Lynne Barrett-Lee

Women's Own

women’s own

lynne barrett-lee

Published in the Western Mail Magazine every Saturday

To read the latest instalments of my weekly Western Mail column, simply click here and scroll down till you see my face...

Intrepid reader's note... This online version of the column goes back to March 07 (the published one for even longer) so if you're new to this page, you might like to start at the bottom and work your way forwards - otherwise some bits might make little sense.

(Like you really don't have anything better to do ;-))

15^th Nov 08 Hi De High Life

There are generally signs to tell you you’re in the grip of something new. With a virus, for example, you might have tonsils the size of turnips. Similarly, with a crush on departed X Factor contestants, a tendency to weep uncontrollably from time to time. And it’s the same with exciting new social phenomena. You know as a result of the thunderous sound of everyone rushing to jump on the bandwagon.

Let’s face it, crunching one’s credit is very sexy at the moment, so it’s no wonder everyone’s so keen to cash in. First up was Michelle Dewberry, or, ‘her off the apprentice’. Presumably as a result of her sterling business education, she’s set up a website and coined a new term. We’ve had ‘yuppie’ and metrosexual’ and now we also have ‘chiconomics’, which a newspaper – not this one – superfluously explains is a clever hybrid of ‘chic’ and ‘economics’. Needless to say, I have not visited her website to check out how best to be ‘chiconomic’ myself. I suspect, with my past history of making carrot quiche on Black Monday, I’m two steps ahead of her already.

Equally irritating on first inspection is a book newly (and most likely hurriedly) published about how to enjoy life while embracing the idea of ‘thrift’. So far, so patronising, so stoutly middle class. But then I alighted on a portion of the published extract, on how families could achieve holiday nirvana on a budget, to which one answer posed was – wait for it – Butlins.

As with planets ending up in conjunction with other planets once every second century and causing people born under Scoprio with Taurus rising to sprout hair on their eyeballs, sometimes life’s pageant is kind of spooky. Because, folks, once again, I’m ahead of the game.

No, they’re not paying me, and no, I haven’t actually been yet, but it just so happens that I am ALREADY going to Butlins, and I’ll bet my entire collection of novelty mascaras that it’s going to be stonkingly fab. I mean, have you looked at what they have to offer these days? Well, let me tell you, it looks brilliant. For starters, it’s astoundingly cheap. No, not cheap as in eating back copies of the beano for your tea, obviously, but certainly cheaper than renting a posh caravan in the Gower. Which you can’t right now, anyway, as it’s November. And even with Pete insisting on paying extra for the Wi Fi, our outlay still represents amazingly good value - an apartment with two tellies, beds made up for us, a ‘gold host’ (whatever that is – probably nothing to do with angels), and absolutely no-one at any point suggesting we attend a stimulating lecture on rare Etruscan pots. Plus there’s wall to wall, back to back, dawn to dusk entertainment, including next week – and this is the real reason for the sojourn – VIP seats to see ‘X Factor’s Shayne Ward’, during which I will, with due regard to my status as high-maintenance diva who is above such girlish things, pretend I’m only there for my darling daughter...

Like I say, what’s not to like about Butlins? Thrifty, chiconomic and a zillion brownie points with the offspring. Just a shame I didn’t think of the book first.

8^th Nov 08 Drage Rage

Dear me, I’ve been in a bad mood this week. A seriously snarling and snapping sort of bad mood, which is something I very rarely manage.

This week, however, it’s been stroptastic all the way. It all started with the cooker. Boy have I been in a rage about the cooker – or rage about the range, to use the technical term. You know, I’ve had it all of three months and already one of the little flame icons on the fascia has almost completely disappeared. Can you believe that? I mean, how can something that cost so much money have failed me so utterly in so short a time? How long, more to the point, before the whole lot rubs off and I have to do my cooking by blind faith? I do keep trying to pretend I’m a disciple of whatever religion it is that insists Persian rugs should have a deliberate mistake in them, and embrace my missing flame icon as a reminder that perfection is neither human nor helpful, but then I remember what I paid for the wretched thing and that grrrr feeling just keeps coming back.

And another grrr. Jeremy Clarkson. Which is super-galling, because, God knows, I’ve stood by that man. Not easy when you live in Cardiff and almost everyone you know hates him. And now he has betrayed me, in his column on a Sunday. He said (in essence anyway, which is pertinent) that if I went to his house and asked for peppermint tea, he’d punch me in the mouth. Yes, I know he didn’t mean me personally, obviously, but I also know peppermint tea drinkers are with me on this. Just because we like drinking peppermint tea doesn’t by extension make us loonies.

And if Jeremy Clarkson wasn’t enough, world events have conspired against me too. No, not the US election, and not Wossy and Brand either. I speak of my beloved songster hero, Austin Drage. So gorgeous, so talented, such a bright shining star, yet he’s been booted – oh, so cruelly – off of the X Factor. I cannot begin to tell you how much this has annoyed me. Nothing I can put in print will be able to do justice to the depth of my fury that this travesty has come to pass.

I can just about forgive the voting public, because the voting public includes among its number a bunch of people whose opinions (while ill-informed) are not my own. But I cannot forgive a certain judge for what he’s done. He knows who he is and were I Jeremy Clarkson I might be inclined to punch HIM in the face, ideally with a peppermint tea bag.

I know I shouldn’t get so het up about this. I should have better things to do than to obsess over something as inconsequential as a talent show on TV. I also know it’s odds on that Austin will hit the big time and that one day I’ll be able to say ‘see! I was RIGHT!!!’ But in the meantime I don’t care who wins now. I really don’t. Which has, of course, left a gaping hole in my life which is going to last right until Christmas.

And then – cripes – it WILL be. Grrrr-eat.

1^st Nov 08 In The Small Print

I was on the radio last week. No, not for my razor-sharp political wisdom (acute though we all know it is), but simply because they needed someone in-the-know to talk about celebrity books.

I could talk endlessly about books, and often do, and I’m generally at one with the zeitgeist, but this is one area where I find myself straying from what seems to be the common view - that we don’t buy enough books by ‘proper’ authors any more. Instead, greedy publishers peddle overpriced rubbish ostensibly written by various ‘celebrities’, charting, in many cases, lives not yet really lived. Worse still, some celebrities even have the nerve to flog us badly written novels and preachy children’s stories too. This dross, we’re told, then clogs up the bookshops, leaving no space for the books we really should be reading – the literature that is the British person’s birthright.

As a writer who has a following, yes, but rarely troubles the bestseller lists, you might think my take on this would be that of a bitter and cynical old bag, but actually the opposite is true. Yes, your average high street is currently groaning under the weight of the new consignments of hardback celeb memoirs, but then, in retail terms, its Christmas – what do we expect?

What many commentators don’t accept is that the rise of celeb culture (and so celeb publishing), probably isn’t elbowing out literature at all. In Britain we publish more books per head of population than anywhere else on the planet. Yes, some are tales of reality stars’ travails, but equally, lots aren’t. And, in any case, in the decade I’ve been in the business, there’s been a steady rise both in book publishing AND literacy, and much of that is down to people who once wouldn’t have dreamed of picking up a book, now, as a result of all your Katie Prices and Madonnas, devouring them at an astonishing lick. And once you’ve got hooked on the power of reading, it tends to become a habit. And I’m all for that.

All of which leads me to a question. What do you think of when you hear the word ‘Barry’? The Island, perhaps? Gavin and Stacey? Well, whatever your preconceptions, I make no apology for plugging it. Tomorrow, you see, I shall be there (11 am to noon) in the County Library, where, according to the program, book fanciers will have the chance of having coffee with me. I don’t actually drink coffee, but that doesn’t matter. The main point is that for all the accusations of dumbing down that are levelled at society, here’s where our love of reading so often begins; a place that routinely does a brilliant job of making books fun. I don’t pretend the Barry Book Bash – a whole weekend of events – is (or is trying to be) a Hay Festival. But I do think our libraries, and – even more importantly – our creative and energetic librarians, are resources we fail to use at our peril. So even if you don’t want (or live close enough) to make a visit, either to listen to my twittering or otherwise, I urge you to make time to use your own in some way. And yes, buy someone a book - ANY book - for Christmas.

25^th Oct 08 Pillow Talk

I’m hot, me, and I’m not being euphemistic here. I really am one of nature’s sizzlers.

No, honestly, I’m not talking the language of love. I’m talking basic body heat in a bedroom situation. I’m simply someone who is invariably too warm in bed. God only knows how I’ll get through the menopause.

Don’t worry. I’m not sharing this with you as a prelude to a long-winded, self-absorbed run down of the darker corners of my anatomical peccadilloes, but because I’ve just found a new thing to possibly obsess over, and that is that I’m clearly part of a razzy new human subgroup – hot people who hanker after cold pillows.

Can’t name any names here obviously (for that would be advertising) but I have to tell you, there’s a whole undiscovered world out there. Did you know, for instance, that there are people who feel so strongly about their ambient sleeping arrangements that they feel moved to emote at great length about every teeny detail , for the greater good of fellow flushed and sweaty sufferers? Well , there are, and the world is all the richer.

I’ve come by this seam of kookiness via clicking on an advert I noticed. It’s for a pillow that stays cooler than you. Aha, I thought, that sounds like manna from heaven. Pete and I, you see, are not compatible in bed. This is because he’s of a pathologically high tog persuasion and I am, ahem, the polar opposite. In a sterling piece of matrimonial compromise, therefore, we have shouldered this burden fairly for decades i.e. we’ve had a four tog quilt. But before you write in and call me a meanie, that’s been on the basis that as he invariably pinches my half at some point in the night, he ends up, effectively, with eight.

Since we relocated our new bed under the window, however, I have grudgingly upscaled to a nine tog, which obviously leaves me too hot. Either that, or, exposed to the cool of the night, waking hourly with the feeling that elves have painted my body with an alcohol rub.

So you can imagine my excitement to find I can now join a sort of ‘cold pillow fanciers’ club. All I need to do is shell out £24.99, fill my ‘medical grade’ pillow with 2 litres of water, seal the stopper and wey hey – I’m set for the night. I know this because some fifty odd people have written in about them, and to a man (bar the odd skinflint or person with a puncture) have waxed more lyrical than a bunch of dead poets on speed.

And – get this – if I really want to run with the wild bunch, I can also ‘share’ photos of myself and my pillow, and am instructed to ‘let my imagination run wild’. Just as long as I ‘behave’, as I consider my composition, ‘as if a guest at a friend’s dinner party’. I read this and it brought me up short, I can tell you. Trust me, I have BEEN to dinner parties in my time. Is there something I’m missing in all this?

I’ve ordered the pillow anyway. I shall rest my head upon it. I shall let you know what happens next….

Apologies for the gap at this juncture, which has been wholly caused by my not quite getting myself together sufficiently to upload 7 months of columns...

If you are in a state of anxiety about wanting to read them, and can't be fagged to read them all online at the Media Wales archives, please email me at lynne@lynnebarrett-lee.com I can't guarantee I'll get round to adding them, but i'll be ever so flattered ;-))

1^st Mar 08 An Ill Wind

Dang and blast it, I’m ill. Horrid flu bug. Caught it off Pete, who had it last week. Such is the price one pays for selfless devotion to sick husbands. I told my dad. ‘That’s why I never go out, ‘ he said sagely. It’s not the going out, I pointed out. It’s the staying in. ‘Germs,’ he said. ‘Typical. That’s the problem with having children.’ I gave up then, to save my throat a bit.

Anyway, the upshot is that I’m writing this in bed. I probably don’t need to be (being female, being robust, there being no-one here to impress with the extent of my unwellness) but I thought ‘I know. I’ll stay put’. At least it’ll save on the blowheater bill. Plus I might come over all feverishly creative. I mean, look at John Keats. Always been a hero of mine, Keats. I can quote you whole chunks of Endymion and Ode to Autumn (which is a sadly underrated party trick). And being terminally ill and consumptive and so on, he must have written a few of his masterpieces from his sickbed.

I’ve stayed in mine for another reason too. You never know when you’re next going to get ill, do you? So it’s sensible to make the most of it while you are. (I’m obviously not talking major illness. Just your bog-standard irksome viral nasty.) Because being ill just isn’t what it used to be. When I was ten (an appendectomy), being ill had its merits. I got to see Watch With Mother, with a blanket over my knees and my pillow brought down from upstairs, and mum would get back from dinner lady duties and warm through whatever my friends had had for lunch. Stew, mostly, plus, if I was lucky, jam sponge. Sometimes she’d do me a whole Fray Bentos steak and kidney pie. Remember those? Fifteen layers of flaky pastry, fourteen of which were as flaky as damp flannels. Happy days. I also didn’t much mind when, in my late teens, I contracted glandular fever and had to have a fortnight off work. Much as I didn’t much care for the symptoms, it was almost worth it for the whole ‘hanging out in an empty house’ situation. Just having the bedroom to myself was pretty splendid.

But those days don’t last. Grow up and suddenly it’s all mortgages, and responsibility, and not wanting to be seen slacking. And for me – self employed for decades – not working is also synonymous with not earning. Bit difficult to wallow in jim-jams with equanimity when you know it means not getting paid.

And worse, I work for myself AND I work at home, which means holing up here holds no sort of compensatory appeal. There’s no commuting not done, no tights not put on, no chopsy boss not to have to put up with today. Little things all, but not NOT having to do them means my illness does not come with any sort of upside. I’m here as per usual, only sick.

Maybe the answer is to go rent an office. Having a workplace to go to would at least mean that when I was ill I’d have somewhere not to go. But that’s a bit like using a sledgehammer to crack a nut. Which, come to think of it, is just how my head feels. Feverishly creative? I wish. How on earth did Keats manage to make sense?

