Splish Splosh

Went shopping for a bathroom. We had drawn up a list of six showrooms to look round. We took the baby and the four-year-old with us. Shopping with children concentrates your mind. We selected the bathroom in the first shop. The baby was wailing so loudly, I did not think we would make it to another. We had to keep putting the children in the baths to quieten them. The baby got very confused because the baths were, of course, empty. Empty of water. Full of my children. I think the showrooms miss a trick. I think sales staff should wander round in bathrobes and shower caps with outsized sponges and rubber ducks. It would, at least, entertain the children so you could get into the bath and try it on for size.

We were picking out "the grown-up" bathroom. I wanted a sleek, sharp modern bath with "an edge". I got a roll top. I wanted one of those toilets you hang off a wall that you can mop underneath. Not that I wanted to mop underneath it. I just wanted to tell my mother I could. The only wall hung toilet didn't match the bath (I didn't want). We ended up with a traditional toilet with a pedestal, a cistern high up on the wall and a chain you pull. Like school. I may have to take up smoking very fast in confined spaces. Preferably with my best friend.

There was a moment. The baby was crying; the four year old demanding I attach his moulded red plastic Power Ranger to the rocket; and my husband said if we went with the taps and shower I wanted for the bath (I still didn't want), they would obscure the view out of the window. I thought: "Do you know what? Fundamentally. I don't care. In a month or so, I won't even notice. Let's just decide something and go."

These shops, these catalogues are trying to sell you a different life. Not a bath. Not a toilet. It is one of the reasons I am finding doing up the house so intensely irritating. One catalogue tells me: "More than just a bowl to rinse your razor, clean your teeth, this is `art`." It goes on to remind the reader "today's bathroom" is "about feeling good. The simple pleasure of your own space and the sheer unashamed enjoyment of quality." As if your bathroom was a blank, tasteful bathroom in an overpriced boutique hotel where you are anonymous and rich; beautiful when naked; where you can close the door on reality and someone else picks up the sodden towels afterwards. As if your life was like that; a life of sanctuary, taste and the perfect shower spout.

Perhaps, I might feel differently if I thought there was ever a chance I would be able to spend any amount of quality time in it. The one thing I did like was the sink. I am not sure about "art". It is round and stone; it looks like I could baptise the baby in it. Which I may have to since the last time I went to mass (not including funerals) was Christmas.

We had already been bathroom shopping in one of those shopping warehouses where you buy food in bulk and televisions that think they are cinemas. There were some very large shoppers in that very large shop. People so large you wondered whether they shopped in bulk because they ate in bulk. You wanted to point at their trolleys and ask: "Ever wondered why you're fat? Stop shopping here. Shop somewhere normal. It will cost more. You will eat less. You will get thinner. "

I should not scoff. I look at the boys some mornings. I say: "Did you grow last night?" They are taller than they were when I put them to bed. There are other mornings when I look at my hips. I say: "Did you grow last night?" They are bigger than when I put them to bed. Doubtless, there will come a day when I will heave myself, rippling and sodden, out of my luxury bath, abandon my village shops and insist we go shopping with a forklift.

Beach boys

There are days I feel quite proud of myself for giving this a go and trying to carve out a new life for all of us. Today was not one of them. I just thought: "God this is such an effort" when I woke up, opened the wooden shutters and gazed out onto the foggy village street. I hate weekends up here when I am on my own. The week is bad enough but then, at least, I have help with the children and there is school to give the day some structure. The weekend though completely tips me over the edge of darkness; I roll down the scree, leaving pieces of myself along the way and by the time I reach the bottom there is very little left.

I decided it would be better not to be alone - when I say alone, that equals me plus three children and I turned to my phone book. I list the mothers up here all together. There's a slightly grey trail down the page of names; the trace you would get if you regularly ran a finger down it slowly, name by name, looking for someone to call. It is the mark of desperation. One woman was out; one woman's husband is only at home at weekends; I rang another woman once before when I felt this teary panic and she sounded so surprised at the call, I would rather not repeat the experience; one friend left to live away; two others have their own domestic difficulties; another, I had seen too recently for it to be respectable to call again so soon; a couple I know so slightly, a call would be bizarre. One mother I do like and I did call. She invited me round tomorrow but it still left me with today.

In the classic tradition of the unhappy female, I gathered the children up and went out to shop. I hate the supermarket in the nearest market town. My husband goes shopping there with the three children and tells me the shop assistants cannot do enough for him. They do nothing for me. They might occasionally say: "Do you want help packing? "but they do not mean it. They might say: "Do you want cash back?" but they want to ask me: "Why did you have three children? You can't control them." Instead, I prefer to make my own rounds of the butcher, the baker, the grocer, the newsagent, the chemist and the electric shop. When they know you live here and you are not a tourist, small shopkeepers do not seem to mind if you shout at your children. That can come in handy. The man in the electric shop was supposed to sell me an inside aerial which would make the television work. He sold me an aerial - the closest it came to making the TV work, was sitting on top of it; it certainly did not fetch down a picture from the skies.

After the shopping, I took the children to the beach. This is why we live here - one of the reasons anyway. "Right," I said, "we're going to the beach." My six-year-old jutted out his jaw. "I hate the beach," he said. I was not in the best of moods. "I don't want to live here," I said, perhaps over-hastily and not what the children need to hear, but the words pushed themselves out regardless. I blame the weather. "We live here so you can go to the beach. We are going to the beach. Whether you like it or not." My son shook his head. "I'm not going. I'm staying in the car. You go." Forced to chose between the beach or straight home to bed without tea, he caved and chose the beach where the fog was so dense, it obscured even the castle. The boys played in the misted-out dunes, doing what they call "adventuring" and I ploughed the sand with the buggy and a chilled baby. "There you see," I told them, the wind so cold it felt like it was tearing strips from my head to hang from its beaded belt, "isn't this nice?"