November 13th
Write polite but firm note to Joan saying she must remember to do the bathroom mirror. I still put a please on the end and a kiss, but spend the whole day at work wondering whether when I come home she will have turned over a new leaf with my newfound courage and direct approach and realise who’s boss.
Have to call YOUNGEST to say not to use the bathroom until I get home, that it must be just as Joan left it, it is a virtual crime scene. If they sold that red and white stripy tape at Tesco’s, I would have bought some, rope it off like they do in those murder programmes. YOUNGEST’s phone not on – naturally – so have to text her which takes me ages since it is so complicated. She texts back after school with just a? mark, so I have to leave her a long message on the answer machine and text her again to make sure she listens to answer machine before she goes upstairs to bathroom.
I drive home with a sense of real urgency, like a detective approaching the scene of crime. I race upstairs two at a time, keys still swinging in the door, and put the bathroom light on for a really good look. Streaks and splatters that I left there this morning while setting the trap. She has not done the mirror. Temper boiling, rage setting in, I stomp down the landing and open the cupboard under the stairs and no Hoover, she has left the Hoover in spare room still plugged in. Still plugged in! She has never done that before! My bossy tone has backfired and now I am sunk. I shall have to either give in and she will have the upper hand for ever more, or find another cleaner, and that – I know – is going to take me months. Skid up to notepad by phone to see whether she perhaps hasn’t read the note. Maybe we can still be friends. Or pretend to be. But oh yes, she has read my note all right. Next to my note she has written her own note. She says she has run out of Windolene spray so that’s why she hasn’t done the mirror. She has so not run out of Windolene. I swear there was one at least half full. She has probably thrown it away. Get my rubber gloves on and consider going through bins to check whether she chucked it out, but of course I realise I could go through all the week’s rubbish and even if I found the Windolene among all the chicken drumsticks and week’s kitchen rubbish she might have been clever enough to empty it first so that, when I did find it, it would serve me right for being such a difficult cow. It would be a job for forensic. There is no way I am going to win. She knows that.
November 14th
Get invited to a dinner party and unavoidably have to accept. I am going to have to make polite conversation for a tryingly long time. Get there and the two other couples look very middle-aged, look, frankly, a bit dull, and the shocking truth is that you’ve been invited with them because presumably your hosts thought you would have a lot in common which is code for they think you’re a bit dull too. Hostess says they have just come back from South Africa – resist sounding too interested lest they get the snaps out – but not content with telling us that they went to South Africa and had a lovely time, they treat us to the full route, towns, names, dates and historical points of interest. And there doesn’t seem to be anything remotely like cooking going on in the kitchen.
Eventually hostess says she had better put the meat in. Meat ‘in’, that means in the oven presumably. Meat ‘on’ might be more encouraging as in she just has to fry it or boil it, but meat ‘in’ implies that the bloody meal hasn’t even been started. Clearly the whole thing is going to take hours and hours…You start to do a time estimate, three courses and then coffee, that’s got to be two hours at least, once the food is cooked. I go to the loo and really take my time, don’t even need the loo, put some make-up on, steal some moisturiser, fiddle about looking in their bathroom cabinet – anything to kill time. Come down and they’re still talking about their second homes or some dreary conversation about decking their garden or something. If only I could go back up to the bathroom and run myself a bath. Perhaps I should encourage everyone who knows me to think that my old age is going to be very eccentric indeed and they will take such behaviour in their stride.
November 15th
I am getting so jumpy. I mean obviously I am jumpy when the cat brings something in, or a bird comes in the living room, but I am getting so jumpy I do that silly middle-aged-woman little scream when someone walks into the room unexpectedly, or the other day when the toast popped up. It’s what my mother would have called ‘trouble with her nerves’.
November 17th
Bought myself a mac. An off-white Burberry sort of job. Nothing fancy, but thought it would go with everything, the sort of non fashion statement someone of my age should go in for. Bumped into my mother in town and realised it was virtually identical to hers.