23^rd Feb 08 To Dye for

Days getting longer, daffs in bloom, Christmas tree dispatched to where ever it is Pete dispatches our Christmas trees, and my thoughts, naturally, turn to summer. And the big news this summer is dye.

You might not yet have noticed, but if you want to be on-trend in the coming months you must apparently seek out clothes that come with the buzz words of IKAT (a pan-Asian resist warp and weft thing, apparently), ombre (that’s dip-dyeing to the rest of us) and tie-dye.

Funny, isn’t it? Sometimes you don’t realise something’s disappeared till it comes back and reminds you it hasn’t been around. So it is with the business of dyeing your own clothes, a craft in which I used to be something of an expert, on account of having been a chronically strapped for cash teenager with a yen to be seen to have different things to wear.

But do teenagers do that sort of thing these days? Perhaps I’m missing some huge adolescent make do and mend movement (tell me, do) but from what I’ve noticed teenagers almost never seem to spend any time scouring the Dylon shelves in Debenhams (I’ll wager they no longer have them) because they’re too busy wading through the offerings in Primark, many of which, these days, cost less than dye itself. And I can’t help but think that’s a shame.

Back when I was a teenager (which helpfully coincided with that whole post-Woodstock love, peace and wafty clothes bit of the seventies) everyone dabbled. My own forays into the world of artful clothes reincarnation can be traced back into an early exposure to the art of Batik, thoughtfully introduced to us by Mrs Wright, the art teacher, who had a fondness for boiling up cauldrons of wax. My own effort, a pattern based, inexplicably, on the interior structure of an onion, still resides somewhere in my loft. Worked on it for weeks, that rectangle of fabric; waxing and dying and washing and re-waxing...and if the net result was nothing more useful than, well, a rectangle of colourful, onion themed fabric (I never got around to turning it into a stylish tissue holder), it did awaken my creative urge. Therein followed a positive glut of new clothing; t-shirts were transformed into art installations, my dad’s nylon drip-dries became violently hued dip dyes, and almost everything else became purple.

And that wasn’t all. When we weren’t dyeing things (including the obligatory fingers, washing up bowls and random areas of carpet) we were chopping out triangles from our girlish summer dresses and inserting them into the seams of our jeans. We made school bags out of curtains, with plaited wool handles, and knitted twenty seven foot stocking-stitch scarves.

I ran this by Georgie, this whole ‘customise your clothes’ thing. Predictably, she wasn’t impressed. ‘Why on earth would you want to do that?’ she enquired. ‘Couldn’t you just go and buy new stuff?’

I’ve fretted about this ever since. Because it’s necessity, that good old fashioned mother of invention, that’s precisely what’s brought us the clothes on our backs, from woad-coloured cloaks to modern Gore-tex. But what is today’s children’s legacy to be? A new vowel-free language? A skill for speedy typing? The ability to microwave a pizza?

All legitimate talents, but it still seems to me that no-one – male or female – should reach voting age without having, at least once, tie-dyed a T-shirt.

16^th Feb 08 Being Joseph

I’ve been thinking I’d like to be a property developer, which is making Pete decidedly twitchy. He’s worried he’s going to come home one evening to find I’ve snuck to an auction and blown all our cash on a dump with twenty seven sitting tenants.

Mind you, it’s his fault. Sometime back he took to watching television of a morning, having decided my preferred diet of Chris Moyles and indie bands could only be stood for so long. So now we have two forty-somethings-on-a-sofa in our kitchen who mostly seem to talk about Dancing On Ice.

But it’s what happens next that’s the problem. I leave it on, you see, even though I work in the study, because I’ve grown quite attached to the sound. It’s like the kitchen’s a staff room, where they’re always on breaks, and the rumble of conversation about house moves and knick knacks has proved an unexpectedly pleasant background hum.

Except for one snag. It’s called ‘Homes Under the Hammer’, and, in it, two presenters (the usual him and her combi) go rootling around properties that are up for sale by auction, voice stern opinions, script appalling puns, accost the buyers, probe their plans, then come back months later to see what happened.

I find this so compelling that anyone who attempts to contact me between ten and eleven will find the phone goes unanswered and emails unread. And where it’s mostly true that I do this because I’m working, for that hour each day, I am fibbing.

Because property development seems such fun. And why wouldn’t it? I am a builder’s daughter, after all. Dad was a master builder actually (as well as a plumber). Always smelled of putty and taught me all he knew.

But recent evidence, whatever Pete’s fears, suggests otherwise. Though I can wield a Black and Decker with the best of them, there is a painting in our bedroom that has spent seven whole months propped against the wall, not as some post-modern decorating affectation but simply because it’s too heavy to be affixed by means of a simple hook. We’re talking Everest grade rope and/or even battening. And once battening enters the equation, I’m stymied. Not because I can’t but because I simply can’t be bothered. Not this weekend anyway. Maybe next…

Then watching the programme last week I had one of those eureka moments – Margate, it was. Plot of land that morphed into four town houses. Tidy profit. And I looked at the presenter, thinking ‘hmm, nice raincoat’, and suddenly it all became clear. I don’t want to be a property developer after all - I just want to be HER. (Or him. I’m not picky.) I want to criss-cross the country with a cameraman called Kevin, poking my nose into nooks and crannies, going ‘Dry rot. That’ll cost them’ and ‘Hmm. Dip strip these doors?’. Mostly – and this is the crux of it all - I want to spend more of my life in outerwear. Classy coats. Designer Jackets. Matching scarf and glove sets. Paeony splattered macs. Suede boots with killer heels.

I can’t imagine why this thought’s only just struck me. I have more coats and jackets than a Spice Girl has angry fans in Buenos Aires right now. I am MADE to be a gad-about-presenter in stylish rainwear. And that, I’ve come to realise, is what it’s really all about. Can’t tell you how relieved Pete is.

9^th Feb 08 U Bend if you want to

Having a nice life? Well, good for you. Apparently I’m not. Not supposed to be, anyway. I exist at the bottom of a metaphorical toilet, and what I thought were the actions of an independently minded woman are actually the machinations of a middle-aged clone.

It’s one of those ‘recent research shows’ things. (I know. I shouldn’t sneer, should I? Without all these grim ‘scientific studies’ for us to wallow in, there’d be more space in the papers for silly handbags.) Anyway, it’s not just me. Apparently us fortysomethings are all in the grip of a terrible malaise, because we’re living in the U-bend of our lives. The effect is independent of wealth, status or numbers of Desperate Housewives episodes viewed, and is apparently due to being at the furthest point from our twin peaks of bliss; at the one end birth and childhood, at the other, presumably, in possession of the Age Allowance and no longer having to pay to watch telly.

I read this and naturally my first thought was ‘WHAT? I don’t feel remotely like I’m in a U-bend!’. Perhaps I’m stumbling through a fog of denial but I incline to the idea that this is the best bit. The first bit, fun though it was, was too mired in spots and unrequited loves and double maths to be properly enjoyed, and as for the next bit, which seems mostly to be about illness, infirmity, having to give your offspring all your money so they can get on the property ladder, and, of course, embracing beige, I’m not exactly champing at the bit. But then I had a second thought, and it was this. That this bit being good probably depends, in part, on not reading anything that travels under the alias ‘important research’, when its actually little more than doom-mongering, designed to depress the worried well.

And it’s hard to avoid. Particularly if, like me, you have a mum who likes to cut out recipes and snippets from the papers, which means that as well as reminders that I still don’t know what quinoa is (apart from being annoying just for existing, obviously) I now know that the B-L new kitchen plans are not about our old one having died but entirely about the mid-life crisis I’m supposed to be having as a result of being stuck in my U bend. So it’s not OUR kitchen, but MY kitchen (Or, rather, my ‘M-LK’), and Pete’s only role is to part with wads of money for underslung sinks while feeding his own mid-life crisis by feeling inadequate about his dearth of carpentry skills, and coveting the contractors’ DeWalts.

It sometimes seems – don’t you think? – that we’re so short on world war and famine, that we’ll buy into anything that tells us we’ve no business being happy. And if we are feeling good, then we’re clearly a bit stupid and need to find more things to be miserable about.

It was in thinking this that I recalled something pleasing. Back in the forties, a Prime Minister, name of Churchill, lost an expensive ring in a Downing Street loo. He’d thought it lost forever, and had almost given up, but this whiz of a tradesman, determined and undaunted, stripped down all the plumbing and reclaimed it, to the PM’s great joy.

That plumber – yes, truly – was my Dad. Random, I know, but it still seems to me that there’s a lesson in there for us all.

2^nd Feb 08 Notes on a Scandal

You find me, as I write this, in Scotland. Edinburgh, specifically, just for a day and night, while Pete attends a Very Important Meeting.

I’ve tagged along for three reasons, the first being that, once the VIM is done, there’s to be a shindig (Celadh, in fact, but I can’t spell it) during which, as is the custom, Pete and his fellow medics will be prancing about in kilts – which, since Mel Gibson donned one in Braveheart, is a personal must-see. The second is that it’s part of my ongoing resolution to get out more and not mostly to Sainsburys. But the third, and most compelling from a literary perspective, is that my gatecrashing means I have a whole day to either sightsee (ridiculous – this is Scotland, it’s Winter) or make like my fellow writer, the esteemed Joanne Rowling, and simply sit somewhere warm, writing great things.

J K famously wrote much of Harry Potter whilst holed up in the corner of some Scottish café, in order, so legend has it, to save on the heating. Not something I can reasonably claim (though the air con in our hotel room makes a pretty pressing case) but I suspect it was more than that anyway. That she’s of that school of writing that thrives not on solitude and wine gums but with the white noise of humanity thrumming at her elbow.

I doubt JK ever had a glass of Chenin Blanc on hand at such times (much less a Caesar salad on the way) but I’ve always liked to think we’re compatriots in the business of creation, and fancy, as I look out upon the granite buildings, the leaden sky, the green of the castle grounds rendered almost black by the squally rain, the people rushing by doing battle with skittish brollies, the irritable phut phut stop-go-stop of the traffic, that we’re ploughing the same furrow, coaxing similar muses, that we’re fellow journeyman scribblers at the sharp end of life. (Come on, we do look a teensy bit alike.)

But so many distractions! I know nothing of the calibre of client in whatever caff it was she frequented but they must have been a pretty dull bunch. This lot are just too entertaining. I’m trying – really trying – to get into the creative zone, but try as I might, I can’t think straight. Not with the quartet next to me. They’re all eating lunch wearing fingerless gloves. Why? Are they part of some gathering of biological mutants? Are there rude words tattooed on the backs of their hands? And that pair adjacent. They’re illicit lovers. Gotta be. They keep putting down their cutlery to stroke each others’ cheeks. Looks so Richard-Curtis-film twitty. Normal people don’t DO that. If I stroked Pete’s face like that in a restaurant he’s think I’d gone bonkers.

And those two. Those ladies-who-lunch sort of ladies. You can tell by their hair. All coiffed and tidy. It’s blowing a hoolie and lashing rain down in girders. How’d they get here, and still look like that? It’s bizarre. Are their hairdos made of uPVC?

My own lunch comes and goes. I achieve almost nothing. Except notes about nothing. Which make the staff antsy. They clearly think I’m a food critic. Which is fun, but hardly progress. And proof, sadly, that my long cherished fantasy – that the most successful writer of the century and I are cut from the same cloth – is quite wrong. Let’s hope my men-in-kilts one fares better.

26^th Jan 08 It Could be ME!

I think everyone knows, intuitively, that money doesn’t buy happiness, fame is a shallow and capricious bedfellow and that the best things in life are free. But at times like this (it being January, credit cards having taken a pounding, there being nothing but mistreated chickens on the telly) it’s easy to forget, isn’t it?

And if you think that‘s going to be the lead into a homily, you’d be right. I should explain. Been in a bit of a flutter this week as, in glorious counterpoint to my computer woes of last week, something slightly exciting has happened. Well, I say slightly exciting, but that’s possibly overdoing it. Let’s say something with the potential for being slightly exciting has happened. Which, given my excitable nature, is certainly good enough for me.

I’ve never had much sense of perspective, which is both a curse and a blessing. A curse because it tends to give me a somewhat overoptimistic view of the life’s possibilities, and a blessing for exactly the same reason. When Mrs Parry, the careers teacher, told the fifteen year old me that expecting to make a living as a novelist was the most unrealistic suggestion she’d heard all morning, and I’d be better off training as a nurse or a teacher, It could be argued it was very sage advice. But if I tell you that today I have a one in eight hundred and thirty six chance of having written the Amazon.com Breakthrough Novel of 2008 (and, boy, who wouldn’t like THAT?) you’ll appreciate why I’m glad I am as I am, because it makes this fact rather poptastic.

But I digress. The main point is that I started out as one of almost five thousand entrants, which means a little over 4000 have already had their hopes dashed – and probably not for the first time, which makes what’s followed even more lovely.

Which is – keep up, now – that because of either a glitch or a shrewd ploy to sell more, only customers of Amazon in the USA can post the reviews (of online extracts) that will help choose the winner, which means nineteen of the twenty countries represented in the comp are at a big disadvantage right now.

You’d think, wouldn’t you, that the Americans would be overjoyed at this unexpected tilt of the playing field. Americans, as we all know, like to win. How pleased you’d think they’d be at their good fortune. But it’s just not so. People – those same Americans – have rallied. It started when one entrant suggested that if anyone had no-one to review their work, then he would, and, since then, whole floodgates of altruism have opened. Both writers who’ve made it this far, and also many who haven’t, have offered to help out their fellow non-American writers and make up the lack that this problem has caused.

