All aboard for the double decker

I am trying not to think of London as home; to think of it instead as "London", a place I used to live. A while ago, driving the children to the beach, we came over a hill, the narrow road falling away, cutting through the fields, out to the links. Tucked behind the golf club was a big red London bus. My first thought; "There's a big red London bus." I am nothing if not obvious. My second: "Can I get on it?" Third: "Will it take me home?" Tsk. Tsk. I mean London. Will this magical bus which I have brought into existence through the power of my own sweet and heady will, take me back to London? I glanced quickly at my husband as he pulled the car tight over into the side of the hedged road. I thought: "Can he see it? Can he see the bus? Or is it only me?" I am not sure whether I was disappointed or relieved when he said: "Look kids, a bus." He turned off the engine. "Make sure mummy doesn't get on it." I thought about running for it. I decided against it for fear the bus would pull away in a cloud of fumes and dirt just as I reached for the pole. They often do. I did not want to see the children's grim faces when I turned back to them, having bungled my escape.

Yesterday, I was braver. I hopped on. The Number 19, stopping at Finsbury Park, Highbury Barn, Highbury and Islington Station, Islington (St Mary's Church), Islington (Angel), Theobald's Road, Holborn Station, Tottenham Court Road, Piccadilly Circus, Hyde Park Corner, Knightsbridge, Sloane Square, King's Road and Battersea Bridge. At night, it even went on to Clapham Junction Station. This is a good route for me. Ding Ding. All aboard. One of my best friends lives in Islington. I could drop by, drink dry wine and eat sweet cake. Say: "You're looking well". Try not to feel too old beside her blonde and lustrous beauty. Or, I could carry on, stop off at Holborn, close to where I worked once in TV land. I could walk through to Covent Garden, browse a while among the shops. Then again, my hairdresser is in Knightsbridge, I could call by. Say: "Darling. Look at me." I could hold my hair out from my scalp. "Can you fit me in? Can you? Can you?" Sob, when he says: "No". I could console my shaggy, silvering self with French coffee in Sloane Square; then cafe fortified, mooch with intent up the King's Road, spending money I don't have, buying back a life that is no longer mine.

Instead of all this, the big red London bus rumbled down along the A1 towards Newcastle. There is something about a bus journey, even if you are heading for nowhere you want to go. You think: "OK, this time is mine. I am excused a little while. Now, where is it that I'm going? Why? And who is it that I am again?" I sat on the top deck at the front of the bus. You have to if you want to pretend you are driving. You could tell you weren't in London. I think it was the little things: green fields and cows, giveaways both. I have rarely seen winter barley growing up through the cracks of the city's mean streets. Also, no sniffing, mumbling lunatic sat beside me with a leatherette shopper; its handles held tight in knuckly hands.

My conductor, a former management consultant, and the driver, a former miner, bought the Routemaster bus two years ago. It costs £15,000 to buy and do up a bus. It has done 3 million miles since it was first commissioned in 1966 and carried an estimated 3 million passengers. They call the bus "Kenny" after the mayoral man who sacked it from its city job. Now, instead of commuters and shoppers and metropolitan folk, it carries golfers and tourists up and down the a 39-mile stretch of Northumberland's sandy, castled coast. Yesterday, it was gentle and retired folk from Worcestershire admiring the oats, asking interested questions about sheep, heading for a day of puffins and history.

I like Kenny. I put my hand on his proud metal bonnet and felt it throb. I could tell Kenny likes me. I rang his bell. Twice. We have a lot in common the two of us. We're about the same age, we've been around, we've seen things, we're natural Londoners, we're probably both a bit too big, back end wise. Admittedly, no one points at mine like they do when he thunders past but Kenny and I have a bond. If I ever run away to London, I am taking the bus.

Fretting about home

I had efficiently found my mobile phone, charged it and set the alarm on it. What I did not do was check the clock on my phone was set at the right time. It was not; it was set an hour late. Yesterday, I had to make a whizz-bang, pop pop journey down to London. I only just made it out of the house by 6.15am for a sevenish train. Just in time for the children to wake up and cry. Real tears, that Mummy was going to London. Do they suspect I may not come back? I did not leave them alone. My husband might have been missing in action but I do have help with the children. I have enough moments where I come suspiciously close to lunacy; if I did not have help, there would be nothing suspicious about it. I would be bang to rights bonkers. I have tried doing without help; frankly, I wanted to kill myself. I have nothing but admiration for women who cope on their own at all times. I could not even pretend that is me. I keep saying to my fellow mothers up here: "Get some help. Get some help for God's sake." They just look at me. They do not seem to need help. They can cope. Everyone can cope better than me. I went to a lovely house the other day. All the carpets were beige. All of them. The woman has two boys. How does she do that? How does she keep it beige? I have only ever bought one carpet in my life. It was beige. What a mistake that was. She makes her boys take off their shoes. I tried to make mine do that. My carpet has not been beige for a long time.

