Supermarket Swap

Back in March 2008 before the bankers brought the world to its knees, I went to see Ross Noble perform live at Salisbury’s City Hall.  It was my birthday, a school night and Ross Noble still had a sharp jawline and visible cheekbones.  I was throbbing with excitement.  In fact, I throbbed so much that I couldn’t stop myself from heckling.  I can’t remember the surreal narrative to which I contributed that night, except that it had something to do with Waitrose and earned me the moniker ‘Waitrose Woman’ from the tousle haired, dark eyed, barely comprehensible Geordie (yeah, Ross, make me work for those gags!).



How times change.  Back then when I still thought that the eurozone was something in danger of depletion by deodorant, I did shop in Waitrose, at least sometimes.  I liked its wide aisles full of polite, middle class shoppers, unlikely to wrestle you for a reduced pack of smoked salmon or to elbow you out of the way of the last remaining jar of artichoke hearts.  I used to bloody eat artichoke hearts!  Can you imagine it!  I thought nothing of paying up to forty percent more for branded goods or shelling out a fiver for half a litre of fish stock… Hell, I was keeping Delia in baking tins!

And it wasn’t just Waitrose, to be fair.  Occasionally, I’d stop by Marks’ and pick up a handful of couscous and a coupla olives, cheerfully handing over another of those fivers.  This wasn’t just any food, after all, this was overpriced, overpackaged food…

The thing is, three years later, the income streams are no longer threatening to burst the banks, I fixed my mortgage just weeks before the interest rate crashed, my children are becoming more costly the taller they get and I’m oil dependent.  Supermarket snobbery has become an unaffordable luxury.

So, this is a confession.  I have shopped in Asda.  And I’d do it again (check out the cost of Hellman’s Mayonnaise and tell me you haven’t got a bargain).  I haven’t quite brought myself to try Surf Automatic, but it may yet go that way; this is a long journey with many via points, after all and every Lidl helps.

The vivid green of Asda branding, so very far from any green found in nature, does unsettle me, but I like the arse slapping in the adverts so I’m at peace with the place and, when I’m in there, I feel affluent again.

But this is not the whole of my confession, because I have fallen further, friends. 

I’m ashamed to say that on more than one occasion, I have made unkind comments about the succession of minor celebrities, kings and queens of the musical jungle (I’m  thinking of you, Jason, and you, Colleen and now you, Stacey) who have happily handed over their integrity in exchange for a plate of mini toads-in-the-hole or a frozen strawberry gateau.  With laughter, black and cruel, have I condemned the food of their glittery commercials and indicted their clientele as the flabby underbelly (emphasis on belly here) of the gastro-impoverished. 

Never did I think I’d be channelling Kerry Katona, the undisputed princess of the low rent, but it’s happened.  Sam has gone to Iceland.

No, I don’t have tattoos.  No, I don’t have a dog on a string. No, I don’t have a BMI of 35.  I do however, have a pair of velour tracky bums (no contraband Uggs yet) and a taste for prawns in filo.

If you haven’t done it yet, try it.  Go to Iceland.  I did.  What it did for my self esteem would have cost thousands in therapy.  I felt like a bloody supermodel.  For twenty minutes, I was the thinnest person with the best hair on the planet.  It was the happiest supermarket shop ever.  Add to that the joy of frozen party food, cheap chocolate fudge cake and all the ice cream your children could smear on the sofa, and you’ll know where I’m at.

Three cheers then for the discount supermarkets.  The lighting’s hideous, their reward schemes nonexistent and you’ll probably want to stick with the butcher for your actual meat products, oh, and you will have to overlook the trans-fats and hydrogenated vegetable oil issues, but be clever and you too could reduce your deficit.  Kerry’s done it.  And I’m pretty sure Ross has too.  How do I know?  Just look what happened to his jawline…

Blue Sky Thinking

I have mixed feelings about flying.  From someone who’s watched ‘Top Gun’ thirty-seven times (twice in French) and worked as ground crew for South African Airways, this should not be the case.  I love the smell of aviation fuel on cool, dawn air.  I thrill to the sound of engines at full throttle.  And I swoon at the short sleeve shirts and aviator sunglasses by which even the shortest, dullest men are transformed into good-to-go heroes.

At the same time, I’m terrified.  Not so much about hijackings or improvised incendiary devices created from the ingredients in someone’s Y fronts, but by the lack of control.  Giving up mastery of my fate to somebody else takes some doing.  I don’t like to think of myself as controlling, but it only took one trip on the back of a tandem with my husband to know that riding behind the guy with the controls and visibility isn’t how I ride best. 

Seven days back from touchdown at Gatwick and I’m only just drifting back into complacency about being alive.  Though I love everything about going on holiday – the packing, the hunting for passports, even the bikini shopping – flying really does bring out the worst in me. It reveals me to be irrational, over-talkative and actually, a little bit racist.

This summer, we flew Tor Air.  I know - I’d never heard of them either and I have written about travel for oooh, eversuch a long time.  The perturbing thing was that none of the officials at Gatwick seemed to be aware of them.  “How are you spelling that?” asked the clerk at security.  

“Tor, as in tor-ment or tor-por,” I said, little knowing the truth I spoke.  He shook his head.  “It’s not one I’ve dealt with before,” he muttered.

Of course, had I checked online beforehand I would have found acres of coverage about them.  Delays, huge delays and monumental delays, seemingly down to an intermittent electrical fault.  Some praise for their daring to take the first charter flights into Baghdad, some more stuff about the failure of the cabin lighting due to the intermittent electrical fault and a couple of lines about this ‘tiny fleet’ of four aircraft based in Gothenburg. 

“Swedish, eh?” I said to my mother.  “Probably put together from a flatpack kit with an allen key.  Will the 50p hot dog and the Daim bars make an appearance, I wonder?”