Which means a sense of fair play can be just as infectious as measles, because I can’t think of a time when such generosity of spirit was displayed by so many, so enthusiastically, at once. People, remember, who are competing against each other and so really have nothing to gain.

So whatever the outcome of my eight hundred to one long- shot, the actions of a bunch of my fellow writers across the ocean has been a very welcome shot in the arm. Now, doesn’t that restore your faith in human nature?

19^th Jan 08 Bag lady

Of all the titles least liked by women of a certain age the epitaph ‘Old Bag’ must rank highly. As a thing to be called, it has no redeeming features. Unlike, say, curmudgeon, it has no hint of warmth. And where grouches and grumps are often though of fondly, the old bags of this world exist in a desert, devoid of either humour or respect. And yet, sad to say, there are times in one’s life when Old Baggishness tends to win the day.

And that day, for me, might have come.

Last week it was. Monday. Came out of nowhere. Well, I say nowhere. It wasn’t really nowhere. It had been brewing since the previous Thursday. A Thursday which was unremarkable except in one aspect. My internet service had disappeared. In that storm Wednesday night, I think it must have been. Nothing that dramatic, truth be told. Just of sufficient wattage (Flash-age? Kerpow-age?) to make the lights flicker and the TV go ‘phut!’ And, naturally, for this is the way of my existence, for my modem, or router, or whatever the bloody thing is, to decide to want to hide in the cupboard under the stairs.

In any event it wouldn’t work any more. So come Thursday, I took action. For what turned out to be most of the day. Got nothing written, nothing done, nothing useful achieved. Keep calm, I thought. Be polite, don’t get angry. Nothing ever got solved by getting ranty with people. They’ll only hate you and call you an old bag. Thus all I did achieve was knowing precisely who to blame: my much esteemed Internet Service Provider, whose annoying secret-recipe-for-operating approach appeared not to include being fixable – as always – and a very very very bad mood. Which, naturally, carried over into Friday where it was further inflamed by Joe being in a very bad mood also, on account of the problems with my Internet Server meaning he couldn’t add a very important song to his iPod, the lack of which vexed him most greatly.

We then went away to Center Parcs for the weekend, where, in the spirit of all the tree nymphs and faerie folk and elves, I did swimming and cycling and Pilates and ping pong and found calm and inner peace and goodwill.

Come Monday , however, real life resumed, and with it the seethe-making truth that my server - of nine whole years - didn’t seem to care. Fuelled by yet another spate of indifference and ineptitude, the ashes of my Ying and my Yang both ran for cover and I was once again very very cross. At which point I decided I could stand it no more. I left my call centre drone to his interminable droning, dialled a whole other number – one called ‘sales’ – they get answered - and when it was (‘can I help?’) I took a breath - a nice deep one - and screeched, ‘Call this service?! The clue is in the ‘S’ word, you numbskulls! Give me my MAC code! I’m leaving!’.

‘Oh dear, is there a problem?’ the querulous voice ventured.

‘How long,’ I growled back, ‘have you got?’

Ten high-octane minutes and I got my result. A new router, new filters, new everything, gratis. Plus a jaw-dropping sixty percent reduction in subscription. Just by virtue of embracing old bagdom.

Tell me, what’s not to like here? Bring it on.

12^th January 08 And to cap it all…

Because we’re a party of twenty and need to go away when everyone else does, you’ll not be surprised to know that we booked this year’s summer hol last September. Which means January – a mere six months to go! – actually feels a bit like the run up. At the very least the time to think ‘now, then. Done Christmas. What’s next?’ Except Georgie (every inch her mother’s daughter) is ahead of me and has, while whiling away an hour with the brochure, discovered the existence of a serious setback. And from an unexpected quarter – the small print.

I don’t read a lot of small print, I’ll admit. Not when it comes to the average holiday brochure. Mostly because I know what I’ll find. The usual guff about not calling the rep a dozy boondog. The lines about how, if the camp site gets overrun by martians, that under sub-clause 22, it’s not their fault. The drawing of attention to the important local customs which point out that if a phalanx of men herding ceremonial llamas happens by, the tour operator will not be held responsible for any loss of limb that’s resultant thereof.

But this bit of small print wasn’t even in the small print, which means my failure to spot it was criminal. It lurked, in italics, between ‘washblocks’ and ‘ping pong’. And it was this; ‘Swimming caps are compulsory in the pool.’

Whether this information causes a roll of the eyebrows or a sharp intake of breath will depend mostly, I’ll hazard, on your gender. Take competition swimmers and rubber fetishists out of the equation, and I think most would agree that hair, like bras and lippy, is a girl thing.

So it’s not surprising that the men in our party (particularly those with no daughters) find the resultant explosion of female angst so amusing. Well, they would, wouldn’t they? After all, they dare not get too attached to their own hair on account of its potential for being temporary. And I guess I wouldn’t mind donning silly headgear if I knew it was going to hide my bald patch.

But they just don’t get it sometimes, men, do they? It’s not that I’m fussed – I’m a beach girl myself – but I’m also Georgie’s mother and as such am the person to whom all bleats, moans, hysterical outbursts, fits of uncontrolled sobbing, requests for emergency sleepovers, marshmallows and late chits are addressed. And needless to say, this piece of intelligence has invoked most of the above, because for Georgie the idea of appearing sans hair AROUND BOYS is only marginally less horrifying a prospect to contemplate than the octopi and krakens and giant killer squid that apparently cruise all of the Adriatic coast.

I had thought, in my desperate motherish way, that perhaps there was something I could do. Speak to the folk at the campsite perhaps. Get us moved to another nearby. But my silly musings are a complete waste of time. In Italy, where we’re headed, the swim cap is law.

Strikes me as mighty curious that the country that gave us Roman orgies, Gorgonzola, some of the most terrifying road junctions in western Europe, Mussollini and - yup - the Mafia, should have a bit of a thing for health and safety, but there you go. Swim caps it is or we swim in the sea. It’s going to be a long old six months.

5^th Jan 08 Viva La Cucina

Apart from being glad I’m a Leo – which everyone knows is the best Zodiac sign – I don’t much bother with astrology, being mostly unable to understand why Saturn’s progress across the heavens should have anything to do with my chances of selling more books than Jeremy Clarkson. But as I’m desperate and there’s a slew of New Year predictions around now, I’ve been looking to the stars for encouraging signs.

Specifically, about our kitchen. 2008, you see, is to be the year of the new one, our current one, having given ten years sterling service, now falling quietly to bits, in the manner of an ancient Mayan temple.

A new kitchen, to my mind, should be a thing of joy. Not the joy you get from blowing wads of cash on a spectacularly extravagant holiday, obviously, but a pleasant sort of project even so. Except we seem to have reached an early impasse. Not just because we hate almost everything we see (too dark, too fussy, too Spartan, too orange, too much like hers down the road) but of the few that ignite any sparks, we seem entirely unable to agree.

My own tastes are not outlandish. I’m leaning towards a sort of contemporary-but-with-a-nod-towards-the-traditional sort of look. The kind you’d get if you fused Jamie Oliver with Heston Blumenthal and took them round to Nigella’s, with integral fairy lights and cappuccino frother.

But Pete’s leaning in an entirely different direction, for reasons that eluded me until I realised they were directly linked to his preferred televisual diet of air crashes, crime scene investigations and profiles of serial killers. His kitchen of choice (and yes, it’s a real one) is a symphony in grey. The sort that leads normally balanced people to go and hurl themselves off buildings. Sort of forensic laboratory meets mortuary meets State Correctional Facility, with enormous charcoal slab-fronted units and a complete absence of any detail or styling that could addle the mind of a potentially deranged cook. It’s got cupboards that could house a decade’s unsolved homicide case notes - or a body - plus hosable utility grey flooring and floor to ceiling grey venetian blinds – presumably there to squint through to see if anyone’s staked your kitchen out. The picture does include a plant, in a pot, but if it’s a stab towards lending a jaunty air, it’s a stab that has failed to succeed.

But Pete thinks it’s great. He’s come over all Richard Rogers and keeps banging on about its aesthetically pleasing monochrome simplicity. Indeed so smitten is he that he keeps leaving the picture on the screen of my computer, presumably in the hopes that it will burn onto the kitchen choosing part of my brain in the same way as the Sky Sports One logo soon will on the screen of our telly.

Which is why my plan for gentle steerage towards the right path (i.e. the one in which he understands that I am always right in such matters) needs all the astral assistance it can get. So I was cheered by the horoscopes I spotted in one of last week’s Sunday supplements. Where Leos, happily, can expect a year of ‘fruitful projects’, Virgos are sternly advised thus; to be ‘generous with money’, ‘mindful of a loved one’s advice’ and – get this – to ‘embrace more colour in their lives’.

Okay, so they didn’t specifically say ‘lose the grey’. But I think it augers well. I’ll keep you posted…

29^th Dec 07 Muffin to do…

So. The Mid Christmas Lull is upon us. Funny period, isn’t it? One minute you’re barrelling along astride a tidal wave of frenzied preparation and the next you’re becalmed in the doldrums. Sick of Turkey and BBC costume productions but still not quite yet at New Year’s Eve.

So what do we do when there’s nothing to do? Yup, you got it in one. We go shopping. But was it always like that? No, it wasn’t; seems our ancestors were much too busy to trawl the sales. So for those of you inclined to more imaginative pastimes, I humbly offer up some alternatives for this 29^th December...

Turn the other cheek: if proximity to flatulent and sofa-hogging relatives leaves you feeling chopsy don’t make like the Nazis and get nasty. They chose this very day in 1940 to unleash 10,000 bombs on the city of London – the worst night of bombing of the Blitz. Some time further back, but no less aggressively minded, the US 7^th Cavalry, clearly keen to stretch their legs, chose the same day in 1890 to conduct their last battle with (sorry, massacre of) the injuns, or ‘Native Americans’ as we’re now faux-respectfully told to call them.

And I doubt Thomas Beckett had murder on his mind while tidying his cathedral after the Christmas rush of 1170. Sadly, the same can’t be said of the four knights that fetched up and killed him, apparently on the orders of the king. Henry II, naturally, denied everything.

Launch a ship, why don’t you? Perhaps like the Warrior, which hit the Thames at Blackwall, in 1860. Eminently sensible timing. School’s out, after all. Not to mention half the workforce. So no traffic.

Go into labour: Charles Mackintosh (of raincoat fame), Charles Goodyear (of tyre fame)and Andrew Johnson (of, um, being the 17^th US President fame) all entered the world on this day. Make merry in the spring and you could find yourself enjoying both a baby with potential for greatness and a brilliant excuse to get out of playing Twister.

Invent something. Yes, that could mean new ways with old stuffing, but you might want to aim higher. Or straighter, as is presumably what happened in 1862, when an enterprising person (possibly named Flintstone) decided that what the world needed to offset all that chocolate was to go and hurl big balls at skittles. Though his invention – the bowling ball – led to a less pleasing one. That abomination for feet, the bowling shoe.

Join a club. But make it a good one. Forget the PTA and the Masons. If you want some real kudos, make like Texas – become a State in America. Must surely beat watching Titanic again.

And finally, feel subversive in Starbucks (or, for balance, the coffee bar of your choice). We can bleat all we like about being the most overworked nation in Europe, but we do have it easy these days. Politicians of yore spent their Christmasses working - not shuffling round Ye Olde Debenhams. And doing particularly good work in 1675 - ordering the closure of every coffee shop in the land. The reason? Because they were ‘centres of malicious gossip against the government’.

So next time you pay for a Grande Latte and find yourself muttering that there should be a law against these places, now you know. Actually, there was.

And so could be again. Happy New Year.

22^nd Dec 07 Pass the remote

So much telly to watch, so little time. Does it ever strike you like that? It does me. Christmas, like an unseasonably balmy spell in summer, brings such a glut of stuff, doesn’t it? And slap bang when you’re stuffed to the gunwhales with invites and the need to boil giblets and play whist.

So, no, I’m not excited about any of it. Just anxious. And this is nothing new. Back in 1980 Pete and I took what was then, given our meagre incomes, the extravagant step of signing up to rent a thing called a Video Recorder. Never was so much excitement seen in one small south London flat without anything illegal being involved. We got everyone round and settled down to do the unthinkable; to watch the film ‘Jaws’without benefit of a cinema. Sounds nothing now, doesn’t it? But back then the idea of watching a movie in that fashion was as incredible as the Pop Tart must have been to the Hun. Plus – joys! – we could control it! We could watch it when WE liked! We could pause it while we went to make tea and fetch biscuits! We could rewind the best bits! Watch the whole thing again! Truly, it felt like a whole brave new world.

And - wow! - you could actually tape things yourself. We rushed out. We bought tapes. And so the trouble began.

Every day, from then on, brought with it a new dilemma. Did we a) watch episode six of ‘Monarch in a Big Frock’ on telly, b)watch ‘Whup your Granny’ on the other side (‘other side’, quaint that) while taping episode six of Monarch in a Big Frock in the hopes that we’d have time to watch episodes four, five AND six before episode seven next week, c) contrive to get home from work/college early enough to be able to watch episodes four and five of Monarch in a Big Frock in time to be able to either d) then watch episode six, or e) watch ‘Whup your Granny’ while taping episode six to watch at a future time, or f)go to the pub as per longstanding commitment to having friends, a life, continuing sanity etc. while the tapes grew ten deep up the wall?

