocopier ink cartridge or finding an extension lead. The inevitable multiple choice questionnaire follows. Why is it with multiple choices there is never a box that says ‘it depends’ or ‘maybe’ or ‘sometimes’? My score is pitifully low, not because I have ignored potential hazards but because I have rated everything as high risk. I’m anxious about everything. A modern-day Captain Mainwaring, hopeless in a crisis, too panicked and nervous to be any use to anyone at all.

  The afternoon First Aid sessions ends with a home-made splint and I think I am going to keel over; my imagination has simply run into overdrive. Severed bones, arteries and limbs fill my frenzied mind and I have to go and lie down in their First Aid room for half an hour to compose myself. Bossy Boots rings head office and I am sent home. Wasn’t much of a pay increase anyway.

  October 4th

  ELDEST is coming home from university for the first time for the weekend. I clear the diary – take a couple of days off on Friday and Monday, get the fridge stocked up, make her favourite home-made chocolate mousse, and plan some nice walks for the three of us while YOUNGEST is at school. We could go blackberrying. She comes home Friday lunchtime, we tell her with some enthusiasm that we’ve booked a table at her favourite Chinese, and she says sorry she’s arranged to see Lucy and Phoebe. She won’t be needing any food till Sunday.

  Feel foolish. She has come home principally to see her mates – yes, OK, I dare say it’s nice for her to be home, but she’s hardly been pining for us the way we have for her, and so it should be of course. But it’s a hard lesson to learn.

  This year I need to make Christmas the best ever. Christmas is a time when even birds who have flown the nest return.

  October 5th

  I decide to go to a food allergist. Since I spend the whole time with a stomach the size of a beach ball. It can’t be (just) that I am eating too much. OK it could be that. But every magazine I open involves people finding out that they have food intolerances. Celebrity after celebrity talking about their wheat and dairy intolerance, and how their lives have changed as a result. It’s not cheap, as in an astonishing £50 for an hour session, but the promise of reducing bloated stomach means that money is no object. Even in the North, where I live, she is booked up for every Saturday in the foreseeable future, so I am not the first to catch on to the trend. She’s at the back of the hippy shop, the one with all the jangly chime bells and the kind of clothes hippies wore in the early seventies, baggy ones, which is an attractive quality, but if I wore them I would look like Gipsy Rose Lee.

  I assumed I would be painted with teeny neat samples of tomato, cheese and yeast up my arm, but find instead it is a long long list of questions about what I eat and how often, and she wants detailed explanation of bowel movements. It’s not as bad as the woman on telly who pokes around in people’s poo to establish their diet regime, but it’s not far off. Then she cuts a great dollop of my hair off and sends it for analysis. Which makes me a bit suspicious. Surely that’s a lot of old nonsense, isn’t it? Being able to tell so much from a lob of hair? Suppose it might be state-of-the-art DNA test but see no sign of white lab coats. Wish I wasn’t so cynical. She then goes on and on and on about how flour has changed over the centuries and claims that most of the Western world is now officially allergic to flour. Something to do with shelf life and additives. It makes sense. But surely we’d all be writhing in agony if we were all allergic to it. She is 99 per cent sure that what I have is a wheat allergy and so I am to give up pasta, bread, flour of any sort, except for the wheat-free stuff. She says everyone loses weight. Count me in.

  October 7th

  YOUNGEST’s birthday is less than a month away and I haven’t even started buying her presents. I know she wants a DVD called The Rat Race, so send GOM out to buy it. Tell him he must get it by the end of the week, consider it officially passed over, ticked off, done, delegated. I make him write it down. Sigh of relief, feel suddenly in front, ahead of the game. Marvellous.

  October 8th

  Got a bit maudlin. Sat on a wall overlooking forest at the end of our lane, and got a bit pensive. Realised how the year has flown by. I had been here in this exact spot, at this exact time of day, walking the dog back in the spring, which felt like five minutes ago, and so much has happened since…It’s now late autumn, and with a flash of wisdom and panic combined I realise that I am now in the late autumn of my life as well – got to be two-thirds of the way through. I am shocked and horrified and return home with sense of urgency to enjoy life more.

  Life is now officially in short supply. I resolve to change my approach to it as a result which obviously won’t last…Must relax, must chill out, must learn Italian, must get more out of life, must see the Victoria Falls, must be happy, must do something significant today and then again tomorrow too. Life is running out, and there’s loads of things I still want to do. Might do something mad like go off with Derek from Derek’s shoe bar, or set myself up in a B and B on the Stilly Isles or turn into mad ageing hippy and sell home-made jam on trestle table at the end of the garden.

  October 9th

  You don’t think it’s going to happen to you. You were part of the generation who invented sex, you had a pair of hot pants, some Mary Quant shiny patent boots, you invented free love, you were around at the start of the Beatles. Surely you would be exempt? Catalogue addiction wouldn’t happen to you. Then one day when your guard is down, when your concentration lapses, you phone up an ad in the Sunday Times for a rambling holiday brochure in the Tyrol, or you buy a useful shopping bag that folds up and zips inside your handbag, or some pants from M & S that are as big as a parachute, or you walk out of a shop with the most hideous cardigan on earth, probably in beige, and then it’s too late. Someone in marketing catches on, gets your postcode and notices you are middle-aged…There is no going back
.

  The catalogues start coming. They know where you live, they know you have hit middle age, and they know what you want. Now. Probably make you want them. Inside you are still a sex kitten, still a groovy chick who can strut your stuff on the dance floor to Tina Turner…but to everyone else you are now just a middle-aged old cow with bad hair and bad jumpers. And the marketing geniuses who design catalogues seek you out like a heat-seeking missile, because they know that it may not be tomorrow or the day after, but some day relatively soon you are going to want to send off for a car boot tidy or a machine-washable beige dressing gown or a microwaveable hot-water bottle. And like all marketing geniuses, they’re right. Something catches your eye, a jaunty but practical summer skirt, an attractive but serviceable gingham tablecloth that looks fresh and clean – it’s no good fighting it, you can’t win.

  But the one made for grumpy old women, the one that hits the equivalent of our G spot, the one that is the weapon of mass destruction, the one that is guaranteed to wear you down and get you hooked is the Lakeland catalogue. Full of the kind of gadgets and handy items that appeal to the woman with too much to do, and whose house is a disorganised mess, and who would like it to be organised domestic bliss. Page after page of luscious items like: sock drawer dividers, microfibre dusters, recycling boxes, his and hers bucket buddies ‘for those days when you both decide to spend the day weeding in the garden’, microwave fresheners, Wellington tidies and everything to make your life more ordered, more neat, more clean and more like Martha Stewart’s. Why stop indoors? The garden is subject to Lakeland envy too: an irresistible garden camouflage range, to camouflage your garden furniture or dustbin or lawnmower. Because your garden should be neat and tidy too! Before you know where you are you would be popping one on anyone who sat still for longer than half an hour…Or asking your GRUMPY OLD MAN to wear one permanently. In fact why stop at making him wear it in the garden?