“There’s no in-flight meal,” she replied, “it’s buy-on-board.”  My mother has never been to Ikea.  I don’t know what I was thinking of, making a quip outside her frame of reference. 

So, I did the milling around Gatwick airport working the glamour in my Missoni shades and new pedicure.  Anxious that the nine books I’d brought with me weren’t enough for the fortnight, I succumbed to buying more holiday reading matter in Waterstones, trying to convince myself that £18.00 for two paperbacks in their ‘buy-one-get-one-half-price’ was not unreasonable but knowing from the throb of my credit card that it totally was.  

Fully loaded, I entered the tubular walkway to the aircraft.  It was just as well that I didn’t see the outside of the plane as, when I finally got to examine it in the brilliant lights of Kalamata airport later on, I could still see the ghost lettering of the previous owner – Dodgy Airways or whoever – beneath the garish prime coloured Tor Air signage.  Not only was I not flying first class, I was actively flying second hand!

Aboard the previously-owned aircraft, I was met by an unsmiling flight attendant leaning against the washroom door.  Yes, leaning. I’m old school.  I prefer my cabin crew upright and smiling like they’re auditioning for a Colgate ad, so I was immediately unnerved. There was an awful lot of inadvisable make-up knocking around too, but maybe this was down to the faulty cabin lighting that so often featured in the on-line reviews.

Once seated (those two words make it sound as though it took no time at all when in fact it was as complicated as a Krypton Factor final) I watched the floor show that was the safety briefing.  For a start, the girl styling out the life jacket in front of me was wearing a skirt that had clearly been issued at the start of her career when she was twenty pounds lighter.  In the event of an emergency the chances of her moving anywhere at speed where nil.  Just another hidden catastrophe of the budget airline, I guess.

After a scenic tour of the airport runway possibilities, it seemed our captain picked one at random and went for it, manoeuvring stick A into position B, depressing pedal C and pulling hard on lever D.  And that was it.  We were committed.  I closed my eyes and wished there was a god instead of a gaping vacuum filled with oppressive practices and men in long frocks. 

Generally speaking, I find that the clenching of my sphincter and pelvic floor muscles during take-off is enough of a work-out to last the rest of the year.  I relax nothing until the ‘fasten seatbelt’ sign is switched off.  The midwives would be so proud!  It was a relief when the captain (or ‘der kapitten’ as he was termed) finally achieved altitude and I looked forward to his announcement.

The sound system crackled into life and ‘Kapitten Dragonoff’ introduced himself. 

“Ok, so it’s game on,” he said cheerfully, “and we’re flying at something-something thousand metres!”

This is where I knew myself for a racist.  I need calm English tones.  I need a man called Roger or Richard or Quentin in that cockpit.  I need him to describe the route, tell me that there’ll be no clear air turbulence and exhort me to have a pleasant flight.  I do not need an excitable Swede including me in his real life Ace Combat Playstation game.  And since when did we go metric at altitude?  I’m not even metric on the ground.

I’d love to say that the rest of the flight was a dream, but it wasn’t.  They announced the trolley service by informing passengers that ‘dere will be inflight refreshment wid der tea and der café and… and…”

I was hanging on for her next words but they’d clearly done a bunk.  Were there Kit Kats?  Paninis? Cheese and ham toasties?  She flailed and splashed around in a murky pond of foreign words before finally coming up with ‘a whole loadda odder stuff.”  I breathed out.  My pelvic floor relaxed.  Turned out it’s not just take-off that stresses me.

By the time I’d got the cup of tea and Kit Kat that I ritually buy to normalise the experience of being in the air, we’d started our descent.  That’s how slow, or, if I were kinder, ‘thorough’ the trolley service was.  To be honest though, I didn’t care.  This was a win-win situation.  I was either going to die in the final stages of Kapitten Dragonoff’s video game, tea in hand, or I was going to land intact.  Either way, the Tor Air experience would be over.

Thankfully, the landing, though brutal, was without event; clearly all those touch-downs in Baghdad have paid off.  I walked off into the warm Greek air without a backward glance, my life back in my own two hands, ready to spend a fortnight worrying about the return flight home… 

Dorries' Day

Human sexuality, who’d have it?  Nasty, inconvenient as it is, leaking and oozing into inappropriate corners of lives, leaving a trail of super injunctions, broken careers and indelible stains in its wake. It’s the reason Bill Clinton failed to be the most powerful man in the world, the reason our king-in-waiting is still embarrassed by Tampax adverts, and the reason my friend Catherine ended up breaking off her engagement to an accountant and took up with a spot welder. And that’s the grown-up stuff.  Teen sexuality?  That’s a whole other world of confusion, but, stepping up to the plate to deal with it… Nadine Dorries, MP.

I read about her ten minute bill proposing the teaching of abstinence to girls aged 13 -16, last month and have been having sleepless nights ever since.  In the early hours I heard her name, accompanied by images of high heeled shoes.  Bewildered and confused I sat up in bed. 

“Is Nadine Dorries having a lesbian affair with Theresa May?”  I asked my husband, once I’d poked him into consciousness.  He didn’t answer, but I took his weakly raised eyebrow as a cue to continue.

“Why am I haunted by images of Nadine Dorries and Theresa May’s kitten heels?” I demanded to know.

“High heels ban.  TUC. She campaigned against it.” He mumbled before turning over and resuming his open mouthed sleep.

Aha!  Campaigning for high heels but against sex?  The woman is a mass of contradictions and must not be taken seriously. The trouble is, she has been taken seriously and her proposed bill is due a second reading in January. The credence her proposal has been given by its passage to the next stage frightens me in the same way that I am frightened whenever I hear Jeremy Vine on Radio 2.  How have we arrived at a place where people of such limited intellect are offered influential public platforms?  If it’s incoherent ramblings the man in the street wants, I’m so much cheaper and I won’t fiddle my expenses.  Or set up home with my best friend’s husband. (Oh, it’s all on Wikipedia). And I know more about the music in the Radio 2 playlist, too. 

