The Secret Diary of a Grumpy Old Woman

by Judith Holder

  December 13th

  Had a brainwave.

  Why not do the Christmas supermarket shop on line? Why wait until the whole world is shopping for brandy butter and sprouts? Do it now. Get something crossed off the list. Anything to avoid the scrum at the supermarket again at 06.20, the queue to pick up the ORDERED turkey (when there are hundreds on the shelves) and the fight over the last red cabbage. An hour into the process and I was feeling decidedly relieved. The colour was coming back to my cheeks. Organic turkey, sprouts, parsnips, smoked salmon, gravy granules (sorry to shock you) and fresh custard, all in my virtual trolley. If I was actually in the supermarket I would be skipping in the aisles, singing, probably singing, ‘Happy Talk’ from South Pacific. Even spent an extra 15 minutes stocking up on all the essentials that you inevitably run out of on Dec 27th – loo roll, washing-up liquid, washing powder, paper serviettes, spare batteries even – felt like I could really enjoy Christmas this year, could concentrate on wrapping presents beautifully and extending some nice good cheer and neighbourliness all around. I might get round to cleaning the car for Christmas, or dry-cleaning some cushions…Life is good.

  I get to the virtual checkout. Fiddle about in the stupid address box when it says it is not the correct address and you know it is just because you have missed out a space or something. Horrific bill. Decide that delivery on Christmas Eve morning would be best – cutting it a bit fine I know but then at least you know it will all be done. Get to the page with delivery slots. To my horror all the ones AFTER DEC 10th AND BEFORE JANUARY 1st HAVE GONE! All allocated to women who are evidently more organised with more time on their hands than me. Like Clarissa for instance. Have to fish out shopping list from bin again, I could weep. Have wasted two and a half hours. Perhaps I should go to anger management courses, or maybe they should offer them free AT THE SUPERMARKET.

  Call a non-virtual supermarket to see if they can offer any immediate task reduction, and try to order turkey, and they say you have to come in in person or do it on-line. Ring local butcher and leave message on answer machine. Job still not done. Nothing shifted off my ‘to do’ list, and now have wasted whole morning. Could sob.

  December 14th

  The Christmas Fayre. Needless to say my bric-a-brac offerings were greeted with such disdain by Clarissa and her committee that I might as well have been showing them the inside of the dog poo bin in the park.

  ‘I think we’d better draft you in on hair braiding. Sophie is short of a pair of hands. And we shall need you to clear the hall by 6pm, there’s a barn dance in tonight.’ Great.

  A queue of 12 children all wanting their hair braided when their parents have paid £2.50 for it is not a nice way to spend your Saturday when you can’t braid hair. Frowns and tuts all round; one or two of the braids had unravelled before they even got back to their parents to show them.

  December 15th

  The last but one Sunday before Christmas which means that the whole world is shopping. Including me. I thought I had almost finished but then both daughters have revised their Christmas lists, which means not only do I still have long list of presents still to buy, I have some taking back to do before I start. Takes 45 minutes to find somewhere to park – 45 minutes! And the parking space is just that bit too far to keep going back to fill the boot. So I have to lug everything around with me like a homeless bag lady but more bad-tempered. Prices at this stage of the game are irrelevant, price comparisons just not realistic. All you want to do is get things ticked off the list, you don’t care in what order, you don’t care in what colour. Ticks are what you want. Ticks are what you live for.

  Every single thing you buy involves queuing, well OK so maybe if you were buying bathing costumes or sun block you’d have a teeny bit of space, but on the whole if you’re on soaps and calendars, everyone else is doing the same. You want Sims 6, so does everyone else, you want an iPod speaker, so does everyone else.

  Maddening, maddening, maddening.

  December 16th

  The office party. Obviously huge pointless crisis as to what to wear. After trying on at least six outfits, I plump for the ubiquitous floaty top with the camisole under showing a bit of cleavage which I notice is looking what ELDEST would call a bit dodgy, a bit wrinkly…Maybe I have reached the stage where my cleavage should not see the light of day.

  Party is predictably hideous. There’s a lot of flirting, a lot of drinking, one or two of the girls in the office have hired sexy Santa outfits, which is maddening – showing a lot of leg and making me look even frumpier than I feel – and inevitably Robin and Jocasta get into a bit of a huddle. One of the marvellous things about getting older is that if you want to make your excuses and leave such a ghastly event at 8pm you can, not only is it allowed, it is positively welcomed by all the young people who are dying to get off with one another and don’t want to waste time talking to you. I see Robin has got Jocasta pinned to the wall in deep conversation, and I decide to leave. Get the lift to find a sweet-looking bloke asking if I know where he can find Jocasta. Must be her stay-at-home husband, she is a lucky girl that’s for sure. See my opportunity and rather than telling him where the party is, I take him, show him, take no risks. Sometimes I can be such a cow.