No surprise, then, that looking at the festive TV listings brings me out not in a spirit of joy, but a rash. They aren’t so much an itinerary by which to plan your Christmas viewing, but more a flagship branch of, say, Accessorise or Harvey Nichols. Way too much to choose from and all of it spangly with promise. Yes I know we’ve seen ‘Finding Nemo’ seven times, but, ooh… frosty afternoon, box of fudge, glass of absinthe… And how can we bear to miss the ‘To The Manor Born’ bumper Xmas re-make? And Dragon’s Den. Can’t possibly NOT watch Dragons Den, can we? Yet we’ll have to on account, as before, of needing to play Cranium and Pass the Pigs and Join In.

And in these post-modern days, it’s even more of a stress. Because unlike video tape, Sky Plus is finite. And ours is already 89% full. Can I bear to part with ‘Cold Mountain’, three old Jamie Olivers, and – crucial, this – last Sunday’s ‘Top Gear’, to make way for Peter Jones and When Joseph met Maria? Enough decisions already. Bring on the sherry.

15^th December 07 Party Tine!

This week, a seasonal enigma. Or, if you want to get seriously scientific, one of those spooky fourth dimensional time-slip situations, like we’re suddenly in a parallel universe. We have, you see, lost thirteen forks. Yes, that’s right. Thirteen. By jove and bediddle - can you believe that? One or two I could understand. Probably par for the course in most households. But THIRTEEN? And it’s not like we’ve been cavalier in our fork husbandry or anything. Indeed , so on top of my cutlery census am I that I can tell you that if you don’t include the salad servers, at the last count we had twenty one of the things. We had the twelve matching Ikea ones - GIPSOP or BOLBIM or somesuch, the six other Ikea ones - FORNUT , perhaps? - which I had to buy because all the GIPSOPs and BOLBIMs had gone, plus the last three of the elderly John Lewis green set; functional,yes , but no longer very stylish, because they’d long ago lost their plastic sheaths.

So, a bit of a mish-mash on the cutlery front, admittedly, but because I am in the happy position of only succumbing to any grand entertaining whims bi-annually at most, not a problem for all that. But however meagre the quality and class of our forkage, we can’t really function with just eight. There are ten of us for Christmas, for starters.

How on earth did we lose thirteen forks? Isn’t it just so weird? Teaspoons I could understand. Teaspoons are the lone wolves of the cutlery drawer, being frequently brought forth without their heftier cousins, to stir tea, eat yoghurt, procure spices from small jars. Teaspoons are MEANT to go missing in action, which is why you can buy them for sixpence in Woolies. Teaspoons are of the ‘Never Find One When You Want One’ class of item; like Sellotape, plasters, sewing needles and blue biros, safety pins, staplers, red rawl plugs, elastic bands, A4 paper, AA batteries, kitchen scissors and boxes of matches.

But disappearing forks? That’s a new one on me. Forks are to teaspoons as paperclips are to safety pins. They’re like staples. Brown rawl plugs. LR6 batteries. Red biros. Chopsticks. Blunt scissors. Forieng coins. Dead matches. Pins.

‘Forks?’ said my mother, with a motherly snort (she was round our house, scrubbing our teapot). ‘You of all people should know about forks, dear. Given that you had most of mine.’ I’d forgotten all that. And I know why, as well. It’s something your brain does when faced with unmanageable trauma. Which is how some might describe my seventies attachment to the explosion-of-small-industrial-springs hairdo I favoured for longer than’s possibly sane. And let’s face it, why stump up a fiver for an afro comb, when a kitchen fork did the job every bit as well?

But no-one in our house sports any sort of afro, and I think I might have noticed if any of my offspring had taken to teasing their locks with my BILBOTS or FARGS. So I did the usual trawl around the murky underbed regions and came up with nothing bar a tea plate and a flapjack. Which was a help on the teaplate ( if not patisserie) situation, but of no practical help re. the shortage of tines. And no-one’s fessing up. Like I say, spooky. Anyone got any ideas?

8^th December 07 baby he can drive his car

Another week and, goodness me, another milestone. And possibly an unpopular one. Anyway, Joe’s done it. He’s passed his driving test. And all within the blink of a correctly aligned eye, which is going to be a bit gutting for his older brother, because it’s something that took him a laborious ten months plus many shifts cleaning out the chicken rotisserie machine at Morrisons to achieve.

But he’ll cope. He understands how these things work because he was our first born, which means that just as Pete’s younger brother Richard had a leather jacket and a backlist of seventeen girlfriends at an age when Pete was still attending gigs in his school blazer, Luke’s kind of got used to the idea of Joe doing everything sooner than he did.

They always blather on about how great it is being first, don’t they? All those extra percentage points of IQ, all those latent leadership qualities, all those opportunities for having younger siblings skivvy for you, but what they often forget is that subsequent-borns reap a reward that might not be obvious when you’re completing one of those ‘are-you-destined-for-greatness?’ tests, but is, in lots of practical ways, better; namely that your parents have done it all BEFORE.

Where parents of first borns wrestle constantly with an ever moving yardstick and all that ‘so and so’s parents let HIM do it’ pressure (and have to counter with the ‘I don’t care what THEIR parents do’ riposte), done-beforers tend to be less stressed about stuff. Though deeply irritating for the offspring who’ve had to mount military campaigns in the pursuit of any minor new privilege, this means second borns get what they want with comparatively less effort, and are trusted with freedoms older sibling can only laugh hollowly at. When Luke started his ’I must have a small and fashionable hatchback or my existence will be rendered meaningless’ lifestage, the concept was scary. After all, I spent my own seventeenth birthday mostly falling off the new motorbike I’d awarded myself (with a little help from messrs. Barclays) to celebrate, so I knew just how dangerous an age seventeen could be. And that was street-wise me. Could our baby conceivably be ready to get behind any wheel not designed by Fisher Price? It had seemed only days, not years, before that he’d been dragging Pete from his bed at dawn to come and help him and Sonic the Hedgehog kill Dr Robotnik. No wonder we were sluggish about relinquishing the reins that kept him out of harm’s way. But once you’ve got one safely over the threshold of near-adulthood, you realise something crucial – that they grow up despite you and that your fear never lessens, so you might as well take a deep breath and press on.

And with second born status, comes also nous. Joe’s logic was simple. It would be much cheaper if a) he had all his lessons at once because he wouldn’t forget stuff and would so need less of them, and b) he got a car now instead of at Xmas, because then he could practice and so save us even more. So now a mere month since his seventeenth, we’ve managed to earn ourselves the distinctly dubious distinction of being parents to the first year twelve with a car in the school car park. Apologies, fellow anxious parents. We didn’t mean to. Anyone need a lift anywhere?

1^st December 07 Harum Scarum

Had this great joke emailed last week. There’s a lady – we’ll call her Lynne – walking down the street when she comes upon a wizened crone. ‘Spare some change?’ the crone asks. Lynne hesitates. ‘If I give you a pound,’ she asks, ‘ promise you’ll buy food? Not wine?’

‘Fat chance!’ the hag squawks. ‘Had to give up wine 20 years back.’

‘How about shopping,’ Lynne says, warming to her theme. ‘No time for that,’ the bag replies, the air whistling through the spaces where her teeth used to be, ‘takes all my energy staying alive!’ Still Lynne hesitates. ‘Fripperies, then. Hairdos?’

‘Are you NUTS?’ says the crone. ‘I’ve not had my hair done in decades!’

Lynne shakes her head. ‘I’m not going to give you money,’ she says. ‘I’m going to take you to have dinner with my husband .’

‘Lady,’ the hag says, ‘You’re mad. I have fleas, I’m filthy and I stink. Do you honestly think he’ll want to dine with me?’

‘No,’ Lynne says. ‘But it’s important for him to see what women turn out like once they’ve given up shopping, wine and hairdressers.’

Loved that one, obviously, and emailed it straight to Pete, because it coincides with a major family milestone; I’ve taken Georgie on her first trip to get her hair done.

Been a bit traumatising for Pete, this one. He’s had hairdressophobia since childhood, on account of the words ‘I’m off to the hairdressers’ being synonymous with whole half days passing in a motherless fugue, a father in a very bad mood, and a denouement that usually consisted of Not Speaking, following the classic line, ‘HOW much?’

No such stress at the B-Ls. Up till now – with the boys – it’s been clippers-r-us, and my own hair ministrations, on account of my self-employed lifestyle, happen at home, with Debbie, while he’s at work. But there comes a time in every girl’s life when the siren call of salons gets too strong to resist, and last week it happened to Georgie. She wanted panels. And long layers. And to have her hair rendered the straightest in the universe. Which, with school, meant a Saturday appointment.

The two of us left at noon. Well, I say the two of us, but it was raining so we had Pete drop us. Couldn’t risk returning to the car park during drizzle. Couple of hours, I said. I’ll bring back something for lunch. And, having perhaps forgotten, he believed me.

And it would have been. Except that while I was three seats down, a combination of understandable reticence on the part of the stylist and the default state for teenager-in-public, i.e. mute, had seen Georgie’s multi-panelled vision translate to just five. Are you sure that’s enough? I asked daughter and stylist. Daughter and stylist said yes. Fast forward an hour to a curious lull. All right? I enquired, all done with my own hair. Not quite, said the stylist. Going to do a few more. I phoned Pete. He sighed. ‘There’s no food,’ he pointed out. I could hear the defeat in his voice. ‘And Joe can’t find his brown hoodie,’ he added, to underline their abandonment fully.

We emerged at four fifteen and scuttled to the car. ‘Go on,’ he said, wincing in readiness. ‘How much? ‘ I said a state of not-knowing would be better for his health.

And sent the email on Monday. Transition done.

24^th November 07 You Be The Fudge

Here’s something you might not know - today is officially Buy Nothing Day. I know there’s a designated day for pretty much anything (hug a hamster, for instance, or eat gourds), but BND strikes me as being a particularly good one, on account of it having come around at a time when buying stuff is such a big chore.

The folk at BND do, of course, have a political agenda. They want us to stop and think (using recyclable brain cells and duct tape) about just how much damage we’re doing to the planet, and that’s got to be a good thing. There’s nothing like having a mass consumerism detox, is there? If only to focus attention on the developed world’s inexplicable obsession with having so many varieties of Lynx. But do we really need to leave it there? How about we go the whole hog (or, to be festive, whole butter basted organically farmed turkey with bacon lattice and cranberry jus, orderable from December 6^th) and extend BND, bar essentials, of course, to Buy Nothing For A Month And A Bit?

Can you see where I’m going with this? To an earthly utopia, that’s where. Because let’s face it, whereas for much of the year, shopping is a mildly pleasant pastime, right now it is anything but. And that’s because you have to do it alongside all the people whose most cherished Christmas tradition is ‘getting it out of the way’.

Doesn’t that strike you as ridiculous? That pretty much everything we do from here on in will be something we’re ‘getting out of the way’? And yet that’s exactly how it mostly is. Cards? Got them out of the way in November. Christmas Menu? Ugh. Already ordered from M and S. Phew. Stand in a queue anywhere at this time of year and there’ll be someone clutching a shrug, a cafetiere or - worse - a wodge of vouchers, and phoning someone (invariably in another queue elsewhere) saying ‘well, at least that’s him/her/it out of the way’. And so it goes on. Right up till Christmas Eve, when all you’ll find in the shops are tubs of revolting blue gift wrap and creatures from our neighbouring planet , Office Party, buying inappropriate underwear, i.e. men.

But there is another way. If no-one was allowed to buy anything until after Christmas, we’d have to harness so much creative energy! We’d have to find new ways of decorating our homes, with such innovative items as bits of holly and pine cones. We’d have to make festive food out of whatever we could find, such as packets of sultanas and flour and brown sugar, and crusty topped bottles of liqueur. We’d have to make Christmas presents using such novel techniques as unravelling old sweaters to make funky hat and scarf sets, and decanting bath salts into jam jars we’ve decorated ourselves. We’d be forced to explore the uncharted regions of our lofts to find stores of old cards and glitter, with which to fashion gift tags and garlands, and make snowmen out of cotton wool balls. Lacking postage, we’d have to deliver cards and presents by hand, and – fancy! – speak to the recipients using language and smiles. In short, we would have to return to our childhoods. Make it FUN. BND? It’ll never catch on.

17^th November 07 Pan’s People Beware…

More sinister computer jiggery pokery means I write to you today from skinny-land. My computer monitor (my new big fat widescreen-flatscreen with bells on) decided to expire recently, which meant that once I’d exhausted the computer firm’s interestingly named ‘support’ options, I took the executive decision to steal Joe’s, as any sensible jobbing writer would. Which left me with one on which everybody now looked like they’d spent five years eating nothing but inner soles and grass, and him with my gorgeous but dead one. Which – damn it - then sprang back into glorious panavision just as soon as he – purely speculatively, he insisted – plugged it into his computer upstairs.

I don’t like having this skinny one because it comes at a time when I am feeling spectacularly lumpen around the middle and, having also had a bit of a sort out the week before, have discovered – arrgh – that my foxy skiing trousers no longer do up. Galling to note that while onscreen I am reduced by several thousand pixels, in the real world the reverse is true.

Which is why I have – pause to absorb guffaws various – rediscovered the joy of aerobics. I’m not sure why I have this penchant for such dangerous obsessions, but needs must, frankly, because there are only two ways to lose lumpen bits; eat less or exercise more. I don’t do eating less as a matter of principle so, since I last wrote about matters corporeal , I have been to no less than eleven classes. I have done aerobics. I have done aerobic circuits. I have done step aerobic circuits and step weights aerobics. Even aerobic weights step aerobic circuits, probably. And suddenly I remember WHY people do aerobics, because there’s nothing in life that quite delivers the same kick as three grapevines, a tightly honed box step, four jacks, eight hamstring curls, two shimmies and a mamba all being executed, in sequence, with effortless grace.