Dorries’ proposal stems from a position of such misogyny and ignorance that it defies belief.  That she is a woman herself compounds the outrage, but, happily for her, plays to the middle-aged, socially conservative men she woos with her perfectly-legal-in-the-workplace high heels.

At its heart is a traditional, age-old fear of female sexuality. When Eve said ‘yes’ back in the Garden, she couldn’t have known what she’d set in motion.  But she said yes.  Why?  Because she was a bloody sight more spirited and intellectually curious than Adam, who like every man ever after, would wait for the woman to make a decision and then go along with it, only later explaining to God/his boss/his mother that it was her idea and he felt helpless to resist.

Let’s face it, Eve was a proper girl.  She coveted the teeny weeny, green, fig-leaf bikini and relished regular dealings with the forked tongue (all this before Sex and the City!).  As for the Garden of Eden, well that was Someone Else’s project.  She’d get the decorators in herself, little knowing what a curse they would prove to be.  But I digress.  The point is, Eve as the original sinner continues to be cited by men (often with beards, flowing robes and a host of other unpalatable views) as the reason for man’s flawed and fallen state.  And it is to Eve that Dorries returns with her, at best naïve, at worst openly discriminatory, abstinence proposal.  In directing it solely at our teenage girls she makes them the gatekeepers of sexuality and burdens them with the responsibility that I thought we’d finally started asking our boys to have a share in.

Sex education has come a long way in the past twenty years.  Remember The Period Talk, when the boys were summoned away from class by a member of the PE department for extra running around, while we girls were forced to sit through an excruciating lecture about ova and womb linings? Who can be surprised that men of that era believe that the appropriate response to conversational overtures of an intimate nature is to bugger off to the football; that, after all, is their template.

What I (officially) learnt about ‘sex’ at the two secondary schools I attended could barely be termed ‘education’.  We were offered a purely biological understanding of our bodies and reproductive capacity as if that was the difficult bit.  Nothing of emotions or of the terrifying hormonal impulses to which we were to become enslaved; nothing of the false friend that is the post-coital oxytocin surge that makes it look like they actually love you, and absolutely nothing whatsoever about female orgasm. 

I can vividly remember the diagram of the female genitalia in the text book we all stared at in grim, embarrassed silence.  There was the vulva, with a line and a label; there the urethra, similarly labelled; the labia – both majore and minore and the clitoris, for that too, had a tag.  Thing was, none of us had the foggiest what its function was and at no stage did any teacher ever enlighten us.  It was just there.  Like the appendix, one presumed.  An evolutionary relic.

I was in the sixth form before the son of the school doctor put me out of my misery.  We were studying a poem which featured the phrase: ‘the button of all her desires’.   I must have looked blank, because he was prompted to ask if I’d discovered mine.  Let me tell you, aged seventeen, being told by a fellow student what had been rigorously omitted from biology lessons in front of a class full of sixth form boys remains for me, the definition of humiliation.

I will forever be thankful to him, however, for, having discovered it, tried it out for efficacy and finding it not to be wanting, my relationship with the button of all my desires has been deeper and more enduring than any other relationship I have had. 

Abstinence is already taught ‘as an option’ in schools, but most educators of young people accept that it isn’t likely to work as a strategy for most because, at some point, those young people, male and female, are going to want to do it.  Just as they’re going to want to try all the other things that presage adulthood, only more so, because there’s a biological imperative behind this one. 

By telling girls (and indeed boys) that they should ‘just say no’ the message we send is that adults don’t want to talk about young people’s sexuality or worse, that it shouldn’t exist.  Abstinence might seem like the most straightforward way of dealing with something terribly complex and uncontainable, but it comes with lashings of guilt and generous helpings of fear, denial and repression.  And that only covers the heterosexual sex with which Ms Dorries concerns herself.

Difficult as it might be, we need to be a culture which celebrates teen sexuality, legitimises it, and takes it seriously.  It’s important that all kids have access to the same, high quality information that will help them make safe, confident choices about who they sleep with and when.  As I used to say to my Year 11 tutor group, you only get to lose your virginity once, and you have to live with the memory for the rest of your life, so better to have a fond recollection than a hazy, drunken regret.

The developing sexuality of a young person is a rite of passage to be acknowledged as we acknowledge all the others.  I’m not saying treat it like the passing of exams, with a cash bonus for every satisfactory performance, but I do think openness would help.  When teenagers become sexually active they begin a private journey away from their parents.  Sometimes that journey is going to take place in the back of a Ford Focus and sometimes it might pass through fields and woods and disused buildings, and that’s all part of growing up.  Nadine Dorries would do better by her own teenage girls to accept that it will happen and there is nothing she can do about it except let them know she’ll be there when they discover that thing about oxytocin.

Our sexuality is part of our identity and as such, is undeniable.  Learning to deal with it is a life-long task, at times onerous and other times a joy.  Dorries knows this even if she can’t bring herself to admit it; after all, what brought her into the relationship she currently enjoys with her mate’s former husband?  (If you say ‘bell ringing’ I won’t believe you unless you’re using it as a euphemism).

Let’s help our young people to enjoy better relationships and better sex in a non-judgemental culture of tolerance and mutual responsibility.  When Dorries replays her proposal in January she’ll show herself and her socially conservative backers for what they are: out-of-touch, illiberal wankers.  And I mean that most sincerely.