November 21st
Write nice newsy jolly note to Joan next to box of chocolates saying I know how busy she must be with the run-up to Christmas, so if she doesn’t have time to do everything I understand. She leaves me a note back saying she will be leaving at the end of the week. No explanation. This is my punishment obviously for using the word ‘Must’ in my note last week. Serves me right. Now I will have to deal with the run-up to Christmas without any help around the house.
November 23rd
Clarissa calls stupid meeting after school pick-up about Christmas Fayre. Like that was supposed to be convenient for me! Which it would be if I was a stay-at-home mum like she is. You might know it clashed with meeting Jocasta called, so had to say I had been called out to see a client. Left it vague, said they could get me on the mobile.
Clarissa has typed out an agenda, had her hair done, and has set herself a table at the front of the room like she’s top dog. Honestly, haven’t these women got better things to do? The headmistress comes in and greets Clarissa with grovelling gratitude, and says she has popped her head round the door to thank Clarissa for all her tremendous hard work once more this year and knows that with Clarissa at the helm the thing will go with a zing as usual. It all becomes crystal clear. Clarissa troubles herself with all this, not because she has nothing to do, but because she is parent-in-chief, top of headmistress’s good books. If she wants daughter to move French sets, or get a place in the badminton club or trampolining at lunchtime club, all she has to do is snap her little manicured fingers. Because Clarissa is in charge of all the tedious fund-raising activities in the school calendar.
Other trainee Clarissas speak up nicely when spoken to by her, when asked how their cake stall is going, or the prizes for the raffle, or the wickerwork stall or the organic Christmas Fayre stall. Masterfully she has got an army of other women on the case, ringing round local beauticians and Italian restaurants, grovelling for sponsorship and raffle prizes and suchlike. This woman should be running a multinational.
She gets to me as the new girl and asks how I am getting on with bric-a-brac, do I have a theme? What sort of stall was I thinking of? The question took me by surprise, what I want to say is, ‘Well I imagine I just sort of bung on a trestle table a load of crap that gets sent in because nobody wants it or can flog it on eBay and I lay it all out and if I have time I price it all with little sticky labels, otherwise I have a coffee and wait for people to ask, then at the end I take the unsold stuff, which will be most of it, and stick it on Oxfam’s step where they tell you not to on a Saturday night but everybody does anyway.’
‘A theme? How do you mean?’
‘Well, last year bric-a-brac took a record £300, it was a Victorian theme, year 9 tied it in with a history project and Miss Jones (headmistress) got very involved.’ What she is doing is throwing me a rope of opportunity to be in Miss Jones’s good books. ‘Oh I see. Hadn’t really thought about it.’
‘Can I suggest that you email me some thoughts by end of play Friday?’ She’s worse than Jocasta. Scary woman, obviously must have been head girl in her day.
The meeting carries on for 1 hour and 40 minutes more with details of where in the assembly hall each stall will be, who is doing mince pies and teas and coffees, pricing decisions, lucky dips, entry charges, raffle tickets, helium balloons and ads in local paper. Sneak out wh
en Clarissa busy with caretaker and cleaning arrangements and she shouts as I try and sneak out, ‘Shall I put you down for hall clearing afterwards?’ There is no sneaking out when Clarissa is about.
This is all I need in the run-up to Christmas.
∨ The Secret Diary of a Grumpy Old Woman ∧
December
December 1st
Ohristmas task frenzy is getting into full gear, am completely bogged down with tasks. Saw someone reading The Little Book of Calm on my way in to work. Felt like snatching it and flapping it over their head. Childish thought.