Which isn’t necessarily what mostly happens in my case because aerobics has not been a part of my life since Luke was still sucking on rusks and I had a one-baby, rather than three-baby compliment of blobbage, but when it does – boy, it feels fantastic.

And here’s something even better you might not know. These days, ordinary people do aerobics. Can’t vouch for all those swanky private clubs, obviously (there must still be enclaves of stringy gym bunnies in fluorescent thongs out there somewhere), but down at our good old council run facility, it’s bits all-a-wibble and old-kit-a-go-go, which, as someone who cringes at the very thought of confusing my knee lift with my half jack while flailing amid a sea of taut-buttocked lovelies in designer lycra, goes down a bomb, I can tell you.

But all this untrammelled joy has propagated a worrying development. Standing outside after class with Helen the other night – the pair of us sweating like cart horses – I caught sight, through the glass, of a dance class. Not salsa, not line-dance, not anything specific, but were I to hazard a guess as to style, I would probably opt for ‘modern jazz’. You know the sort. Cheesy. Old fashioned. Top of the Pops circa 1972, ergo, deeply un-hip. I checked no-one who knows me was listening and nudged her. ‘You thinking what I’m thinking?’ I said. Helen nodded. Oh, dear. I can feel the leg-warmers coming out…

10^th November 07 99 Red Balloons

Funny how things tend to flow. Last week I was mooning over eco-anti-Christ, Jeremy Clarkson, and this week, it seems I’m going green.

Well, trying to, anyway. Because, kickstarted by this week’s Climate Change Issue, I thought I might buy a composter. Or at least do something I always swore I wouldn’t. Calculate – gulp – my carbon footprint.

Not difficult, these days. Type ‘carbon footprint’ into a computer search engine and you get almost as many hits as ‘Posh and Becks’. Which was where I started; with that monolith, Google, who not only offer to calculate it for you, but also display the results for all to see, by way of a coloured balloon on a map.

So it was, many gas bills later, that I found out mine was 7.23. Which left me none the wiser about anything much, except for the fact that my footprint isn’t just high - it’s double the national average.

Okay, I thought. Think positive. Carbon footprints are probably like clothes shopping. Visit enough shops and you’ll eventually find something that a)fits and b) is a dress size smaller than yours. Or else will be sized by some other scale; which is why women like to shop in New York.

Being fond of pandas, I thought I’d test this theory by trying the WWF site. Here I found figures that were measured in planets – much nicer than tonnes, I decided. Even so, it seems I’m still pretty high-maintenance, needing a whole 2.98 of them to fund my profligate lifestyle. They helpfully added that, in terrestrial terms, I need 5.37 hectares of field.

Over at ‘yougov’, where our esteemed government have created the Rolls Royce, nay, the very Swarovski of carbon calculators (all swanky graphics and mushroom clouds of tax-payers-money) they tended, sadly, to concur with Google. At 7.88 I’m still a bad girl. I fared no better at carbonfootprint.com, either . Over there, I’m a whopping 19.81; gadzooks - a sperm whale of a size!

All of which leaves me confused but mostly vexed. Because I’m NOT a bad girl. I recycle everything. My house glows (albeit dimly) with low energy bulbs. I only fill the kettle with thimbles of water. I am a double glazed cavity walled loft lagging paragon. Every one of my appliances is an A. I work from home in sub-health and safety friendly temperatures. I eat soup I make myself out of peelings. I feed bluetits. I relocate spiders. I eat lentils. I have one hundred and fifty seven sycamore saplings growing sturdily betwixt my holly and ivy. I use words like betwixt. I choose the right gear when driving. I’ve never owned a tumble dryer. I don’t bath. I’ve turned to thirty. I switch off. I take the train. I still wear the jeans I bought in 1992. And the moon boots I bought in 1984, come to that. I walk to the pub. I Do My Best.

But these are as nothing compared to one evil fact. Which is that last year I took four short haul return flights. Which means, despite all else I do, I am marked; my Google balloon is bright red. A bit, come to think of it, like the days of the plague, and those crosses they painted on doors. I think I’ll buy the composter anyway, though. To digest all that damning food for thought.

3^rd November 07 3 in a Reasonably Priced Dream

Apparently, there’s this new thing the Americans have invented. It’s called Lucid Dreaming and if, say, you spend your nights revisiting the dreamworld equivalent of the weekly trolley haul around Tesco, then what you can do instead, once you’ve learned how , is to pre-programme your REM sleep to get something much nicer; i.e. hot, A-list stuff of your choosing. I’m not normally one for a fad or a fandango, but, goodness, I’m pleased to have discovered this.

I’m not sure if it’s hormonal or just the fact that various televisions in this house seem to be permanently tuned to that mad new digital channel called Dave, but my dreams for some time now have been pretty unsettling and racy, involving - I kid you not – Top Gear. The show has just started its umpteenth season, as well, and makes as compelling an hour’s viewing as ever. It’s not everyone’s pint of stylish eastern European white beer with ingredients listed in cyrillic, obviously, but for me, Top Gear continues to be one of the most watchable things on the telly.

And I dream about it pretty often. Well, not IT exactly. More, ahem, driving, and, um, other situations, mostly with the guys who present it. I dream, you see, about Jeremy Clarkson. No, really. Don’t laugh. And latterly, since his near death experience and new hairdo, I’ve been dreaming about Richard Hammond too. And REALLY latterly, like just this last week, I also dreamed about – get this – James May.

Clarkson I can understand. Love him or loathe him - and I love him - he is funny. And also clever, articulate and a really good writer. Which I know is a bit like Pete saying he fancies Rene Zellweger because of her hitherto unremarked fondness for late seventeenth century devotional poetry, but still. As for Richard Hammond, yes, he’s short, but soooo cute. But when an otherwise normal woman finds herself enjoying the sleep time equivalent of a shimmy down love lane with James-May-Off -Top-Gear, it’s clear that she probably needs help.

Which is not to say that James May isn’t sexy. Just that, well, he’s not packaged as such on Top Gear, is he? They make him drive really slowly. They have him pimp up his cars by adding curtains and doilies. They almost never (no, make that absolutely never) put him in a muscle car and have him go ‘phwoar! This thing rocks!’

Which is why, I guess, unreconstructed cave woman that I am, it never occurred to me to notice him much. But then something else happened. They (someone, don’t know who exactly) decided to have him front a new wine-lovers road trip type programme with that wine buff, Oz Clarke and, as the law of television states that you can’t possibly have two pipe and slippers men on the same programme unless antiques are involved, this means James, with the addition of yet another funky hair-do (or, in his case, hair-don’t) has had to morph from ‘quiet sensible one’ to ‘devilish young rake’, and there’s nothing like being a devilish young rake to make a man irresistible to a woman like me. Which is no sort of way for me to spend my nights frankly, however friskily he jostles for my attentions. Dreaming about two Top Gear presenters is eccentric enough. Three, I concede, is just batty. Think lucidly now, Lynne. George Clooney, George Clooney …..

27^th October 07 Hurry Up and Wait

Being a writer, I have a love of big, punchy words. Their choosing, their using.The art of their deployment. So you can imagine my pleasure at being able to tell you that I have a gold standard reason to use one today. And that word, since you ask, is sychronicity.

It’s last Monday morning, I’m sore of throat and tired of limb. I’m sitting in the waiting area of our local Vauxhall dealer, sipping on a Max Pax of scalding cappuccino, and flicking through the Sunday supplements I’ve not had time to read yet, on account of having been away watching England not win, Pete fly a pretend plane and Lewis Hamilton – sob – not quite making champion. I’m there in my role of long suffering/ever nurturing mother (take your pick) getting emergency treatment for the boot catch of Joe’s almost car. It’s his actual car now, as he’s turned 17, but as of last Monday, it wasn’t quite his yet, so I’m sitting there, waiting, when my eyes alight upon a remarkable thing; a photographic feature which is all about waiting, which is such a fine example of synchronicity that it quite makes my day on its own.

How often in one lifetime does a person who’s waiting read an article about waiting at exactly the same time? Not once, for most people, I’d wager. So while some lovely young mechanic, who I shall fondly call Lewis, is tinkering with Joe’s car not yards from where I’m sitting, I find myself discovering a new Unrealised Truth. That I don’t mind waiting. No, better than that. That I really LIKE waiting. That waiting – and I suspect this is true for more people than might have noticed – is actually a very Zen and life-affirming thing to do. (If Liz is reading this I dare say she’ll roll her eyes about now – I blither endlessly about things being life-affirming, despite having not the first clue quite what that means.) Go on. Have a think. Don’t you agree just a bit? Give five seconds thought to great waiting moments in your life and I’ll bet you’ll view many of them fondly. I just did and I do. The waits in antenatal to be pushed, pulled and pummelled. Their glorious, baby-scented, post-natal bedfellows. Being sick-but-not-that-sick and being taken to the doctors ,and awarded a bun for being brave on the way home. A stoic mass wait for a delayed train or plane. A wait for a loved one to be awarded some honour. The wait for your favourite band, like EVER, to come on.

There are exceptions, obviously, to the waiting/joy equation. No one sane ever found happiness while waiting to see a dentist. Or, in most cases, while parked beside a fellow interviewee. And there’s a caveat. You have to be sitting. Not standing. Standing waiting’s just queuing, and no-one likes that. And you have to come practically and emotionally prepared. Magazines, a novel. Some Big Thing to chew over. A readiness for impromptu conversation. A bag of wine gums. Change for that foul but kind of ‘it’ll do’ coffee. Plus a willingness to surrender to circumstance; to not FUSS. Achieve that and enjoy a sweet oasis in your day. And, by happy extension, in my case, of course, a column and a chance to use a particularly nice word. Eh, up, though. Here’s Lewis. Must be off.

20^th October 07 Running on Empty

I must, this week, bring you shocking news. And also an apology. If you are the person responsible for tending the gardens adjacent to City Hall in Cardiff, I confess I’ve had a wee in your shrubbery. And not just me, either. We were many. Most shocking of all, though, is that someone of what I assume is sound mind thought ‘how many toilets will we need for 7000 people?’ and came up with this answer; ten. Yes, welcome to the start of last Sunday’s Cardiff Half Marathon, a 7000 competitor, nine loo (one was out of order) event.

Not the news I wanted to bring you, admittedly. Even as my entire lower body is in a state of temporary petrification and I am compelled for the immediate future to stay at all times on one storey, the news I wanted to bring you is that - Woo hoo! Jeepers creepers! - I have run a half marathon and survived! Can’t tell you how much I would like to devote this page to a euphoric gush (13 miles equals lots of endorphins) about just how thrilling that feels. About how wholeheartedly I never imagined I’d manage it, and how equally wholeheartedly I urge every person whose legs and lungs work to go out and do one while you can, because it’s the most brilliant thing ever. Except I mustn’t, because where’s the fun in that? Everyone knows that people who drone about their running are quite the most boring, bar skiers, on the planet. Except to other runners who did the same race, which is presumably why that same apparently sane person thought it a ripping idea to keep us all in a damp, hour long crush in the grounds of Cardiff Castle afterwards till we were all twittered out and thus safe to let loose.

So back, as we must, to the toilets at the start. Which were – no excuses, now – pants. Which is something I don’t wish to bleat about because just as you wouldn’t have knocked Mother Theresa for parking on the odd double yellow, no-one wants to carp about toilet inadequacies to people – Barnardos Cymru, in this case – who do such good in staging these events. But I must, if only to draw attention to the fact that ( doh) we need more bloody toilets! Not just in a race situation (though is it really so difficult to calculate what everyone will most want to do before attempting to run 13 miles without stopping?) but in any mass-of-humanity type event. Particularly those of us who can’t do it up trees. We don’t want to queue for an hour every time, we don’t want to have go in the inevitably smelly gents, and we really don’t want to squat and bare our bottoms in public, particularly around foliage that might include thorns. Crucially, we all saw that film of Paula Radcliffe peeing at the roadside and gasped ‘ Arrrgh! I’d have DIED if I’d had to do that!’

So, Mr Nigel Rowe, MBE, Consultant Race Director, and your team of clever men (it must have been a man) listen up. You’ve done a wonderful thing and organised a great race. You have made lots of runners and charities very happy. But, please, put a woman in charge of toilets in future, before the bottom (so sorry) drops out of your support…

13^th October 07 My Face dot com

Last week, a pal threw down a terrifying gauntlet. She asked me to be her friend on Face Book.

Which isn’t good. Because if there’s one thing at which I must stand firm, it’s to stay away from such online distractions. Crucial when you spend all day staring at a monitor, with only the words ‘and then she…’ for company. I can see why the kids must do it, obviously. Joe’s in a band, so it’s useful. And as for George - well, where else is she to display the three hundred and fifty seven photos she and her friends take of each other daily? But I need Face Book like I need a wounded bird in my life. Plus – ugh – I find that ‘n’ word so scary.

Because my work is regularly punctuated by the sort of events where everyone has to don a little laminated name badge, I view the whole idea of networking with a degree of dismay. It’s something vaguely humiliating but that has to be done. Prefix it with ‘social’, however, and it becomes even more dispiriting; blurring the lines between work and recreation; ‘poking’ people you wouldn’t dream of phoning. But could I really commit the gaffe of turning a proper friend down?

