Redressing the Balance (And no, I’m not being funny)

I joined twitter because I wanted to vent anonymously. I’d shocked a couple of Facebook friends once or twice, and was fed up with having to worry about what other people thought. Only two people on twitter knew who I was, and it was great. I said whatever I liked, to an audience of complete strangers. If they didn’t like it, they could just stop reading my tweets and I knew I wouldn’t have to watch them trying to control their eyebrows at the school gates. What’s more, they were so easily pleased, slag off the kids, throw in the odd C bomb, they loved it!

But it’s changed. There are over 3000 people following me now, and I have no idea who the majority of them are. However I do know that they include my brother’s girlfriend, several people I see on a regular basis, and at least one of my 14 year old daughter’s classmates (he read one of my most inappropriate tweets out in their French lesson). And then there are all the people who have become friends through twitter. People I now care about, and see in real life. And the twitter people I just love because their minds are so sharp, quirky and brain-achingly brilliant.

So I find myself worrying about what other people think again, and I’ve decided I should take a moment to redress the balance. I tweet a lot about my family, because they are the biggest thing in my life, and I think it’s only fair to tell you that they’re bloody brilliant. My daughters are 19 and 15, they are bright, funny, kind and beautiful young women. My son is 10, he is genuinely crap at maths, but he has the most extraordinary mind, makes me laugh like a drain, and has a philosopher’s soul. My husband is quite possibly the most annoying man on the planet, but he is also probably one of the kindest and most patient.

That’s it really. I shall go back to calling them twats, and telling you their deepest darkest secrets, because that is what I do. I just wanted those of you I care about, to know that I love them.

First Love. Or how to peel a mouse.

When I picked up my ten year old son from school the other day, his opening words to me were “Well, I’ve got myself a girlfriend.” I knew he’d been worrying about whether he’d be able to “get one” at the all boys secondary school he’ll be attending next year, so naturally I was pleased for him. But my recollection of being that age, is that boys were all well and good until they got too keen. “Don’t wear your heart on your sleeve. Don’t let her know how much you like her!” I warned him. His slightly unnerving response: “So I shouldn’t come in tomorrow and start calling her honey?”

All through my life, my closest friends have been male. I just like men better than women. When I was my son’s age, my best friend was called David and he lived across the road. Looking back on it, I was perhaps quite an unusual girl. I spent many happy hours making insect “zoos” in which an assortment of ill-fated invertebrates, dragged screaming from the undergrowth, would be displayed in jam jars in the summerhouse. My parents would be charged a small fee to examine shield bugs, woodlice, caterpillars, earthworms; in the kind of hands on experience most can only dream of. They loved it. Really. And I still have a deep scar, from when I missed the lid of a jam jar with a pair of scissors, and created an air hole in my hand.

Around this time, I was given a book by Gerald Durrell called ‘The Family Naturalist’. I absolutely loved it. It was full of useful information about collecting tadpoles, dismantling owl pellets and identifying poo. But best of all, it told you how to dissect and skin a small mammal – something I was very keen to do. Now just to be clear, I don’t tread on ants if I can possibly avoid them and frequently relocate snails from the pavement to the safety of our garden, so killing anything was not an option. But, at that time, we had cats, and therefore a steady supply of small dead rodents. So the next unfortunate victim of Sadie, my cat, was plonked in a jar of formaldehyde (stolen from David’s biologist father) until such a time when we’d be able to cut the poor little bugger up. What neither of us realised, was that formaldehyde can only penetrate so far, and if you don’t make a cut in the abdomen, it all gets very unpleasant pretty quickly. Finally the big day came. The mouse was removed from his jar and pinned down by his little paws, like a rather bedraggled mini, furry Christ. In went the scalpel. Out came something akin to decomposing liver pate. As David and I struggled to control our gag reflexes, his mother called out to tell us our spaghetti Bolognese was ready.

The reason I’ve subjected you to all this, is really just to demonstrate the kind of friendship David and I had. Not like a boy and a girl. Just good friends.

Having been friends for several years, we’d become very close. Building camps, riding bikes and founding secret societies (with a membership of two). But still just friends. One day, we were walking the dogs on the Ashdown Forest when David suddenly ran his hand down the length of my very long hair and said “It shines like gold”. It’s funny, even typing it now it makes me feel uncomfortable, and at the time it was like a physical blow. I felt sick, and knew that our easy friendship was effectively over. I’m still in touch with him, he lives in California with his wife and children, but I avoided him for years, and our relationship was never the same again.