  December 17th

  ELDEST comes home and her room instantly looks messed up again, which I find oddly thrilling. It is so wonderful to have her home I could skip, skip along the landing, and skip around the kitchen. Take her breakfast in bed, and get all excited about our imminent family Christmas. Who cares about all the chores and tasks, my family is under one roof and I have not a care in the world. The Christmas decorations go up. When the girls were little this was a magical process and it retains some of its magic for this reason. But this year there is tangibly less enthusiasm from the children, its me that’s overexcited, me that puts the Christmas carols CD on, me that is trying to recreate a scene from It’s a Wonderful Life.

  GOM persuades the girls to go and buy the Christmas tree with him. I suspect it will be the last time ELDEST gets the tree with us, and it is outrageously large, it’s a kind of male version of a hot flush – his way of trying to recreate their childhood too. He knows full well that ELDEST next year will have left home and getting her back in time to buy the tree will be impossible; she’ll probably cut it so fine she’ll be back on Christmas Eve itself. Once YOUNGEST leaves we’ll be into artificial trees.

  GOM still not done the Christmas card labels, so spend an infuriating hour cutting and sticking the last 20. Crawl into bed at 1.30am.

  December 18th

  Take the wretched cards into the post office and I have, joy of joys, just missed the second-class posting deadline, so I have to buy 67 x 8p stamps to make them up to the right postage and stand in the post office and stick them on all of the envelopes. Push them in the postbox with anger and resolve never to do Christmas cards again. But I think I said that last year too.

  December 21st

  Major wrapping session. Sellotape can be really spiteful at this time of year. I tear off little bits and put them on my dressing table and gouge off chunks which takes chunks off the varnish. If you tear strips and put them on the carpet it just loses its stick, and on the kitchen table it doubles up on itself and knots into a ball. Then it runs out after about three presents. You thought you would wrap them all up in one horrible trying session, but the task spreads across two or three days. One way or the other, as fast as you are ticking things off your list, other things are going on instead. Nothing finishes. You are never done. Not until you have fallen over in a heap on Dec 24th at 11.30pm. Then you stop. You have to stop. The shops have closed. Can’t they just be closed for the whole of December and then we might all be in with a chance of actually enjoying some of it?

  December 23rd

  Decide to delegate. Give GOM a carefully written shopping list for supermarket. For once he can experience the hell of it. Put it in aisle order, so that he hits the sprouts and red cabbage first and ends with dry ginger a
le. It’s all very detailed as if written for an alien, so when it says ‘satsumas’, it says ‘satsumas NOT oranges’, and next to ‘tomatoes’ it says NICE TOMATOES – PLEASE CHECK THEY ARE NOT SQUISHY, and next to ‘double cream’ it says CHECK SELL-BY DATE…It’s taken me so long to write out the blooming list I might as well have gone myself.

  6pm I text him to see how he is getting on with list. He texts back saying he is going after Christmas drinks at work. Cool as you like. I call him and say he has to go now lest they have run out of sprouts or stuffing or brandy butter. Now as in now, this minute. 9pm no sign of him. 9.301 call him and he is in Tesco’s, apparently he can’t find fresh custard: ‘Is it in a tin?’ He has spent 15 minutes just looking for the custard: Why he doesn’t just ask someone I have no idea. Honestly, you want something done do it yourself…

  He comes home with it all at 10pm and there are a series of maddeningly not quite right disappointments, the stuffing is in a packet! For goodness sake! The custard is in a carton as in long life, and of course the satsumas have no green leaves on. Worse, he has made some shopping decisions of his own and bought the largest jar of pickled onions I have ever seen, so big it won’t fit into the cupboard standing up but has to be screwed up tight and put in horizontally or has to sit on the work surface until used up which at the rate we eat pickled onions will be well into the next decade. He says they were on offer. Yes, of course they were on offer, no one in their right mind wanted them.

  December 24th

  Make mince pies with ready-to-roll pastry and jar of mince meat. OK, it wasn’t exactly what Delia would have done, but it is something. I have my pinny on, ELDEST is at home, OK watching Sky Plus with her sister, the pantry is full, GOM is messing about trying to get the Christmas fairy lights to work (and failing) and my mother is doing the ironing. We’re not having a riotous time, but I feel cautiously content for once. I have a feeling that as time goes by Christmas will in fact be the time I look forward to the most, the time when my daughters will feel obliged to come home with their boyfriends and then their own children. Or until they allow me to do some ironing for them while they are busy running around for their own families. Sneak behind the sofa while they are watching TV and kiss the top of both their heads. Once a mother always a mother.

  ∨ The Secret Diary of a Grumpy Old Woman ∧

  Coda

  MY CURRENT TOP GRUMPS

  Muffins – what happened to cakes?

  People spitting and weeing and sicking up on the pavement – someone is going to do themselves a nasty injury sliding on it.

  Stackers on back of cars are getting silly…Who cares who’s on board would be a better idea. Might invent them.

  American speak – can we stop ticking boxes and thinking outside boxes and pushing envelopes? More silliness.