No. So I followed her link, and by some evil magic, up popped forty five people who reside in my address book and who are also, apparently, on Face Book. These seemed mostly to be people I haven’t spoken to in a decade, plus someone called Justine, who I swear I don’t even know. All I had to do was leave the check marks in place and they’d all be invited to befriend me. Which idea, I confess, filled me with horror.

Because, apart from anything else, I’ve already been there. Like many, I got briefly embroiled in the phenomenon that was friends reunited. Posted screeds of embarrassing blurb (there was wine involved), and wasted many hours swapping pointless emails. After all, what did they care that I’d published some books? What did I care that their dog was called Simon? But what had been but a brief thrill for me, had undeniably less thrilling consequences; a real life re-acquaintance with an ex from my teens, now unhappy in his marriage, rose-tinted of eye wear, and still as ardent of crush-on-me as his 14 year old self. Cue a number of tricky and worrisome texts, several offering to take me to Barcelona.

I know the face space generation are different. Their raison d’etre seems mostly to be not the resumption of old friendships but the amassing of bright shiny new ones. But even so, there being only so many hours in the day, that must still mean less time for your real ones. So, though risking a faux pas, I think I’ll still pass. Sorry, Jen. I’ll poke you when I see you!

(On which note, I must make a quick plea. If you’ve emailed me and I haven’t replied, please, please, do so again. Imagine my horror after lambasting Ian McEwan over failing to reply to my fan letter, to get an email from M, telling me I’d done just that myself. I do answer absolutely everything I get, honest, but, as evidenced many times within these very pages, my computer and I are not always friends, and the ‘getting’ bit doesn’t always happen…)

6^th October ’07 Feet of clay…

A piece of news you might have missed. Apparently glamour model Jordan’s latest book – a novel called ‘Crystal’, is vastly outselling Ian McEwan’s ‘Chesil Beach’. Indeed, the piece I read said it’s not only outsold ‘Britain’s Finest Living Novelist’ (™?) , but the entire Booker shortlist put together, causing the inevitable ‘state of humanity’ type blusters among the literati, and much merriment and joy at camp Jordan, no doubt. And you know what I say? I say hurrah.

Don’t worry, you haven’t picked up at a copy of ‘Heat’ by accident. I bring you this strictly for personal reasons; nothing to do with my lack of ‘literary’ credentials, my feelings about the busty one, the fact that it’s ghostwritten, or, indeed, it being – groan – Saturday, and everything to do with the fact that I wrote to Ian McEwan once and he never wrote back.

Slightly unfair, I know, because I haven’t at any point written to Jordan. And I have to be alert to the possibility that if I do, she might not write back either, which would put her on my naughty step as well. But as of now, Jordan is innocent until proven guilty, whereas Ian McEwan is not.

I don’t wish to come over all cod-philosophical, but I do think you can divide people into categories based on very simple criteria. Umbrella carrying, for example. I never have an umbrella with me (hence, living in Wales, I now own twenty) because I’m an optimist. Which means I never set off expecting rain. Similarly, if you know someone who routinely arranges anything in alphabetical order other than alphabet jigsaws (and only then if it’s in the company of a small child) you’ll also intuitively know they’re not going to be the same people who down tools of a Friday and say ‘hell, let’s fly to Monte Carlo, why don’t we?’

It’s the same with Icons. If you’re an icon – and I’m assuming there must be a few of you reading this – then one of the great unwritten rules is that should someone pay you the compliment of taking the trouble to write and let you know just how much they respect and admire your work (I’m not talking letters with pants in, here, obviously) you should repay their gesture with the courtesy of responding. If you do that, you’re nice. If you don’t, then you’re not.

I know, I know. It can’t be that simple. Icons, let’s face it, must get a lot of post. But actually, it IS. Yes you get a lot of stuff and you’re pretty busy writing, but you’re also very rich off the back of all that fan-dom, so can’t you get someone in to do it for you?

And I don’t buy the ‘didn’t get it’ argument, either, because I did my research and I sent it to his editor, and I know – I just DO – that it would have been passed on. And if others can manage it (notably, mountaineer Joe Simpson – another hero) then why not –insane, this– a Writer?

I’ll always love McEwan’s novels because they’re almost always brilliant, and his status as my single greatest influence will never change, because that’s what he was. But I’m still rather pleased Jordan’s whupped him in the charts. Because even if he’s incapable of writing a bad book, till he stumps up for a stamp, he stays in mine.

29^th Sept ’07 Best foot forward…

Reading the paper the other day, I came upon a rather pleasing quote by a writer called Jane Shilling. She said ‘the shoeboot is the most hideous bit of clothing ever invented’. She does then besmirch her sartorial acumen by grouping them with the batwing sleeve and the ra-ra skirt – two items for which I retain a fondness, but she’s forgiven, because, where the shoeboot’s concerned, she’s spot on.

I do find a lot of footwear horrid these days. Not the stuff I already have; a visit to my flip flop and boot collection is always a joy. And a pretty well appointed collection now too, because following the bedroom’s refurbishment it now lives in clear acrylic boxes. How long before this state of affairs is replaced by my default one – chaos – is anyone’s guess, but for now, at least, I feel organised.

Incidentally, the new bedroom etiquette is most entertaining. Pete is on such a mission to maintain its hotel ambience that yesterday I found my hairdryer in my knicker drawer. I had only just got it out to deal with my hair, and it took me half an hour of blitzing Georgie’s bedroom (and, I confess, ranting at her) before it was discovered. And he’s not even repentant. It’s surely only a matter of time before my own presence is deemed too much of a clutter also, and I am banished to the spare room. A stress in itself, as it’s now where he keeps most of his clothes, not wishing to sully the cream acres across the landing. When mum comes to stay now she has not so much to enter a room as scale a himalayan base camp to go to bed.

And that’s another thing. He’s dumped my aged clock radio and replaced it with his DAB one. Which has no clock display till it comes on in the morning. So where once I woke, could see it was 4 a.m. and stress, now I just stew there, not knowing. Which is worse.

But back to the footwear. And some psychology. Namely, what is it about people that they will buy almost anything, just as long as it’s deemed cool? Some things, obviously, just are. Breitling watches. Cashmere. But the shoeboot? I put it to you that it suits no-one. It just makes everyone just look like a minstrel. And, trust me on this, that’s not good.

Which brings me, with not a care for all the people I’m about to offend, to the Havaiana . To most of us, the idea of buying a pretty basic flip flop for twenty quid when you can buy a spangly one for a tenner is absurd. Yes, I understand that not everybody wants bells and periwinkles hanging off their flip flops, but if it’s plain you’re after, you can get them just about anywhere else for two quid. Sure, they won’t say Havaianas, but WHO CARES?

Which brings me, paradoxically, to the recent croc-olution. Curious, isn’t it? While some people will pay silly money just for a name, others go and do the polar opposite – as in those who’ve been buying up all the ghastly Crocs-that-aren’t -Crocs that have erupted like a rash of brightly hued boils in shopping malls up and down the land. But WHY? Crocs – real or fake - look good only on beach folk and children, and …

Oh dear. I’ve run out of space. Okay; Shoeboots. Resist. End of message.

22^nd Sept ’07 Just Doing It

In order to write books you have to think what to write. A problem I tend to approach in the time honoured fashion of staring at the wall and eating biscuits. But it seems there is another way. Current trends suggest that if you can’t think of anything you should, instead, DO something. And then you can write about that.

Last week it was the turn of a lady, name of Jennifer, who, clearly short on ideas, bought every self help book she could find, followed their frequently batty suggestions for leading a more perfect life and then wrote a book of her own; one that explains why you shouldn’t buy self help books. (Something to do with replacing feelings of inadequacy with sleepwalking, panic attacks and a fetish for new towels.)

Equally audacious was that elderly college professor who decided to place a small ad looking for no-strings sex, which she obviously found in abundance. And then, of course, wrote about. But most genre defining of recent years (defining in that you can clearly get away with anything if you say it with a straight face) is the whole cosmic ordering malarkey. It seems there’s money to be made from convincing folk that if they look at the stars and ask for something nicely they’re absolutely going to get it. Which is presumably what Paul McKenna did, because he has the rest of the market sewn up.

But where does that leave me? I’ve long fancied writing a self help book. Between every new novel, in fact. For one thing, it seems so much easier on the brain. But is there anything left to write about?

How to write a novel is the obvious choice. And let’s face it, there’s a market. A glance at my own shelf reveals – sweet bejesus - eleven of the things. But I’ve already been there. Got a few chapters down, then had to crack on with the novel, and by the time I finished that, my mate Jane – who’s always found novel writing a lot more biscuit-heavy than I have (hence her three to my eight) nipped in and wrote it instead. It’s good, too. I’m even quoted – several times. Oh, but why wasn’t it me?!

I also thought I might write a book about how to be happy, on the basis that (niggles about redundant half-manuscripts notwithstanding) I’m pretty well qualified. But the only advice I think I could give without coming across as a self-satisfied irritating bag would be to…uh…I guess…BE me.

Even less inspiring was my proposed ‘how I ran nine miles without stopping’, or my still-in-development ‘travels with my fork; the astonishing ingredients I’ve found in Caesar salads over the years’. So perhaps I should go down the 101 road. You know, where you fill in the blank. This exercise, admittedly, has not borne much fruit. 101 songs with the word ‘castigate’ in… 101 things to make from tumble dryer fluff. And then I had a thought. How about ‘101 displacement activities for putting off the moment when you have to write something for which someone might conceivably pay?’. Which how I came upon some dusty notes from 1998. They read ‘Things to do; a) go to library and research mean precipitation for Widnes, b) check UK adoption practices in 1944, and, most tellingly, c) then go write the bloody novel!’. Hey ho. Perhaps I’ll do that, then.

15^th September 2007 Jay Walking…

So. We’ve met Luke’s girlfriend. And – oh dear – I’ve got it bad. So have they, which is obviously bad in a good way, but what I’ve got is a whole other animal. Possibly normal – read on and let me know? – but definitely something that will need constant checking. Like an addiction to Caramelised Onion crisps.

They came down, you see. For Pete’s party, last weekend (which went so beautifully smoothly I honestly don’t have a single interesting – well, printable – thing to say). Anyway she’s from Leeds and she’s really pretty and she’s training to be a Midwife and she’s smiley and gorgeous and everybody loves her, and it wouldn’t be that much of an exaggeration to admit that I have fireworks going off in my head.

Doesn’t do, tut tut, to anticipate your children’s futures. Not in front of them, for definite, and perhaps, from an emotional equilibrium point of view, even within the confines of your head. But I can’t seem to stop it. I mean, she could be the one, couldn’t she? I know they’re very young, but they’re still older than Pete and I were when we met. Yes, she could just be one of several girlfriends he’s yet to go out with. But she really feels like she might not be. Which means she might one day be his wife. Might one day be the mother of his children. Also – I shouldn’t allow myself to even think it – the mother of our grandchildren, too. Might become in integral new family member. Might - imagine that - call me mum.

Benign enough daydreaming, but with it comes stress, because when I’m not colouring in the hearts and flowers around the edges of my paintings by numbers, I’m immersed in their polar opposite. The altogether less edifying business of feeling anxious that it might not work out. Of calculating just how many years separate where we are from where they are. Of realising how much I want them to get there. Of remembering all the frightening statistics that confirm they might not, be it in six weeks, six months or ten years.

And even if I can haul myself out of the doom and gloom, I’m straight back on the ceiling with all the here and now stuff. The way they are together. The way they hold hands. The little glances. The smiles. The way they seem to fit so very well. The prospect of mini-breaks to Leeds, heaven help us. The stop-the-world-right-now-it-can’t-get-better-than-this feeling that I had when we were gathered round the table Sunday morning.

I guess that’s what it’s really all about. You see your children happy and that makes YOU happy, and you can’t help but want to be sure it’s going to be like that for the whole of their rest of their lives. You know statistically that it won’t be – for spells of it, anyway – and all you can do is cross your fingers. I feel like such a mad bat, but, dear me, I can’t help it. Perhaps this tsunami of maternal emotion is actually how it’s meant to be.

Tell you what, though. It has taught me two things. That I’m a hopeless romantic, so I’m in the right job. But also that now, and from the heart and not the head, I understand why mothers cry at weddings.

8th September 2007 Love in a Mist…

Goodness, I love Nigella Lawson.

Hardly difficult, is it? She is gorgeous, after all. Plus, she likes cakes. And her life has contained so much tragedy that I know that, should I meet her, I’d definitely have to hug her. (Blimey. It’s not often you find yourself thinking that about a fabulously successful icon of roughly your own age who exudes such an air of head-girly cleverness and loveliness. By rights you should hate her to bits.)

I love her this week especially, for reasons which have their roots back in March. Having long nursed a plan to jointly celebrate both our 25^thanniversary and Pete’s 50^th Birthday, I was, by this time, making lists. Choice of venue. Choice of band. Choice of – dare I say it – theming. ‘Darling,’ I said to him, ‘what food should we do? The whole five course meal thing or a buff…’

‘Can a make a confession?’ he interrupted, looking vexed. ‘ Every time I even THINK about this party, I am filled with unutterable doom.’

He went on, quite eloquently, about the work , about the stress, about the planning, about the putting up of relatives, about the feeling of it becoming this HUGE responsibility, and me becoming bug-eyed with angst. So we ditched the whole thing and went to Padstow, just the two of us, but now it IS his 50^th and I can’t just do nothing. So I’m doing it at home. And therein lies the fret. Because I want to make it low-key but also super proper special. Which is the very worst kind of paradox.