So, I tried to explain to my fresh faced, innocent son, that you can’t tell girls how you really feel when you’re only ten. Difficult as it is, you have to play it cool. I could see he was struggling to understand, and I know he has many years of heartbreak and confusion ahead of him as he tries, and inevitably fails, to understand the complexities of the female mind. But at the end of our conversation, he turned to me and said “It’s ok Mum. I was pretty cool. She asked if I wanted to go out with her, but I didn’t answer straight away – I leaned against a tree for a while.”

Should be ok then.

At the end of this month my oldest child turns 19. This has really got me thinking, because when I was her age I moved in with her father. 

Up until that point, I think it would be fair to say that I’d led a pretty charmed life. The worst thing that had happened to me, was my pet chinchilla being squashed accidentally by my dog (although that was quite bad). And I did once try to kill my brother with the bread knife, but my parents never found out, so there’s really no need to go into that now. We lived on the Ashdown Forest, I’d passed my driving test and had my own car so I did most of my socialising in Tunbridge Wells, and it was there that I met the man who would become my first husband. We’ll call him James. (Because that’s his name.)

James owned a restaurant and wine bar. I was 18, he was 30. I was frankly rather cute, he looked like Woody Allen. But a younger, taller, slightly better looking version, and less ginger. Well not at all ginger. But he was very, very funny. And he had a great dog, a rather long-suffering German Shepherd called Ron. We got on very well and after a few months of seeing each other I moved in with him. (Primarily because my parents wouldn’t let me smoke in my bedroom.)

I was working in London and we lived in the rather cramped flat above the bar, sleeping in a bed constructed from scaffolding poles and using a Victorian safe as a fridge (it was a rubbish fridge). It was all a bit of an adventure, lots of wine and langoustines, long afternoons getting pissed with friends and watching the Grand Prix. But it was clear the business had to go, it was hemorrhaging cash – not least because of all the long drunken langoustiney afternoons - and after many months of nail biting and price slashing, a buyer was found.

Because I was young and impetuous and he was basically mad and unrealistic, we decided to up sticks and move to Brighton to live on a boat. I sold a rather lovely MKII Daimler that my father had given me (charmed life, etc) and James promised he would pay me back half the money when he was no longer fighting his creditors. We found a strange old 52 foot harbour service launch, with a terrible name, which when pronounced correctly makes it sound as if you’ve swallowed your tongue. She had the original old telegraph controls, which meant you had to have one person up in the wheelhouse, and another down in the engine room. It was absolutely bloody terrifying.

We lived off cheap Bulgarian red wine and baked potatoes and frequently had to cash in our key card for the shower block so that we could buy food with our £5 deposit money. We had hot water, but if it was on for any length of time the pipe would go soft and pop off its connector, spraying your face with water that was significantly hotter than anything that ever came out of the tap. In winter the pipes froze, meaning there was no running water at all. There was a bad leak in the deck above our bed (on my side) and I’ll spare you any details about the ancient pump-action loo. But it wasn’t all bad! (It was 99.9 percent bad). Anyway, we lived there for nearly 3 years and somewhere in the midst of it all we got married.

Meanwhile, below the waterline, Gribble Worm had been hard at work turning our boat’s hull into something like one of those intricate Japanese cork carvings. Only a lot less seaworthy. We were desperate to get rid of her and move onto dry land, so we sold her for a pound (to a Japanese collector). At this point, just try to imagine a catalogue of financial disasters, dodgy business ventures, a variety of wood-boring insects and two kids - until eventually, James got a very good job with a London wine merchant. For the first time in the best part of 10 years we had some stability. Just enough stability to realise, quite amicably, that our marriage had been over for years.

Anyway, James continued to lurch from one failed business venture to another. He hasn’t contributed to the cost of raising the children for many years now, and his contact with them is largely governed by whether or not he has anything better to do. He looks even more like Woody Allen, is very self centred and doesn’t learn from his mistakes but he does have a kind of crazy charm, and I think what happened was that I grew up and he didn’t.

I’m not sure why I’ve written this – and God knows why I am sharing it with you - but I can’t help looking at my daughter now and thinking that she’s barely capable of choosing her own pants, let alone a husband. (I suppose it’s just as well I was so much more mature than she is when I was her age.) Oh yeah, and I never got the money back from the sale of my car.

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