Gorilla Days

On a small, rather scruffy island in the middle of a lake in Wiltshire, a lowland gorilla named Nico sits in silverback solitude watching satellite telly while hoards of tourists cruise past him as part of the Longleat ‘adventure park’ experience.  It is a thoroughly depressing scene but he’s probably on Prozac too, so maybe he’s untouched by the smallness of his own adventure.

“The thing is,” I say to my boys who are transfixed by the fortieth repeat of the Top Gear Vietnam Special, “if somebody switched that gorilla’s telly off, he’d probably learn how to swim or take up rudimentary raft building and he’d get off that bloody island and…”

“And what, Mum?”

“And… go to the theatre, hook up with the guys, play a bit of footy.  I don’t know. Gorilla stuff? The point is, he could go out and find some life!”

“Are you saying I’m a lonely, stupid gorilla?” asks my thirteen year old.

“You can’t be,” says his younger brother. “That gorilla’s got Sky for a start.”

My kids watch TV. They play computer games.  And sometimes they do these things during the hours of daylight, or worse, sunlight, when they could be charging around the large garden we’ve overextended ourselves to buy.  It makes me feel uneasy.

When I was growing up, the viewing of television was strictly controlled; at least, it was strictly controlled when there was an adult present to strictly control it.   When the household adults were at work and we were left home alone (‘childcare’ wasn’t fashionable in the seventies and eighties) we would wait ‘til the car was safely out on the Ongar Road and then we would switch on the box, to enjoy a full day in front of such treats as ‘Pebble Mill’, ‘Crown Court’ and ‘The Sullivans’. 

Upon his return from work, my father would stride purposefully into the sitting room and place his hand on the top of the TV set to feel if it was warm.  My brother and I would pretend to read from highbrow books with our hearts in our mouths, hoping we’d timed the ‘cooldown’right.  Time cooldown wrong and Dad went into meltdown, explaining that passive viewing would rot our brains, deprive us of any motivation or imagination and lead to underachievement in later life. 

The trouble was, we lived out of town and there weren’t any structured holiday activities for youngsters.  There was a chip shop where you could buy a potato-based lunch and kick empty Pepsi cans around, fields behind our houses where you could smoke fags stolen from James’ Dad’s shed, and a bit of shoplifting if you could be bothered to walk the three miles into town. 

Given my extra-curricular activity programme, underachievement was a positive aspiration.

So now I’m parenting myself and I’m working a few things out.  I have decided that there is definitely an ok place for telly, especially if it includes ‘The Simpsons’.  The stuff that is referenced in that programme makes up for systemic failures in the state education system as far as I’m concerned.  But whereas, back in my day, out-of-school activities were minimal and only for the truly aware and dedicated, these days, you can’t move for gymnastics sessions, music lessons, sports clubs, language classes and part-time theatre schools (my own included).  The pressure is on to enrol your child into something ‘improving’.  Not putting yourself out to get your kid into extra-mural education is seen by some as damaging to his/her life chances. 

Thank God then, for Dr Bryan Caplan, a U.S. academic, who has launched a new book, ‘Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids: Why Being a Great Parent is Less Work and More Fun than You Think’, hitting back at the current trend for over-hyper-super-uber-helicopter-tiger parenting so many have gone in for.

His aim is to nullify the guilt parents might feel when they fail to leap out of bed at 5am each morning to take their children to early morning swimming/ice skating/running/diving/dance/tennis (complete this sentence with whichever discipline you failed at yourself) .  He seeks to reassure those of us who are sick of fighting resistance to the practice of musical instruments and who would rather spend the money they dish out to teachers of Japanese maths methods on a good bottle of wine or (when they do the Japanese maths themselves) a holiday in a five star resort on Barbados.

Very little of this stuff, he concludes, will actually affect the success or otherwise of the mature product.  I must say, I largely agree.  For nine years from ages 7 - 16 I was forced through an education in the violin.  My father would do everything he could to pay for the lessons and keep his pink Capri on the road so he could take me to Saturday morning music academy.  He had heard an interview in which Itzhak Perlman spoke of how he had hated being made to practise the violin by his parents, but how, as an adult, he appreciated the lengths to which they had gone in order to help him achieve his potential in the instrument. Where Mr and Mrs Perlman led, my father would follow.

For nine years I detested the violin.  I forged my parents’ signatures in my practice book and I was accused of miming in the orchestra.  I had no aptitude or enthusiasm for it and barely scraped through the grades, and yet neither of my parents would countenance my giving it up. 

They meant well.  They wanted me to be happy and successful. And all these years later, I’ve ended up successfully being happy and I don’t put that down to my barely adequate vibrato.  I do however, put it down to good genes and all the stuff we did that was fun – the holidays abroad, the games of Scrabble, Monopoly and Cluedo, the cricket in the garden, the trips to the theatre, picnics in Kew Gardens, free concerts on the Southbank, the Sunday lunches listening to Jazz Record Requests, days out to the Tower of London, museums and art galleries, the talking round the dinner table that meant we were always late to meet our friends when we were old enough to go out to the pub. 

I might have been the world’s least impressive violinist, but I knew where you could buy the best salt beef sandwich in London and which jellied eel outlets were to be avoided.

Some children have personalities that make them compliant and ‘pushable’; they need no coaxing and cajoling to do their homework or practise their violin or audition for a play, but try pushing a different personality and you run the risk of alienating them and compromising your relationship.  Dr Caplan's advice is to do the stuff you all enjoy and accept that your children's lives will be shaped not by the choices that you make on their behalf, but the choices they make for themselves. This I agree with, but I would add that, to avoid life looking anything like Gorilla Island, your duty as a parent is to let them in on the choices that are out there...