Which is where Nigella comes in. She, of course, knows nothing of the agonies I’ve lived with these months. Nothing of the time I’ve wasted failing to sort this; of the hours spent hunched over party platter options, the times I’ve posed the question ‘is there any way I can come up with my chicken and spinach lasagne for sixty guests with one and a half ovens?’ (No.) Of the serious thought I’ve given to actually buying another fridge. Of my hearing the words ‘selection of quiches’ and weeping. Of the details of my rice-salad-o-phobia (arrgh! bacillus ceres!). Of my actual real thought of ‘I must SO get an ice sculpture!’. Of how chronic is my inability not to plan this fandango into an inch of both it’s and my life.

But Nigella knows ME, and she has come to my rescue. She, you see, counsels unpretentious simplicity. Not spending months sobbing whilst batch cooking tarts. For a party, she advises, eschew the formal and fancy. Do nice things, like gathering little posies from your garden. Banish thoughts of complicated, labour intensive buffets. Stick to just three things and do them really well. Never did I read such a workaday sentence with such untrammelled joy in my heart.

So, following her lead, that’s exactly what I’m doing. Making use, Demeter-style, of our rampaging brambles, and quite possibly the nettles as well. But the core of it (following my list-burning moment) comes from ‘chef to the stars’ Simon, who is bringing home the bacon, which he’s going to stand and spit-roast in my garage. Yes, my party trio is fantastically simple. Fairy lights, Cava, and a very large pig. Craic? Just think about the crackling - woo hoo! I shall let you know how we get on…

1^st September 2007 The Sun Always Shines on TV

As I believe I have mentioned before on these pages, I’m not much of a one for sitting watching telly. Not because I’m a TV snob, (hardly credible when the X Factor is the factor around which my entire winter social life fits) but simply because I am cursed with a gene that means I can’t do anything recreational at home without beavering at something useful while I do so, which means (not having socks to darn, like my mum did) that my viewing mainly happens standing up in the kitchen, on a pre-historic portable with no remote control and a screen often spattered with Smash. Which is fine, because all the other programmes I like to watch (Countdown, Escape to the Country, anything involving Ben Fogle) happen during that kitchen-intense period that exists after paid work and before I clock off. As a system, it works. Stuff gets done.

But where I’m happy in my primordial swamp, ironing and chopping carrots, Pete, being a man, feels the wind of change and frets. Because, as every man knows, it’s not what you watch, but what you watch it ON. And so, bowing to the pressure that is the fact that almost everyone seems to have a grander television than we do, he caved in last month and bough a seriously big monster, which has since been affixed to the living room wall, like a giant commemorative plaque. Except better, because the bracket is so spankingly brilliant, that our TV is almost a living, breathing thing. Not only can it swivel. It can tilt. It can LOOM. (Mind you, even that’s pretty so-so, Lorna tells me. Her mate, Jeff – who does posh TVs for a living – has one that actually points itself at you wherever you go in the room. How Brave New World-ish is that?)

Anyway, the main point of my telling you this is that it obviously threw up a television surplus, and a home needed finding for the (perfectly good) old one. And as there was scant room between the breadmaker and the kettle, the kitchen was not the obvious choice. Which meant, once we’d quashed the frenzied representations of the children, Pete suggested that it would sit rather well on the wall of our newly pimped bedroom. (You might recall that our bedroom and en-suite have now become Little Padstein up the Graig.)

Naturally, I was reluctant. I know it seems silly, but for someone with my debilitating multitasking gene, the idea of a television/bedroom combination just felt altogether too risky. ‘We can’t have a telly in the bedroom,’ I told him. ‘Why not?’ he quite reasonably replied. ‘Because it’s decadent,’ I said. ‘The thin end of the wedge.’ He looked fuddled. ‘What wedge?’ ‘The wedge of indolence,’ I said. ‘ That will have us lying around eating grapes in our pants.’ He looked like he thought I had finally lost it. ‘Neither of us even LIKE grapes,’ he pointed out. ‘Besides,’ you’re not one for doing nothing.’

So we now have a rather nice telly in our bedroom, and the rest of the house is in uproar. The washing’s in chaos, the ironing’s in extremis, and the kids graze on cheese and cold potatoes.

Turns out he was right about me, though. You never saw a woman more minutely groomed. I am manicured, pedicured, plucked, waxed and buffed. Sorry, but he can’t say I didn’t warn him.

25^th August 07 While My Right Ear Gently Weeps…

Every holiday has its defining occurrence, and My Poorly Right Ear has been the story of ours.

Which timing has been excellent. Being married to a doctor means not having to haunt the GPs all that often, obviously, but also that I’m always aware that should my mostly robust frame succumb to anything icky, I must mentally queue behind Pete’s thousands of patients, all substantially sicker than me. This is not, I must stress, because he doesn’t care, but like many a spouse wed to the medical profession, I am hard-wired not to make a fuss. To be aware that there are always people worse off than me and that looking after them makes up his day. Which is no bad thing, when you think about it. Nothing like a well- developed sense of perspective to keep minor illnesses in their rightful place. Which is, of course, on holiday, where they can be properly enjoyed.

I love a minor holiday ailment, me. Not in a mope about feeling sorry for myself sort of way (I leave that to Georgie, who can extend a small paper cut into the sort of finely honed tragedy Shakespeare could only dream of) but with a paradoxical sense of well-being. Having a not terribly hurty minor ailment outside of the usual hum drum round (which invariably means not feeling ill enough to justify going back to bed of a morning, but just ill enough to feel grumpy about it) gives you such scope for enjoyment. I like the change in holiday routine; the drama having to troll off to find an open farmacia on the Feast Day of the Assumption of some Catalonian nun or other, where officious looking pony-tailed women in white coats sell you Spanish paracetamol and strange drops.

I like that Pete has no patients to divert his attention from fetching wine and olives and going ‘bless’. I love the opportunities it affords for Memorable Minor Ailments conversations – only marginally less mileage than My Childbirth Hell conversations, where I never have terribly much to bring to the table, all mine having being largely undramatic. I like the solicitous ‘how’s your ear today, Lynne-you-poor-thing?’ stuff. I like being the centre of attention without asking. I like waking and inspecting my pillow for seepage. Like shaking Pete awake and going ‘ohmyGod! Look!’. Like his ever-reliable ‘euuw!’ response (a curious quirk for a man in his line of work). I like the tangible – if sticky - evidence that my white cells are working. That a small war – the battle of Eustacion, perhaps - is being waged in the middle of my head.

It’s not ALL likes, admittedly. There’s always a downside. I don’t much like having to swim like a pussy (nose in the air, mustn’t get anything above the neck wet) like some recently coiffed matron with a bridge night ahead. But this small inconvenience is as nothing in comparison with the sensual pleasure of a really good nose blow, which results in such captivating inner-ear fireworks that I can almost believe it’s the broken up signal from some alien life-form that’s crossed entire galaxies to make contact with Earth. Via me.

Fanciful, perhaps, but that’s the best like of all. The ongoing, strictly medicinal reason for imbibing all that anasthetic vino…

18^th August 07 Hooray I’m on Holiday!

Those of you who’ve been reading this column since its inception will know that this time last year (four families, twelve teenagers, a campsite-somewhere-in-Spain) I sent a dispatch from the front line of the annual family holiday. Except it wasn’t, for reasons I went into in detail, all of which, I’m ashamed to report, still apply. You’d have thought, what with technology moving at such a lick that you can actually now email a short video to your auntie in Prestatyn from a gizmo on your diary in the African bush, that I’d have spent some small part of the intervening year enhancing my technological skills to an extent sufficient to wing this to you from the perfectly civilised bit of Spain we’re at this year.

Sadly, however, I’ve been doing what I always to, Being so busy at the day job (i.e. writing another book) that I’ve barely had time to locate the ‘insert symbol’ function on my new operating system, let alone learn how to patch through a report via the campsite internet caff.

I did rather fancy the idea of finding a dilapidated phone box in some dusty village square (you know the sort – smelling of wee and Spanish cigarettes and populated by small geckos) and ringing it through to some whiz with shorthand, but sadly, I’m not sure I’d find one. Do phone boxes even exist outside of Doctor Who any more? And besides, I don’t possess a Panama hat, which renders the idea meaningless, somehow.

So, hey ho, I’m left with little choice except to fill this space with yet more pre-holiday musings, in the hopes that something of a Catalonian flavour will seep through, despite the leaky leaden skies under which I write.

Which is pertinent, actually, because the principal preoccupation of our party right now is the weather. Or, more accurately, the ‘Bloody Rain.’ Last year, you see, it did. Yes, Alan did get a cold sore, and the kids did buy an inflatable stegosaurus - indeed, everything I anticipated in that column did actually happen. Except for one thing. The interminable storms.

I should qualify. This (in most respects, glorious) bit of Spain is tucked just beneath the southern flank of the Pyrenees, so it doesn’t get the sort of rain you get in Brittany. In Brittany you get Monopoly rain. i.e. it’s raining when you get up so you decide to play Monopoly, confident that it will still be doing so when you finish. In Catalonia, conversely, you get smash-and-grab rain. i.e. you smash your sangria glass in your panic to grab your beach towel, your sun block, your book and your mobile before seventy seven gallons of tepid water are dispatched from a cloud that wasn’t there thirty seconds ago.

Which as well as being dramatic, is quite fun the first time it happens. Character building the second time it happens. Cracks-appearing irritating the third time it happens, and full-on Not Funny the fourth time. And if the fifth time it happens is the night before departure and your son and his pal have left their only proper footwear outside the caravan to ‘dry out’, it is no longer funny at all. My memories of last year will forever be augmented by the smell of sweaty teenage trainer emanating from caravan oven.

You’re on borrowed time now, Barcelona…

11^th August 07 A Load of Old Waffle

One of the things you have to do in the run up to the annual holiday is to clear out anything in danger of putrefying during your absence. In our house this obviously includes the organic box (ok, boxes) the fridge, the bin in the bathroom and, naturally, the freezer. (I don’t know why it naturally includes the freezer, it just does.)

So that’s what I’ve spent a large chunk of this week doing, and once again – for the nth year in succession – I find myself aghast at the habits of my children. How did this come about? I didn’t teach it to them, and as far as I’m aware their father didn’t either, so what’s wrong with them – are they, perhaps, sick?

Take the kitchen, for example, and the husbandry thereof. Or lack of, in the case of my beloved offspring. Being a writer, I have to give it a name and that name is ‘alreadiopenophobia’. Namely, a pathological inability to use up what’s left of one bottle of something if there is a new bottle of same in the vicinity. You will in your own homes, I’m sure, have your little foodie pecadilloes. In ours, right now, it is the waffle. The B-L children ( younger two at least - the eldest is now almost a very famous chef and therefore does not obtain calories via the consumption of junk) have a waffle fetish. Not sure where it came from, but nirvana, currently, lies in a lightly toasted waffle with a squirt of squirty cream. (Please don’t write in. They do eat carrots too.) So what do I find during my sortie? Two packets of waffles open and three cans of squirty cream rolling around, half empty, in the fridge. And whist we’re on the subject, ditto ketchup. Also apple juice, pasta sauce, baked beans, lumps of cheese and hunks of chocolate. (The latter two have their own clinical analysis, namely that the kids also have a severe case of ‘Rapper’s Dumpage’, i .e. they think about wrapping stuff but then dump the idea.)

And that’s not all they seem to suffer from. Move into other areas of domestic disharmony and witness two individuals in urgent need of medical intervention. They both, for example, suffer from ‘Crumplating moulditis’ – the inability to stow a used towel any place else than in a heap on the bathroom floor. This is further compounded, much in the manner of a fracture, by the allied complaint of ‘Alwaysmoreintheairingcupboardosis’ – the inability to see same when next needing a shower.

Clothing, too, presents a specific area of difficulty, in the form of Misseditis – a marked spatial awareness deficiency around laundry bins. Another cause for concern (though, in its chronic form, lucrative), is Pennistalsis – or an inability to remove change from pockets before putting items near the laundry bin (see above). Less buoyed by favourable side effects, however is the related complaint of ‘Aarghmumyouhaven’talreadywashedit-itis’ whose violent symptoms are seen when the first complaint is complicated by the presence of important bits of paper.

And finally, the most debilitating of all medical conditions, confined mostly, though not always to the last born in this house; ‘temporary-total-paralysis-of-the-muscles-in-the-presence-of items-needing-to-be-packed’, a complaint first described by professor Doot Wenham-Ready.

Happily, there’s a cure. To be taken aurally, twice hourly; ‘Getonwithitorstayatbludiomthen’.

4^th August 07 Caravan of Love

Was travelling back from Manchester last week. We’d been up there to see a band, which was brilliant. The only downer was the three and a half hour drive back the following morning, so I filled it with caravan spotting.

Which is an art I hadn’t previously identified as one. Caravans just ARE, aren’t they? I’ve never really much had it in me to deride them. In fact there’s a part of me that actively hankers after the caravanning lifestyle – been on the list for a static in the Gower for two years. That whole notion of collecting up a second set of everything you might need, only smaller, appeals to my girly nesting gene. And with a mobile, you’re also mobile, so what’s not to like? The only thing that stays my hand is a) my experience in Cheddar Gorge circa 1981 (over which we’ll draw a veil save to say a bottle of scrumpy and several tins of hot dogs were involved) and b) that knowing my luck, I’d be pitched next to someone overbearing called Babs, who’d use her wet bloomers as a fence.

But we passed one, as you tend to, and I looked at its name and I wondered what arcane processes result in the things caravans get called. I don’t mean by their owners, but the names the manufacturers give them. This one was called an Avant, which, if french, means ‘before.’ What’s that all about, then? A statement of intent? That it WILL remain before you on the A467, however much you wish that it wouldn’t? Or is it trying to imply that Avant owners are king? If so, they’d better look sharp, because we then passed an Avanté. Love that accent. Would these two have a stand off?