December 2nd
I can put it off no longer, the Christmas ‘to do’ lists have to be written out. Unlike my daily ‘to do’ lists, this is the list to end all lists. It is going to be so big it might require a clipboard to hold it all together. My mother has given me her list covering a sheet of A4 of things she needs me to buy for her to give to other people, as has my mother-in-law. Both claim that they can’t cope with the Christmas crowds and that their legs are bad…And that they would only get it wrong if they chose the presents themselves and everything would only have to go back. And I certainly don’t want their ‘taking back’ lists, that’s for sure. Their legs are bad…neat excuse…So now I have three lists on the go: my own and theirs. The list – as in the master list, the amalgamation of the lists – goes something like this: presents for my mother-in-law to give my children, presents for my mother-in-law to give to her son, presents from my mother to give to me, presents for my mother to give to her sister in Australia…On and on and on they go…I fantasise about getting them both into one of those nice new retirement homes on the main road next to the busy bus lane – with luck I might go down to just the one extra list next year. Wicked thought.
The Christmas card ritual has to be started. Already they are coming in on a daily basis, some of them from people I literally do not remember at all. This year I am definitely going to streamline the list and I am going to do one of those computerised label things which means that I can print them all out on neat labels every year rather than go through the misery of writing them all out by hand. Enlist YOUNGEST to help me, and she is only half concentrating since she has a lot of urgent MSN messaging and lolling on her bed to do. Says it is as easy as anything. Gets me on to the right grid thing and so I devote the next three and a half hours typing out in maddeningly small boxes the names and addresses of all our Christmas card recipients.
Clarissa calls in the middle of it asking for an update. Like it’s a massive work project not a stupid bric-a-brac stall, and I say I am waiting for the school secretary to send out my note round the school, which is not strictly true since I still haven’t given it in yet. ‘Strange,’ she says, ‘I talked to Margaret only today and she said she was still waiting for you to hand it in to her.’ Nothing gets past Clarissa. Not a little white lie, not a little fib, nothing. I agree sheepishly to do it by tomorrow morning, but continue the labels task until 11.30pm, absolutely bushed. Tear up all the names and addresses, some of which were handwritten out ten years ago. Feel exhausted but that have made big progress.
December 3rd
Write some Christmas cards at work while no one looking. Jocasta away at some daft conference. Marvellous feeling. Have to do a bit of cheating here and there as in ‘Dear Roger and family, which is code for I have no idea what your wife and children are called but you seem to remember mine. It’s all a total farce, but this year I am ahead of the game, hurrah, will manage to send them all Second class mail too. Even better.
Manage a long soak in the bath, light some of those candles people give you who have no idea what else to buy and are likely candidates for recycling. Begin to see the point of them. Lovely hot bath, lots of bubbles, might do this more often. Empty nests have their upsides.
My mother rings with a sob story about Derek and how she is dreading Christmas without my father. Well, here’s a surprise. I’m dreading it too. But suddenly I’m the one that is supposed to do the mothering not her. Marvellous.
Decernber 4th
Not only are the present lists well under way, the food lists now have to come to the fore, because for some reason making one meal on Christmas Day with enough leftovers in the fridge to scavenge on until the supermarkets open again is a big deal. A big enough deal to send the entire female population into a food frenzy. And although I can rationalise that, can logically realise how silly it is to get sucked into all the panic, I do it again, like every year. This year both daughters have become veggies…So we have two vegetarian daughters, neither of whom likes vegetables – joy of joys – so try as I might to find something in Delia for them for Christmas Day, most of the recipes – guess what – involve vegetables, or lentils which both of them detest along with all other pulses. At this rate I can see me giving them a fish finger or a Quorn burger each while we feast on a fatted goose. Literally. They don’t even like nut cutlets.
Once the food tasks appear on the radar my whole life is cluttered up with it all – there are notes, lists, reminders now in my office, handbags, car and kitchen calendar is by now almost falling apart, the metal thing that holds it together at the top has come half out and so the pages don’t fold over and the whole of December is a mess. Aunts, uncles, in-laws, school plays, parent charity nights, office parties, and then the Christmas period itself is getting horribly full with old friends’, relatives’ and neighbours’ dos. It’s not that I don’t like them. OK most of them. It’s just that every year I say to myself I am going to chill over Christmas instead of it being a race against time without a minute to even read the Radio Times or relax with a box of chocolate brazil nuts. That sort of thing would be my idea of Christmas…Some nice uninterrupted lolling on my own sofa in other words.