The railway station is away, away along roads that cut through mist flooded fields. An Easterly wind blows the mists in from the sea. Despite spring sunshine washing over daffodil days, in the early morning and in twilight's heavy moments, the sea fret lurks in the village streets. It blocks out spaces behind the rough stone walls with its mist and North Sea mystery. At my cottage, you can stand and see it roll and lurch onwards, eating grass and lambs. Till everything, even the lighthouse, disappears in its soft, grey damp. Usually, not always, it will stop short of the row of cottages; it will stay in the field, knowing it has not been invited; fearing to come further. Sometimes, polite, I smile and walk towards and into its chill embrace. I like the sea frets. I like anything that frets.

It is a long way to London, travelling there and back took around nine hours and all for a business lunch. The lunch was good however and, bonus, at the end of the meeting, my companion handed over a box of German confectionery. The sweetmeat was called "Bethmannchen" (there should be an umlaut in there, but I have a resolutely English speaking keyboard). These Bethmannchen (do not forget that umlaut) are small baked mounds of marzipan, kept upright by three pale almond halves pushed into sugared flesh. I thought: "Bugger. I knew I should have brought pease pudding." But you can never find it gift-wrapped. The confectionery has a history. It dates from 1840; named after the four sons of Frankfurt's state councillor Simon Moritz Bethmann (Moritz, Karl, Alexander and Heinrich). Originally, there were four almonds. When Heinrich died, the confectioner cut the number of almonds to three.

So there you are. Your meeting is over. Your charming associate hands over his tasty gift and suddenly you are thinking: "Infant mortality", "Poor Heinrich" and "How old was he?". It is like finding out the currants in an Eccles cake represent the number of deaths there during the plague. As if Kendal mintcake is a monument to all those lost on ill-prepared Duke of Edinburgh trips in the Lake District. I say: "Thank you " and "How kind". I think: "I hope the children are alright." I wondered too, whether Heinrich's mother ever ate the three almonded confection, to taste between her teeth the grainy, sugared proof three sons survived.

So long. Farewell.

That went well. The rented house looks like a shipwreck. Clothes, books, toys and bedding are strewn across each and every room while in the hallway, plastic binbags breed like something from a low-budget sci-fi movie. I keep thinking: "Socks for school tomorrow" and realise I have no idea where they are. Then I think: "Knife, I need a knife for the bread". No idea either. I may send the boys to school wearing saucepans on their feet.

Then, it all got much worse because my husband left to catch the train for London. He is away for three weeks on a work deadline. Just before he left, the children wanted a hug so he went upstairs to kiss them goodbye. This gave me the chance to pour and swallow the remains of a bottle of chablis in the kitchen and burst into tears. I had just got my act together and he came down again to tell me he had screwed the tops of the children's wardrobes on so they would not come down and kill them but I had to ring the TV repair man tomorrow because the TV is not working. I stopped crying at the thought of three weeks with three children and no TV. But by the time we said goodbye, I was already snuffling away again. As he headed into the night with his smart trolley-dolly suitcase on wheels, I closed the heavy wooden door behind him and went back to the kitchen to pour another glass of whatever I could find. Cooking oil probably. I was just about holding it together till I heard the siren wail of my six-year-old from the top of the stairs. Two minutes later and my husband cracked open the door to slide in a stray children's car seat; he glanced up the staircase to find a sobbing six-year-old dressed in a robots' sleepsuit with his legs wrapped round his crying mother. "We'll be fine. Go and get your train. Hurry up or you'll miss it." I waved him away. As the door closed heavily behind him again, my four-year-old came out of the bedroom. He kelt down and kissed me: "I love you mummy," he said and lay next to us on his tummy as I patted his brother's back and rocked him gently back and forth. "Shush now," I whispered. "Shush. We'll be fine."