My children do learn musical instruments and they’re fortunate to attend a school that gives them daily opportunities to play sport with all the discipline and team skills that sport instils. We live in a beautiful part of the world, in the middle of the countryside but in striking distance of the beach.  Our summer evenings are spent playing quik-cricket on Sandbanks and barbequeing with friends. We take walks to examine the glow worms on Hambledon Hill; my father takes the boys to Bath RFC matches and we cart our picnics to any number of rainy venues to listen to live music.  The boys don’t listen to Jazz Record Requests, but they do listen to most of the output of Radio 4.  They have seen plays at the National, the RSC and every provincial theatre across the South; they’ve been to music festivals, comedy festivals, cheese festivals and beer festivals. 

They know that life is a privilege; that, unlike Top Gear, it’s brief and unrepeatable.  They owe it to Nico to switch the telly off and get to it.

A Race Apart

“Have a look at these,” says Sarah, placing a box of trainers onto my kitchen table.

“MBTs,” she announces proudly.  I stare at her.  “Masai Barefoot Technology,” she adds, urging comprehension.

“Are you in training with the Kenyan distance running team?” I ask.  “I suppose there’s a space in the team now that Sammy What’s-his-name's tragically fallen from his balcony…”

“Don’t be silly, I’m in training for June 25^th.”

June 25th.  Have I missed something?  It doesn’t ring any bells.

“Sports day? The Mothers’ Race? You can’t have forgotten?”

Of course.  The Mothers’ Race. Once upon a time, when mothers still wore pinnies and slept in rollers, this was a little bit of sadistic fun invented by games masters to ensure that women attending Sports Day couldn’t nod off in the sun behind their copy of Woman’s Weekly while their little Johnnies wobbled down the track with newly off-ration eggs.  Fast forward fifty years however and, like everything else in British culture, it’s an altogether meaner, more competitive story.

Last year, forty-two year old Sarah came second in the Mothers’ Race.  The mother who beat her is nearly ten years younger with a thirty-four inch inside leg (Sarah is five foot four with a following wind).  These facts are immaterial, apparently, as no handicapping system applies to novelty races, much to her dismay.  Instead, she has chosen to approach the event as if it were the London Marathon, which explains the over-priced, hi tech trainers.

My own introduction to the Mothers’ Race came several years ago.  I was thirty-four – just a filly – and gym fit.  I took the race at face value: a bit of a laugh before we broke open the picnic lunch and the tepid cava.  “Shall we jog at the back and chat?” I asked my pal, Mandy who nodded in agreement.  We took our places in the line-up, me in my flip-flops, she in Dunlop Green Flash.  I could have sworn she hadn’t arrived in those… 

The starter’s gun sounded.  Mandy disappeared into a cloud of dust; the dust I was eating.  I was left to amble in last, a picture of bewildered confusion.  It was only as I flip flopped across the tape that now lay fluttering on the ground, that I realised the Mothers’ Race is a front for so much more. 

What I had failed to appreciate in this uber-competitive era, is that where you finish in the Mothers’ Race invites judgement not just of your running ability, but of your competence as a parent. The faster you run, clearly the better able you are to bring up a child.  The mother who breasts the line in first place therefore, is the best mother. And she even gets a medal from the Headmaster to prove it.

If you wanted evidence to support this unpalatable thesis, you’ve only to think of Princess Di.  In the face of self-confessed faithlessness, philandering and proper dodgy liaisons, she retained an unassailable position in the mothering stakes.  She’d surely earned it, for who cannot recall her spirited win in the Mothers’ Race at her sons’ prep school in 1989?  (Before you protest, I simply won’t countenance any theories that the other mothers let her win just so they’d be safe from accusations of treason.)

“So,” says Sarah, “will you be taking part?”  I see that she is already sizing me up; she needn’t worry.  I have every intention of running, but none whatever of competing.

“I expect so,” I say, “I like to support the children.”

“That’s right,” she agrees, “it’s not the winning that matters but the taking part.”

I snort.  It seems to me that that particular adage belongs to a bygone Britain. Today, it’s only winning that matters, even when it sets friend against friend, mother against mother. What we need is more people prepared to lose graciously.

“Why do you always come last, Mummy?” asks my younger son when we discuss the matter later.

“So nobody else has to,” I reply.

Public Displays of Affliction

I chose to work on the day of the Royal Wedding.  I live with a Marxist intellectual for whom there is simply no debate about the having of a monarchy; any events with footmen, bearskins and carriages bring him out in rash and a rage which even the poking of fun at badly dressed princesses will not quell.

"So, you don't want to knock up a batch of fairy cakes so I can have the girls round to watch it?" I asked a few weeks before the big day. (His cakes are, I am loathe to admit, much better than mine.  I think it's something to do with a superior confidence about timing, but, in these straitened times, the MOD might like to take me on in munitions; if anything would fell Gadaffi, my cupcakes are a cert.) 

"No." He replied.  "Frankly I have better things to do than create confection in celebration of a bunch of sponging German bastards.  And you say 'have the girls round' but it'll be a street party before you know it and I, for one, am not spending the day being groped by local farmers' wives tipsy on warm chardonnay, in the name of community cohesion."

I got the message.  I have seen him groped by at least one local farmer's wife behind the calving shed of a local dairy farm, his eyes wide with terror as she launched herself at him to the strains of 'You Saw Me Crying in the Chapel' sung by the bloke who hires out skips round here.  I understood.  This is not H E Bates territory.

"Ok, ok.  But I think you're being churlish..." I ventured.
"I'm not being churlish.  I just think that, in an evolved society, a monarchy is an anachronism.  It doesn't make sense."

What can you say?  Of course it doesn't make sense.  But lots of things that bring pleasure don't necessarily make sense.  Take the erotic dream I had on my ski holiday last month.  Much to my distress it featured Ian Hislop and Boris Johnson. At the same time. Of course, I attributed it to altitude sickness - I don't go for gnomish, bald men or mop headed buffoons -  but it's a perfect example of how something that is entirely illogical, repellent even, can bring a (very great) deal of pleasure.