December 8th
Finally get YOUNGEST to help me back on silly computer grid with addresses on to print out darling white labels. She fiddles about with the cursor and asks me for the labels and I hand her the roll of labels bought from Smith’s; she says they’re the wrong sort, they have to be on A4 sheets not on a roll like the one I bought. How else do I think they are going to get through the printer, it’s not a typewriter or something out of the ark, stupid. Dur.
December 10th
Completely exhausted. Not only have I got more to do than last year, I realise that I simply don’t have the energy I used to have. I used to be able to get up at 7am, prepare four packed lunches, put a wash on, do the ironing, go for an early morning swim, do a day’s work, come home, cook tea, wash up, do some more ironing and an hour of personal admin or work at the computer, finish at 9.45 and find time to lay the table for breakfast. Now I am so rung out at the end of the day I could use a stairlift to get up the stairs to bed at night. It wouldn’t be so bad if I managed to sleep through like the rest of the family do – I can’t remember the last time I went to bed and slept till 7am. I am forever lying awake in a hot sweat, lying awake worrying about stuff that is in reality so trivial it is pitifully silly to worry about it at all, or am up and down to the loo two or three times in the night. I thought you were supposed to need less sleep as you got older, not true in my case, it’s God’s way of telling me that I have to slow down, but sadly there seems to be no sign of me being able to. It’s His way of getting me used to the idea that some day relatively soon I’ll be retired. Then I’ll be up at 6.15 listening to Radio 4, or on a bad day Farming Today, have a potter in the dressing gown, including some gardening, lunch with a friend, have an afternoon nap, eat tea at 7pm with The Archers, and climb into bed at 9.30. It’ll be like being back at nursery again. Eventually even the nappies will be back. Bring it on I say.
December 12th
Get YOUNGEST back on the computer with new labels. She whizzes about with the cursor again and says OK now it should work. Presses something and it all whizzes into action. Walk out of room while it is printing to look at the sum total of the bric-a-brac offered so far from school and what I have managed to get from the loft. It amounts t
o two boxes of cracked crockery, a nasty bright pink vase, a broken Toby jug, a biscuit tin with a dodgy lid and some unwanted presents that have been doing the rounds for long enough that they now couldn’t go in the Tombola but might pass here for bric-a-brac. Everyone has been watching too many Floglt programmes or Antique Roadshows. Anything of value at all that is kicking around in the house has either been taken to a car boot sale or been sold on eBay. Shall have to go to all the charity shops in town to gather up a respectable amount and then suggest to Clarissa that I just perch with assembled crap on the end of Tombola, as a sort of added bonus, come afterthought. I could call it a postscript as it sounds posher.
Back upstairs to stick labels on envelopes that I have already put stamps on. Excited! Get up there and they are all on the floor printed out and feel truly satisfied. Get the first one out to peel off and to my horror they have printed, but each address has printed just that little bit too far down the label and so each address straddles two labels which means that to use them you have to peel two off, and then cut them in half. Which considering there are 65 of them is going to take me a good two hours more since every time you cut one in half it sticks to itself and you have to prise it open again, and then it doesn’t stick down as well as it should and you have to put a bit of Pritt glue underneath one of the corners, and then you get the glue on your fingers and it takes some of the writing off the labels and you have to handwrite some of the letters back in. Get the picture?
I could have written them all out by hand by now and posted a week ago. Have to leave it for tomorrow and throw the labels in the corner of the room in a fit of childish temper. Was banking on having at least Christmas cards ticked off the list by now.
The Secret Diary of a Grumpy Old Woman Page 15