Lost boys

Who says God does not have a sense of humour? Today, we spent six and a half hours getting to London for another children's birthday party and guess where it was. A city farm.
To me, the city farm is yet more evidence that nobody really has to go live in the country. The boys and the baby saw animals and got lots of fresh air in between the balloon fights and butter-creamed cake. The city even "does" the country better. At the city farm, there was a cafe with proper coffee. One Northumberland cafe I go to boasts "instant cappuccinos" on its menu and they are not talking about the wait. The farm also offered classes in upholstery, stone sculpture and bike maintenance with particular attention given to "wheel truing" - I have always wanted a true wheel. Best of all, there were helpful signs attached to the animal paddocks. I never knew, for instance, that sheep have very good memories and "can remember a face up to two years after a first meeting." That is better than me.

London still makes me heartsore though. It is the feeling you have when someone you love leaves you although I know I did the leaving. I am ashamed of myself for the teenage anxst of it all. So I moved. Big deal. I should shrug in a sophisticated way, inhale hard from a cigarette held in a costume jewelled hand and slowly blow a smoke ring into the already cloudy air. I do not live here anymore. I do not understand how I have left the city and yet carry it with me.

I think I have been in quite a strange mood though. I felt the day started oddly. We had not managed to snatch breakfast before we left the house in a bid to catch a 7.30am train. My husband had driven too fast down a dark and dangerous road and I had been worried throughout that we would miss it. Once we parked the car, we figured that if we ran, there was just seven minutes left to buy food before we crossed the bridge over the tracks onto the platform. Standing with the pushchair, I queued for five croissants, coffees and warm milk at the coffee stand on the concourse. The pressure mounted as I glanced at the large, wrought-iron clock which hangs over the heads of passengers warning them not to be tardy. The boys, muffled in their red wool hats and overly long scarves, were pulling at me and it was the sort of cold that makes you pull your shoulders close to your ears and wish you were anywhere else. One of those old men you find only in railway stations shuffled over. He asked me how old the boys and the baby were and stooped down to carress her small silky head. "A boy?" he asked. I did that up-down rapid calculation you do to decide whether the stranger spells danger and decided he was just sad and lonely.
"I had a boy but he died at seven," he told me. This is the moment at which the coffee seller decided to ask me what I wanted. I ignored her.
"That's terrible," I said. "You don't forget do you? What happened?"
He told me the boy had a hole in the heart.
"In four years, I lost six people," he said.
"How dreadful," I said, as you do.
I have been angry at myself all day because, anxious as I was to get us all some breakfast, there was a moment I turned away from him to order the milk and pastries for my own little family and I never asked him his son's name. I should have.

Mouses and houses.

I have never had so little control over my life - ever. Unless you count that one time in the hot-tub when far too much wine had been drunk and a guard had to be posted incase I slipped beneath the bubble-filled waves and was permanently lost at sea.
Here I am in windswept, muddy Northland when I have Beatrix Potter's townmouse written all over me. I know the marriage vows say something about "in sickness and in health" - I am sure, however, they didn't mention "up in the North and down in the South" because I wouldn't have signed up for that. I come from Leeds - I have "done" the North and you know what, I like dear old London town just fine. I feel like I am a character in one of those epic sagas of a Northern lass who gets hersen' down to London and suffers vicissitudes along the way, oh yes. But does she let them get her down? She does not. She's got grit has our heroine and she makes a reet success of her life in London and she gets a posh job and brass and nice frocks and a fella and then bugger me, if the fates don't decide to blow our scrappy heroine back up North to the mud she thought she had escaped so long ago.
But it is not just the mud and the loneliness. Three small children hang off our heroine at every available opportunity (or at least when they can't find the nanny) and they should know that really their Mam is not just their Mam, she is a career girl. Well maybe she is a little passed her sell-by for the term "girl" but there was a time when she definitely wanted to conquer the world. I mean, in what chapter did it all start to go so horribly wrong?
Was it that fateful moment, clutching a tear-stained photo of her little ones, she handed in her resignation at t' Big t'Office where she had t'Big Salary. Now, her glory days behind her, she works at home and when I say "works at home", at the moment she pretends to work at home because she hasn't actually done anything she got paid for since October. Soon, the nanny will notice and then there will be talk in't t'village about our soft-focus heroine being no better than she should be.
Anyway, enough of her. Cut. Pull focus and back to me. And the house.
To say we have dithered about what to do about the house is putting mildly. Let's spend nearly nine months waiting for planning permission to knock two houses together and go through a very painful tendering process. Yes let's do that. Then let's take some advice from estate agents and our accountant and decide we can't knock them together after all because we won't get back a big chunk of the £120,000 building costs when we come to sell one big house rather than the two little ones. OK, then let's decide to go househunting. (This involves vast and incomprehensible arrays of numbers on bits of paper and calls to a variety of building societies - some of whom laugh at us.)
I know what! On the same day (today) as having a meeting with a prospective builder about the original plans, let's go see another house we could buy for the laughable sum of £615,000 which we could just about afford if I sell the children's kidneys. Luckily for them, I didn't like it although my husband did. If, however, he thinks I am letting him decide which house we live in up here, he has another think coming. By four o'clock in the afternoon, we are so fed up with not knowing what to do, we decide we will go back to London. That's straight then. By 7pm, I decide that is a bad idea because we will feel we have been beaten by the system and if we go back to London I want it to be for positive reasons and not because we can't make up our mind between scrambled or fried eggs on a morning.
There was a time when I used to be quite good at making decisions. The latest decision, incase you are interested, is to knock the two houses together (what do estate agents and accountants know anyway?) and stay. I reserve the right to change my mind tomorrow. Over breakfast when I shall be having cornflakes. Or porridge.