"Eighty percent of Brits don't want the monarchy removed," I said.
"Then I share an island with fifty million people who ought to be more offended by their status than they are.  That said, I accept the will of the majority whilst wishing it were otherwise.  At best I am indifferent to the royal family.  Make your own cakes."

In the end, I got the call to work, broadcasting essential updates about the Royal Weather to the south - open top carriage, or glass roof?  Would the clouds keep their tears to themselves or shed them in a tribute to Lady Di, who unavoidably couldn't be there?

As I drove into work, I listened to the radio coverage, swapping between Radio 4 (James Naughtie speaking over Ed Stourton and clearly positioning himself as the voice of the royal gigs yet to come) and Five Live (lots of gushing along the route and fabulously trivial contributions from people in the crowd, all hosted by 'Nicholas Campbell'. 'Nicholas Campbell'? Perhaps he thought the princes were slipping into their strides with Five on in the background).

I was somewhere on the M27 when Julian Worricker, catastrophically unfit to report on the first glimpse of Kate by the hoardes along the Mall, was asked to describe the dress.  Sorry, that should read: THE DRESS.  The best kept secret, saving the honeymoon destination.  The dress with which fashion writers across the planet had filled miles of copy even before a needle had been threaded.  THAT dress, Julian.

"It's a long sleeved outfit... I think it's a V neck outfit." 

Alexander McQueen would have hanged himself all over again.  Nothing about lace or fabric or the rarely-seen tiara borrowed from HM.  Or the striking similarity to Princess Margaret's 1960 wedding dress.  And nothing about the expression on her father's face; no comments about how his career as cabin crew would have equipped him not only to keep his emotions under control but also to walk down the aisle without treading on anybody's toes (a fact nobody pointed out). 

This is where the BBC needs to sort itself out.  It's all very well having reporters dotted along the route, but reporters are used to reporting news. The fall of dictators, the collapse of economies, the hacking of phones; that they can do. But this wasn't news.  It was a wedding.  What Auntie Beeb needed was aunts.  Aunts speculate, they criticise, they praise, they gossip, they romanticise, they bring up family secrets and things unspoken of for generations; they draw attention to visible panty lines and paste jewellery;  they notice.  An aunt, on seeing Elton John in the congregation, would have made a quip about there being more than one old queen at this wedding.  An aunt would have commented on how tired he and David Furnish looked, but would have graciously balanced it with relief that there was no baby sick on their suits.  An aunt would have hazarded a guess that David Beckham was regretting those tattoos on his neck, but added that Victoria was doing an heroic thing wearing those sky scraper heels in her condition.  I'm an aunt.  I know these things.  Book me.

By the time I'd got into the BBC South newsroom, Kate was alighting from the Roller and smiling.  Then Pippa was sorting out her dress, calculatingly bending down to trigger a global gasp in the tweetersphere in respect of her 'fine ass'.  And, as Kate began her long walk away from freedom, I was hooked. 
"Those eyebrows," I whispered to Jo, whose husband had pulled the plug out of the telly that morning, "those teeth... so beautifully captured in the parentheses of such charming dimples..."
And, as she (let's face it) led her father down to the balding bloke in scarlet, I exhaled in awe: "That is a girl who has seriously got her shit together." (Jim Naughtie eat your heart out.)

At a quarter past eleven I was obliged to phone into the BBC Weather Centre for the mid-morning conference where the big news was that the risk of showers that had threatened the Royal Happiness had been downgraded. 
"Less than twenty percent now, I think," said Jay Wynne. A Royal Weather Person from another region suddenly made an involuntary noise.
"What?  What is it?" asked an alarmed Jay Wynne who, professional that he is, clearly did not have one eye on the telly.
"He's struggling to get the ring on," I said.  "And now he's offering to honour her with his body..."
"Oh," he said, distinctly unimpressed, and continued to confine the risk of showers to the coast.

Thankfully, the momentous balcony scene occurred between bulletins and I was able to enjoy to the full the chaste kiss which these days serves to indicate the consummation of the royal marriage.  Back in Henry's day, the bride and groom would be sent off the bedchamber as soon as the ring was on, with clergy standing outside the door to confirm God's will was being done and the honouring with the body had happened.  Which lucky BBC journo would be entrusted with coverage of that, I wonder?

Of course we are only interested in the kiss because our schools all have 'No PDA' rules (and if you don't know that PDA stands for 'Public Displays of Affection' you were never in danger of being caught in a game of playground Kiss Chase).  No PDA along with the 'thirty centimetre rule' limiting the proximity of the opposite sex outside of the private sphere - these are the regulations that have made ours the uptight, sex obsessed, sensually retarded culture it is.  Which is why we're so keen to see the kiss.  We're actually waiting for a prefect to appear from behind the curtains and slam the miscreants in detention.

And so a youngish, baldish man kissed a pretty sorted and pretty, sorted, young woman and it was done.

I spent the rest of the day battling irrational jealousy of my girlfriends who were texting me updates from the royal wedding events they were attending:
'Anchored off Brownsea with prawns and Pinot!  Is it gonna [sic] rain?'
'Totally hammered.  Who said the civil list was a bad idea? lol '
'Look like Alice Cooper.  Unfounded claims about this mascara. Keep crying!!!!!!'
To each I replied simply: 'Have Royal Wedding Envy. Do not disclose to husband. '

Eventually, I took my cue from the Duke and Duchess and left in an old car.  Driving home I tuned in once again to Five Live where Drive were doing a round-up of the nation's street parties.  They crossed to Paul Greer, live from Bucklebury's celebration where it seemed that the population of the village was intoxicated not only by the free flowing Jacobs Creek, but by the media attention they have clearly embraced.

