Just one of those days

I have had one of those days where you go with the flow or you go under. After a weekend with my achy-breaky mother and father, ("Mummy, you have been away 100 days," my 4-year-old told me when I got back,) I hared off to London for meetings about work. The builders started today but that was OK, my husband could take care of them. First warning that all would not be well was the fact that I discovered on the train, my mobile was dead; I decided that was alright because I did not have to ring anyone. Not until the train shuddered to a grinding halt and it emerged that someone had stolen the overhead lines on the track. Who would do that? What do you do with second-hand train lines? Start your own train company? Do you sidle up to a likely lad in your local boozer and go “Psst. Wanna buy a lot of electric cable - I mean, a lot? Like train track lot. Got a train track, have you?”

I get to my first meeting an hour late. It is an important meeting. I have not met the person before. I am already at something of a disadvantage because I am late. I am at even more of a disadvantage when I realise I have been waiting in her glass-walled office, examining the books on the shelves as you do, my back to the wide open plan seating area outside, with my skirt firmly tucked into my knickers. You are not telling me nobody saw that. You are not telling me people weren't emailing each other about the mad woman with her skirt in her knickers and deciding whether anyone was going to tell her or let her leave that way. You thought that just happened in sit coms didn’t you? Well, it happens in real life too. It happened to me. How I laughed.

Because I was running so late for the next meeting, I then missed my train home. That should have been it. But no. When I got into a cab to go round to a friend's house, I didn’t realise that I was actually speaking Yiddish or Portugese or a mixture of the two. Naturally enough, the cab-driver took me not to De Beauvoir road where I wanted to go but to Bouverie Road which is obviously how you say it in Portugese and several miles from where I wanted to be. Then, and really it would have been better if I had given up the ghost at this point, I rang my husband. The builders have discovered rotten roof joists in the arches we are converting. They may all have to be replaced(the joists rather than the builders). The builders had been on the job an hour before they made their discovery. One hour.

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.

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.

Women firing blanks

Among the new people we have met is one woman who really wants you to know how busy she is. So busy that she really does not want to waste her time making eye contact with you when she could lock eyes with your attractive husband and talk about how full her life is and how many demands there are on her time. Despite or maybe because of working in male-dominated newsrooms, I have never come across a woman who blanks another woman in this way before although I have ofcourse been aware they are out there. It's not sexual - my husband is attractive but it isn't pheromones I smell, it's power. This woman with her gushing "Gosh, did I tell you just how busy I am?" manner apparently thinks she has more in common with my husband because he is a "busy, busy, busy" man and I merely a simple, simple woman. When she happens across us out and about, she gazes only at him, addresses her comments only to him and makes a connection only with him. In her virtual reality power game, I am less important than her, less intelligent and unlikely to understand what she is saying. I have a similar status to a dog or a child as I stand by them, probably lower, thinking about it. I am definitely expected to keep quiet and not interrupt. An unsisterly sister if ever there was one.