Maybe it's because I'm a Londoner

I escaped to London for a couple of days with a toothbrush, a large wad of disposable cash and a certain amount of guilt. But it was worth it - seeing friends, an exhibition, a movie, a haircut, a bit of shopping. Amazing what you can fit in - and how much money you can spend for that matter - when you are on a tight schedule. The best bit was probably the dusking view over a darkening Trafalgar Square complete with sparkling Christmas tree and distant Big Ben. Lovely. Made me homesick. But where is my home now? Will we stay in Northumberland or will we come back? If we did come back could I cope with the crowds, the squalor you glimpse out of the corner of your eye, the "body on the line in North London" which delayed my travel. Talking also made me realise that maybe I should open up and let some people up here in. Get them one of those red enamelled badges prefects used to wear when I was young. Instead of House Captain though, it could read in gilt lettering "New Mate". I wonder if anyone up here would want one.

Just call me Pollyanna

A friend told me my blog made her cry at her desk and that I have become a "victim". Oh dear. Maybe I have been too gloomy about my life up North. So this is my Pollyanna list of everything that is good about living up here: the beaches (which are empty), the skies (which are glorious), the village school (my son kissed the building like some pint-sized pope when he got back from a recent holiday), the "community" ( there is one, really), the opportunity to make new friends (who says you should put up a "No Vacancies" sign just because you are 40-something?). The garden (bigger than anything we could have in London), the gardening(I grew leeks. You have to or they won't let you stay here). The happy husband (he'd better be.) The opportunity to think creatively about life(this one I am working on.)
Anyone of a tender disposition should look away at this point - here is my list of things which are bad about living here: the absence of my old friends, the silence which falls when I talk sometimes (not a good one. More of a "Oh my God. I can't believe she just said that," sort of a space). The fact I had to leave behind not just the friends I had acquired and cherished over years but my hairdresser, my beauty consultant, my nutritionist, my masseur, my homeopath, my osteopath and my therapist.(I never said I was low maintenance did I?) Then there is the career I am probably waving goodbye to along with the galleries, the films, the bookshops, the shopping and the cafes. Even watching TV can make me feel homesick if the camera pans across the London skyline. I think I will stop there. It might be time to dig up a leek and go marvel at the passing clouds.

Karaoke in Soho

My husband has wafted back to London for his office Christmas party. I no longer have an office so I am saved a trip to a smoke-filled Soho den, the cringemaking Karaoke and annual haka "God we were good this year. Really, really good. Be proud of yourself. Really, really proud because God we were good." I have yet to forgive the young toe-rag who volunteered me to be one of The Cheeky Girls three years ago - an experience it took the rest of the year to recover from. But my husband's departure leaves me alone again. The amount of time he spends in London he might as well live there.(Oh yes, that's right we used to. Until he decided to stick a pin in a map and move us all to the back of beyond) and his complaints while he is there frankly just serve to irritate. "God, I've had such a bad day," he tells me from a friend's house where he enjoys his child-free shaved truffle supper. "I don't want to be here you know," he moans from my favorite Covent Garden patisserie. Really? Neither do I.