"Is that it?" asked the professionally bouncy Asma Mir. "Is it all done and dusted?"
"Oh Lord, I really hope so," came a weary response from Greer.

It sounded as though Paul had taken one for the team.  No doubt Bucklebury has its fair share of farmers' wives.  You can have too much community cohesion sometimes.

Life in Black and White

When do you know that you've reached middle age?  Not 'late youth' as I've been defining myself since I turned forty, but actual skin-slackening, life-weary middle age?  I can tell you.  It's when adverts on the telly leave you feeling excluded and incredulous and when the discussion of plans to alter the output on Radio 4 make you want to lie down in the road in protest.

I like to think that, although I'm knocking on a bit, I'm still where it's at (whatever 'it' is); I know my Hollister from my Abercrombie and Fitch, my Tinie Tempah from my Biggie Smalls and although I still write in coherent English, I can txt and msg gr8 (though these hateful contractions are painful beyond words to me, who delights in the visual experience of words, as well as in their functionality - see, I really, truly am a Radio 4 listener and there ain't no denyin' it).  But I find I am being steadily alienated by a culture created by bright, undoubtedly youthful, advertising execs, who are so tuned in to the cultural zeitgeist that they're probably on the verge of existing only as a version of themselves on Facebook.

That I am no longer part of the demographic at which funky, modern products and services are aimed took me completely by surprise.  There I was, collapsed on the sofa, one eye on 'Words with Friends', one eye on the telly and the other appreciating a crisp glass of discounted Sauvignon Blanc (my third, if you're wondering about the multiple eye thing) when an advert came on featuring two young people in a music shop.  She's wearing a jumper clearly thieved from the wardrobe mistress on the 1978 telly series, 'Heidi' while he's in a single breasted suit from 'Alfie' - the original, not the heinous Jude Law version.  They are so achingly attractive they'd clearly never require the online dating service they're advertising.  Anyway, not only do they look fabulous in their stolen clothes but they sing and play instruments too (at least, he does, reinforcing the male-as-talent-behind-pretty-girl-lead stereotype) and what they sing about is 'old movies'.  Old movies 'like Godfather III'.

Well, not only did I choke on my special offer wine, but I accidentally hit 'submit' on my Scrabble game and sent 'red' instead of 'redoubt' (the 'b' would've hit a triple letter bonus) which was going to detrimentally impact on my score against an actor friend playing me from a New York rehearsal room (oh, get me!). 

"Godfather III," I raged, "was released in 1990.  I have pants older than that film!"  But where for me, 'old movies' means 'Casablanca', 'The Philadelphia Story' and 'Way Out West', for the genuinely young, 'old' in this context means any film that doesn't feature a mobile phone.  Whoops, no, I'm wrong.  There are mobiles as big as shoe boxes in 'Wall Street' and, according to a twenty-five year old friend of mine, that's definitely old.  I sighed.  It was made in 1987.  Same as my A levels.  Anyway, you get the picture.  My old movies are way older than advertising account managers' old movies.  Theirs are in colour for a start.  I started to feel very black and white.

No sooner had this feeling gripped me by my aged gusset, than another advert grabbed my attention.  This was for a yogurt branded 'Nom'.  I'm not sure I can articulate my irrational revulsion at this word.  It's something to do with its ugliness.  It's supposedly onomatopoeic but if I ever met a person who made the cretinous 'nom, nom' sound when they ate I'm afraid I would be provoked to violence.  But I note from my young Facebook 'friends' that this is a popular and contemporary expression of gleeful delight at deliciousness; the modern equivalent of 'yummy' I suppose. Now, whilst I would be happy, grateful even, to be described as a 'yummy mummy' I would never want to be termed a 'nommy mommy'. 

So that's it.  I will never be able to eat that creamy, dairy dessert, no matter how tempting, how flavoursome, healthy and bone-strengthening it might be.  I hate its name and that's that.  For the same reasons I'd never be able to make a relationship with anyone called Bradley, no matter how gorgeous, intelligent, physically well coordinated he might be, nor how many modern languages he might speak.

If, from this, you deduce that I'm not coping very well with change and the nuances of modern life, you'd be right.  The final underlining in bold felt tip of this fact came when I heard of the BBC Trust's recommendations that Radio 4 seek a younger, less educated, less middle class, more northern (these all to be unrelated) audience.  AS IF THERE ISN'T ENOUGH BBC CONTENT THAT ALREADY SERVES THESE PEOPLE. (Ohmigod, I did it.  I did visual shouting.)

Radio 4 does a brilliant, sadly unique, job of providing intelligent programmes for intelligent people.  And those intelligent people might not be educated, or middle class (but they might be) and they might not be young (but some are) but they do need a real choice about what to listen to and that choice must include intellectually challenging content.  For my money, Radio 4 is the most democratic institution that exists in the media. Find it and you find yourself an education; the education the government can't provide, filled with classical civilisation, science, history, philosophy, sociology and literature as well as current affairs, politics, comedy, drama and The Archers (because even boffins need down time).

 What the Trust fails to consider is that most twenty-somethings, infantilised by a state that can't provide jobs for them and which obliges them to live at home longer because they can't afford to move out, aren't necessarily ready for Radio 4.  They're listening to all the shouty stuff (nom, nom!) and the loud music on Radio 1, because, let's face it, you can't get tipsy with your girlfriends and get dressed for a Saturday night listening to Clive Anderson's Loose Ends, can you? 

Just as one graduates from Coco Pops to Alpen, so young Radio 1 listeners can mature into Radio 4 listeners. I should have a bumper sticker made:  'Radio 4 listeners get there in their own time.'  The Trust members need to think back to their own youth and they might just remember that there was a time when knocking back twelve cans of Carlsberg and making an arse of yourself in front of your mates held infinitely more appeal than Melvyn Bragg and 'In Our Time'.  And if I've got that wrong, Melvyn needs to move to Radio 1. 