  Why does everything have to have Aloe Vera in it? I don’t need my loo paper to have it in – whatever it is or whoever Vera is.

  Gravy granules.

  Shoe shop assistants.

  Panty liners with deodorant.

  Teenage girls’ magazines.

  Linen – I just look like I forgot to iron it.

  People who constantly say ‘love you love you’ after phone calls.

  Other people – trouble is if I’m in a car then I’m annoyed with the pedestrians and if I’m a pedestrian then I’m annoyed with the cars. Take the pedestrian crossing outside the main station in the city centre. If I’m driving past I get held up for about five minutes waiting for all the pedestrians to dribble over, pulling their wobbly trolleys, laden down with bags. I am annoyed at them. Then next day I might be walking over the same crossing on my way from the station to the office, and guess what, I feel like saying to the drivers, ‘Look, it’s blowing a gale here, actually I’m getting soaked waiting for you to stop for me to cross so look that’s just not fair.’

  And breathe.

  THINGS THAT MAKE ME GRUMPY ABOUT THE MAN I LIVE WITH

  Why doesn’t he start by looking in the right place instead of shouting, ‘It’s not there’ or ‘You’ve moved it, ’ while turning house upside down. What does he want…a grid reference?

  Toilet rolls – presumably he thinks they grow on holders.

  There is a difference between the laundry basket and the floor.

  Dishes and cutlery – no they don’t levitate to kitchen sink or dishwasher on their own.

  Just because it’s Buy One Get One Free doesn’t mean we want two of them or even one of them thank you.

  Stop buying huge family packs of cereals and coffee at the supermarket. Yes, it might be good value but they don’t fit in the cupboard.

  Please will you throw away those corduroy shoes.

  THINGS THAT CHEER US UP

  Our children

  Trees

  Sunshine

  Free parking

  Catalogues

  Cleaning the shower grouting with an old electric toothbrush head

  Finding any uses for old electric toothbrush head

  Using up leftovers

  Someone who knows about fish at the fish counter

  Parking in the parent and child bays in Tesco’s. Well, I have my mother in the car – what’s the difference?

  A bath

  THINGS THAT MAKE US CRY

  Bambi

  Nativity plays

  Peekaboo books

  Wonderful Life

  The smell of our children’s hair

  Our empty nests

  Our father’s hankies

  ∨ The Secret Diary of a Grumpy Old Woman ∧

  Acknowledgements

  I would like to thank my lovely husband Michael Parker for being such a brilliant Grumpy Old Man both on and offscreen, and for generally being able to retain his sense of humour and optimism when I lose both. This book would not have been possible without my mother, Jean Holder, since her support, encouragement and love have made me the person I am today, which is another way of saying I trained as a Grumpy Old Woman under her. I hope that my two gorgeous daughters Siena and Ellen will forgive me for writing a book that in places draws on our lives together, although I emphatically deny ever having tried to open one of their diaries. I thank them for just being them really, and hope that this insight into the mind of a middle-aged woman will mean that they approach their own midlife, when it eventually comes, with affectionate memories of our family life. I would like to also thank Suzanne Lee and Anne Leuchars for their creative input – a result of being both inventively funny and of a similar grumpy disposition.

  The television series would not have happened in the first place without Stuart Prebble, whose judgement and creative support I have come to treasure and enjoy enormously. The brilliantly funny and original Grumpy Old Women on screen have been a huge source of inspiration, and I am indebted to all of them:

  Aggie Mackenzie

  Germaine Greer

  Ann Widdecombe

  Helen Lederer

  Annette Crosbie

  Indira Joshi

  Arabella Weir

  Jane Moore

  Dillie Keane

  Jenni Trent Hughes

  Esther Rantzen

  Jenny Eclair

  Kathryn Flett

  Kim Woodburn

  Linda Robson

  Maureen Lipman

  Michele Hanson

  Muriel Gray

  Pam St Clement

  Sheila Hancock

  Stephanie Beacham

  I would like to thank in particular Jenny Eclair whose humour, talent and support have been astonishingly important to me as a writer and as a woman who has really bad taste in shoes. I am her number one fan.

  Thanks also to Alison Steadman for her brilliant reading of my scripts on screen, and whose wit and wisdom make the whole process enjoyable. From Liberty Bell Productions I would like in particular to thank Claire Storey Lambert who directed and edited the TV series, and whose judgement and creativity is scarily flawless, Fahima Chowdhury whose organisational skills
are scarily wonderful, Steph Robinson and Emma McKinney who contributed enormously to the TV series and who are remarkably ungrumpy. Thanks to the BBC – to Elaine Bidell, Maxine Watson and Mirella Breda for believing in me and letting me have a ball while making some hopefully entertaining TV. Last but not least, thanks to the clever and gifted Lucinda McNeile, Alan Samson, Ruth Muray and George Sharp at Weidenfeld and Nicolson.

  EOF