Happy Birthday Jesus

I have just been to the school nativity to witness my three-year-old as a solemn-faced star and the older boy as a Scotsman. Not sure quite how Christmassy a five-year-old in a kilt and tam o'shanter is but you get the picture. Tinsel, an anatomically correct baby Jesus and a refusenik shepherd who threatened a sitdown protest at one point - in other words, the usual nativity plus a few racially stereotyped stop-offs for the jet-set angels hunting out the best place for the messiah to be born. (Scotland being one of them complete with cabers, sworddancing and Irn-Bru.) The Japanese, by the way, are very polite and do a lot of gardening while in India apparently the smell wafting across the stage was of chicken tikka massalla. At our previous London school there were more black and mixed race children than white and Black History week was a major event. The very thought of dramatising chicken tikka massalla would have given its politically correct teachers the vapours. But there are no real ethnic minorities at my children's charming village school. About the closest you get to an ethnic minority is a red head. Anyway, it was utterly lovely and quite lifted me from my pre-Christmas doldrums. The parents may have been smiling at their beloved celestial tourists but religion at the school is a serious business and not just for Christmas. Even the tots were expected to sing "Happy Birthday Jesus" to a candle stuck in a mince pie the other day at their Christmas party. I admit clap-happy enthusiasm like that brings me out in a cold sweat. I struggle hard to believe in God and other people's certainty impresses me but when they "Praise the Lord" in public - sometimes they even wave their arms while they do it - I am swamped by the thought "Not infront of the little donkey."

Apocalyptic horsemen and friends

Life in London was simpler in many ways. Cafes knew how to make a decent skinny latte with an extra shot, muddy wellies weren't de rigeur and most importantly I had friends. Quite a few of them. Often in the media and certainly in work. Those who had children, juggled their responsibilities, adjusted their career expectations and got on with it. Those who didn't, tried not to talk too much about the exotic holidays and how long they spent in bed on a Sunday. I had things in common with my friends, an office, children of the same age, an outlook.
When we moved to Northumberland a year ago, I gave up on the friendship I had once known. There is, for instance, noone I feel I could immediately turn to in a crisis - I simply don't feel I know them well enough yet to impose. During my husband's absence in London for three weeks, I was left with my five year old, three year old and a teething baby. One Saturday, after four sleepless nights on the trot, I was desperate. I hated my husband, myself and my children in about that order. I spent the day on my knees. When Sunday dawned, I crawled onto the phone to confide in my absent husband that I simply didn't know how I would cope, what to do with myself or what to do with the children. "I know," came the reply. "Why don't you go to Alnwick garden, gather autumnal leaves and make a collage." "I know," I replied. "Why don't you just come home and you can make the f***ing collage." I know there are people up here who would have welcomed me if I had 'fessed up to a crisis but I just didn't feel I could. I was too low and my children too ghastly to inflict them on anyone. In London, I would have shown no such scruples. I would have thrown everyone in the car and expected my friends to welcome me into their homes even if I was insanely grumpy and my children monstrous.
Without a job to go to up here, my main route into friendships is through school. To start with the village church school is tiny so the potential pool of bosom mates is small. In any event, one of the perks of rural living is a free bus for the kids which cuts down the number of mothers you see. I was desperately disappointed when I realised one particular mum was now bussing her son in. Unlike me, she didn't consider the 40 minute round schlep twice a day worth a few minutes of chirpy banter and who can blame her? Well, me for one.
A substantial number of the other mothers I have met are married to farmers. Even if they aren't, they often have pet horses or sheep. I mean why? Don't they get enough mucking out to do at home already? If they don't keep something with four legs, they often keep chickens instead. For the eggs. Which makes their life a perpetual search for egg boxes. And they don't buy eggs, so you see their problem. Hardly any of them work outside the home. Some of them do some teaching on the side. They aren't news junkies. Few of them talk about books. All in all this town mouse struggles sometimes with her country cousins. Not least when religion comes up in the conversation - which it does. A lot. One couple have been immensely generous and welcoming but I can't say it' s not disconcerting when someone you had previously thought entirely sane admits, he is waiting for Christ to return to earth. He told me: "I believe the world will end, the four horsemen of the apocalypse will come among us, death and destruction, the whole package you know. I would only say this to another believer," I shift uncomfortably in my seat at this. Evolution he dismissed as "a theory". Homosexuality an "abomination". Even slavery was Okayed providing it met the biblical caveat of justice within it.
So take your choice. Do I remain a Billy-no-mates or do I ride with the apocalyptic horsemen and his friends, chickens perched jauntily on our saddles , my inhibitions scattering to the wind.?