When I think about new yogurt and old movies, I have to know there's a place I can go to where it's ok to be old.  Radio 4 was it...

I Touch, You Touch...

It’s January.  I can tell that much from the sweet wrappers, pine needles and damp, balled up tissues that litter my house.  And from the over flowing laundry baskets, the dust mice and the slabs of fruit cake that, in another existence and another armoury, might have ended the war in Afghanistan a long time ago. 

Yes, Christmas is over and I can no longer pretend that wasting time is a legitimate practice.  Which is a real shame, because over the festive season just past, I’ve got really rather good at it. 

Like anything, becoming good at Time Wasting takes practice and boy, have I been practising.  What with the snow and ice and a most unwelcome bout of seasonal flu, conditions have been conducive to doing very little, but doing it guilt free (it’s been tricky shaking off the Protestant-work-ethic-plus-Catholic-guilt combo with which I was brought up, but I think I’ve shimmied it out of my system now).

First, the snow came. I look back to the morning at the gym where I authoritatively told the members of my Body Pump class that we were anticipating a little ‘nuisance snowfall’ and I have to laugh.  That was my moment, my Michael Fish moment.  Just two days later the snow in my village was two feet deep.  If Rock Hudson were passing by, you’d swear my house was Ice Station Zebra (stay where you are, Rock, it’s cold down here). 

I don’t want to sound miserable.  Snow is great!  Really it is.  In Val d’Isere or Whistler or the South Pole, where it belongs. Not here in Central Southern where the local authorities’ only severe weather strategy appears to be to hope it doesn’t happen.  Not when heating fuel is being charged at 100% mark-up by racketeering oil companies.  And not when we’d got tickets to see Stewart Lee at the Leicester Square Theatre.

And yet, thanks to the Jet Stream dodging about the stratosphere like a drunk driver, snow fell in huge quantities right on my bloody house, turning even the simplest of excursions into journeys of Homeric proportions.  Eventually, worn down by the prospect of yet again crawling five miles to the main road at five miles per hour, I gave up and slumped into a chair with my i pod Touch.  And that’s when the whole Time Wasting thing really kicked in.

I won my i pod Touch in a competition in the summer.  To be frank, I had thought of it as an upgrade to my Nano, which I used only for playing tunes.  I’m of the eighties; as far as I was concerned, the i pod was a size zero Walkman.  Ok, it seemed quite good that I could get my e mails on it, and the free menstrual app had a certain novelty value, though, as my husband acerbically remarked, with PMS like mine, his predictions would be more accurate than any technology could be.  But as for any real place in my life, the Touch had none.

Fast forward to the festive season.  The boxed set of ‘Porridge’ has been watched, the entire ‘Die Hard’ series has been viewed, deconstructed and reconstructed by my sons in the sitting room and Father Christmas, struggling through the snow, has added two more i pod Touches to the family collection. 

These new arrivals, with their cameras, microphones and Facetime inspire a surge in interest.  Boxing Day is spent comparing them and something called ‘Home Sharing’ happens. i Tunes ‘Home Sharing’ is a scheme whereby one householder’s apps can be shared for free with three others.  I let my children take my Touch away, semi-naked and it came back later that day fully clothed in dictionaries, tube maps, radio apps and other stuff that will apparently enhance my life and human effectiveness. 

I was flummoxed by something calling itself ‘Angry Birds’.

“What’s this?” I asked.  “If it’s Jenny Éclair’s podcast or anything featuring Carol McGiffin you might as well remove it now,” I said.

It’s not though.  It’s a game where some red birds are angry enough with some green pigs to want to destroy their homes.  Talk about Darwinism gone mad.  But I’ve discovered that catapulting birds at buildings can be terribly therapeutic and it’s taught me a great deal about the sort of angle you’d need to achieve if you wanted to demolish a tallish building.  I bet the Taleban use this app all the time…

One of the most addictive apps I’ve acquired though, is ‘Words with Friends’, a virtual Scrabble game.  I’ve always loved Scrabble and have considered it one of the few areas of competitive sport at which I am able to succeed.  I’ve thrashed almost everybody I know who owns a board and have revelled in the smug satisfaction of nailing the triple word score with all my letters – the hole-in-one, clear-the-table feat of the game.  So ‘Words with Friends’ (the free version, with the irritating adverts) was right up my street.  In the first flurry of activity, I started games with every friend I know with an i phone or i pod Touch, spending precious minutes that I might otherwise be using productively, conjuring words, checking for moves and swearing.  Even my dyslexic chums were beating me.  Why?  Well, I did wonder.  Turns out there’s a  ‘Words with Friends’ ‘Cheat’ app too which finds the highest scoring word from your letter selection.  I’ve joined the rule benders myself now, downloaded that and am cheating with the best of them; at least the playing field’s even.

If I haven’t convinced you yet that the i pod Touch or i phone (if you can afford it), is man’s best friend, let me tell you about the radio app.  TuneIn Radio allows you to listen in real time to the radio, or, more impressively, record it and listen back later!  I thought I’d died and gone to heaven.  All my anxiety about being left in the dark once Nigel fell off the roof in ‘The Archers’ was allayed.  It didn’t matter that I was going to be out that evening.  I recorded it and listened to Shula break the tragic news of Nigel’s fatal night on the rooftiles while I brushed my teeth before bed!

There, that’s sold it hasn’t it?  Your house could soon look like mine.  The European Laundry Mountain in one corner, starving, unwashed children in another while you scroll through your apps, checking the long term weather forecast in Tirana and wondering whether you can beat your highest score on Doodle Jump.  Go on, go on!  Let your fingers do the dancing!