And then a Swift. I mean, think about it. WHY? Caravans aren’t meant to be swift. Or Spritely, for that matter, but we passed one of them too. And then a Conqueror. Just what’s to conquer on a campsite? Dodgy washblock facilities? Gnats? And what about the Senator I saw moments later? Who’d call a caravan that? I think senator and then I think bald fat American. Three chins. Heavy drinker. Involved in sleaze.

More jaunty, but perhaps over -optimistic, was the Pageant . Be honest, could a mobile home really deliver a whole pageant? I know they come with racy curtains, but even so. And then, in close succession we passed a brace of behemoths. A Coachman, quickly followed by a Craftman. Finally, names that that spoke of wood fires and whittlng. Proper manly, outdoorsy words. Until I saw the sides and yet another attack of whimsy. One was suffixed a ‘Genius’, the other one a ‘Miracle’. Fond words you might bestow on a baby. Are caravan-naming operatives on drugs? What part of a caravan makes you think – ‘miracle!’? It’s like Enzo Ferrari dumping Dino and saying ‘nah, tell you what, let’s go with ‘Precious’.

The bloke pulling the Miracle looked very much the type who, if he owned a dog, would call it Spike. I wondered, since we were stuck at some lights by this time, if I should canvass his opinion. Did he think namers of caravans perhaps had self-esteem issues? But then our eyes met and his look summed things up. Don’t even go there, it said.

Guess it must get like that for caravan owners. If we buy one, I think I’ll get some tippex.

28^th July 07 Marooned

Sporadically, in life, one gets wake up calls. Childbirth, for example (blimey, it hurts THAT much?). Late spring, when you try to try on last year’s Capri pants. Or, as now, when you find yourself suddenly transported to a hostile and parallel world.

That’s right. We’ve lost our internet connection, and what an eye opener it’s been. When – no, HOW – did my life get so inextricably bound up with Tim Berners Lee? (Ironic that you can Google him to check I got his name right and I can’t.) Anyway, seems it has. BIG style. Because as a result – and I’m really not exaggerating here – I’m in utter organisational chaos.

Take this column. Where I would normally simply attach it to an email and press ‘send’, I now have to commit it to disk, drive to my mother’s, hope she’s not down the charity shop buying handbags, fire up her pre-decimalisation computer, load up the document and send it from there. Except that in accordance to the universal law of sharing a house with teenaged persons, the box of disks I bought months back and of which, as yet, I have used only one, is now just that. A box. So I have to go out and buy new disks during the time I’d previously earmarked for buying stuff in the Next sale (I tied Pete to a chair to facilitate this) which means - wouldn’t you know it? - that by the time I do, everything’s sold out. And then there’s the food shopping, which I also can’t do. So now I have to actually visit the supermarket - in a proper , full-on sort of way. Not just flying in for a bag of rocket and a lemon, but pushing a thing called a trolley, which you have to physically fill with stuff, which you then have to bag up and take home. Which means I don’t have time to finish off glossing the bedroom skirtings, which I have to get done by this Thursday because that’s when the carpet is coming and also – oh gawd –the TV installation man, whose visit is set to coincide with the arrival of certain indispensable brackets which I was going to order online. Except, of course, I can’t, and I don’t know where else to get them from which means I’m going to have to go back to my mother’s to order them, which means the time I’ve allocated for finalising those bit of the accounts which I’d earmarked as An Absolute Must Do Today job will now have to replace taking Georgie round town to buy the absolute must have now Ugg-effect boots she so covets, which means that were she not already not speaking to me on account of having no MSN, she wouldn’t be speaking to me, obviously.

And while we’re talking teeth-gnashing social exclusion, what important postings am I missing? Does everyone think I’m ignoring them? And what about work? Suppose my recent campaign to publicise my forthcoming Great Work has borne fruit and I DON’T KNOW ABOUT IT? Suppose someone’s emailed to take out a squillion pound option and takes my lack of response to mean I don’t care?

But worst by a mile is the realisation that I cannot check my Amazon Rankings. And if you don’t know what I’m on about, then consider yourself blessed. Please do wake me up. It’s a nightmare.

21^st July 07 Hanging on the telephone

Was talking to Di in the pub the other night and between us we reached an important conclusion. There was some wine involved, obviously. She was at the tail end of an evening with the usual crew and I’d just blown in (literally) for a last drink with the rest of us lot who’d rashly decided to do Chepstow Races Ladies Night. A whole other column, that one.

Anyway, we snuggled in the corner and had one of those intense conversations about our kids. The sort of conversations you can’t have with most people because they’d just think you were mad , but as we already know that vis a vis each other, it was safe. And what we established was this. That we’re dreading all our kids leaving home. And I mean REALLY dreading - in a proper , serious, arrrgh kind of way.

I have the edge on her there. Her eldest is the same age as my youngest, of course, while I’ve already one of my three fly the nest. ‘Believe me,’ I said firmly.’ It’s AWFUL. ‘

Which is not something many women admit to; to be so needy in such emancipated times is just wet. And it’s not like we’ve got nothing else in our lives, either; not like we haven’t got lovely men, lovely jobs, stuff to DO. But even so. Even so…

Take me, the night before. One of what Pete calls my Text Situations. It works like this. Luke comes home for a couple of days. I say ‘text me to let you know you’re home safely’. Sometimes he does and sometimes he doesn’t, in which case I ring him. Job done. Days then pass. I get antsy. And then a week. I find excuses. ‘Hi Hon! Guess where I am? In Padstow! Eating fish! How U? Luv u loads!’

And then nothing. More days pass. I find more excuses. ‘Me again? R u still planning on camping in the Gower? Let me know and I’ll do some research. Luv u heaps!’. And still nothing. My brain starts making forays into hellsville. Is he ill? Is he sad? Has he run out of money? Could he, a la Bridget Jones, be lying in his bedroom half chewed by an alsation without his house-mates having realised? Arrgh!

More days. Another text. I can’t help it. ‘Me again. Sorry. Just wanted to say hi! Luv u squillions!’. Still nothing. Pete gets in from footie. ‘You ‘ve got your preoccupied face on,’ he says. I confess that I’m worried because I haven’t heard from Luke in three weeks. He reminds me that back in pre-history – pre-mobile – he only called his mum once a TERM. He also laughs. Quite a lot. ‘He’s got a girlfriend,’ he reminds me. ‘Plus he doesn’t like texting. Plus he’s busy. Plus he’s fine. Plus no news is good news.’ I don’t feel much mollified. He hugs me. Says ‘ahh.’

I harumph. I text Luke. ‘Told dad I’ve been fretting that I haven’t heard from you lately. He laughing socks off. Says leave u in peace! Cept I can’t. Just one word will b fine xxx’

He texts back in point seven three of a second. ‘LOL!!!! Soz mum. Bin busy. Luv u xx’

And to think that before long I’ve got to times that by THREE.

Di and I had another glass of wine.

14^th July 07 The Colour of Love…

One of the things that happen when you hit a big anniversary is that people keep asking what your secret is. And of course you don’t know. You’re not wise, you’re just grateful. The other thing is that lovely hoteliers (in this case, Rick Steins of Padstow) let you have their luxury cottage for the price of the room you originally booked, which is brilliant - and for which grateful thanks.

So now I’m on a mission. Bathroom’s underway and bedroom needs doing, so I’ve had to drag Pete to B and Q. So there we are in the paint aisle and I’m dithering over the cream white, the cream cheese, the soft cream, the pale cream, the cream you get in a custard cream biscuit and the edgily named ‘hint of ecru’, and a record-breaking ten minutes elapse before we reach our fall back position. Which involves Pete going ‘I’m bored now. Get anything. I don’t care’ and me grabbing the first thing to hand.

We do the same in IKEA – another place we spend an inordinate amount of time achieving what we could have achieved in ten seconds were it not for my pathetic inability to make decisions that don’t involve vast tracts of cash ( I’m VERY good at those). In fact, if I wanted to be scientific about it I could probably scribble you any number of equations and all of them would take us to the same point – ten yards into IKEA’s lighting department - where Pete says ‘I’ve lost the will to live. Can we go?’ Says it every single time. Always has. (And before you ask, yes, I’ve done my time too. Comet. The Car Showroom. PC World...)

All very tedious, but it works. And now we have paint and lights, we also have Bryn Cottage in genesis in Cardiff; the main point of this ramble being that, weary of having to think about image and styling, we decided we’d decorate our bedroom along the same lines; all clotted creams and vanilla fudge and bits of driftwood and woven herons and not a hint of This Season’s Must Have Accent Colour in sight. We even bought a big sign that said ‘Amore’ to put above the bed. What with the seductive seaside-y romantic vibe-thing going on, we thought it would look just, well, right.

Except now I find that the whimsical romanticism that I’d attached to the whole Rick Stein/ Padstow/anniversary theme turns out to be exactly that. Whimsy. Because not only are the 30 odd years-married Steins no longer together (actually, I think I did know that; four years back. He was on yet-another-book-tour. She was back home running the business) but also that the restaurant where we had such a lovely time two weeks ago was also the place where Mrs Stein, last summer, slapped Mr Stein’s girlfriend, and then, for good measure, slapped Mr Stein too. Made her feel better, she said (though maybe not about the lurid tabloid exposure), but still, it’s all so very sad.

Course, we’ve bought the emulsion, so we’re sticking with it anyway, but in doing so, I couldn’t help wonder. Why do marriages of such longevity expire in such a way? And then a kind of mini- wisdom DID pass through my brain. Did they spend too little time going to B and Q together, d’you think? Something tells me the answer might be yes.

7^th July 07 Hide and Squeak

Much as I fear the social exclusion that might follow, I have a big confession to get off my chest this week. I admit it; I HATE my leather sofas.

You can’t possibly need to ask why. Just gather the words ‘leather’ and ‘sit comfortably’ together and you’ll have it. I hate them because, basically, they’re hateful. Try and sit on a leather sofa and you’ll know all you need to, because you CAN’T sit on a leather sofa. You can perch on the edge of one, wedge yourself into the corner of one, lie prostrate (or supine) on one and – if you have the mental stillness of the long term tai-chi fan, at least – allow your yang to guide you i.e. end up where the sofa deigns to let you. However, sitting – as in the sort of snuggling one tends to want to do at the end of the day - the kind that’s done with a degree of shoes off, left-a-bit, right-a-bit precision (often accompanied by a glass of something and a welsh cake ) is, for the hide-o-phile, impossible.

This is scientific fact. Leather, you see, has a friction co-efficient of minus X squared divided by the inverse of Theta to a factor of forty times that squiggly symbol that looks like a small bi-valve mollusc, which means it is only suitable for the following applications; being on a car seat (for purposes of evocative aroma and making small children vomit), being in an office (for purposes of discombobulating job applicants), being in gentlemens’ clubs (for purposes of – I’ve got to say it –hygiene), being in the homes of people who hold dinner parties which involve retiring to the best room for cafetiere coffee and home-made petits fours (for purposes of making sure everyone leaves by ten thirty), being made into Chesterfields (for purposes of being able to say ‘oh, but it’s a design classic!’, while spending most of your time on a bean bag), being owned by people who wear pants made of blue tac or porcupine quills (obviously), and, finally, being on a cow.

Leather sofas, you see, are not MEANT to be comfortable. They are the whale bone corsets of the furnishing world – you suffer them simply for effect. And when you’ve suffered enough, you buy lots of cushions; all of them in varieties of fur and fleece and Mongolian yak, which you pick up all the time and put your face in. ‘Just think’ your face is saying, ‘all of life could be this gorgeous. If only we hadn’t bought those bloody sofas.’

So what are we to do? Following the dictate above, the kids have sorted the one in the room off the kitchen by blagging the furry throw off our bed and effectively killing the beast. In the main room, however, we are a seriously lost cause. Not because we can’t do likewise (why d’you think furry throws are so ubiquitous?) but because doing so is so desperate, so embarrassing. So sad.

And I will simply not pretend any more. Which is why, if you happen by the free ads of an evening, you might find a carefully worded small ad. Leather sofas, two. Immaculate condition. Attack of common sense forces sale.

(PS We went to Padstow. Rick Stein is a genius. He has deeply lovely sofas in his hotel. Enough said. )

30^th June 07 De-Walt Disney

Working on the eminently sensible principle that no Barrett-Lee penny should be spent on home improvements that could instead be spent on having fun, it has taken us about two years to bring to fruition the project that was first mooted as ‘doing something about that leak’.

But time and tide wait for no man, and the tide has become more of a tsunami these past weeks; take a shower in the en suite (particularly if you’re Pete and have to spend ten minutes engaged in unfathomable man- rituals) and fast flow the waters of the kitchen estuary; they spill out from under the welsh dresser and form a minor Severn Bore across the flagstones.

The inconveniences of the unexpectedly sodden sock are, of course, manageable. But as with tips and icebergs, the daily wellspring is, I’m sure, indicative of dark forces occurring in the soft underbelly of our house. That while we sleep, the very foundations are being undermined, leading me to fret about the ever greater possibility that if we don’t act soon I will be ferreting in the cutlery drawer for a teaspoon one morning to have not only the hassle of a suddenly wet foot but also the prospect of being joined in the kitchen by a still-whistling husband, wearing nothing but a light lathering of lavender shower gel, while the ceiling rains down in soggy chunks upon our heads.

So – damn it – we decided we must act. We could just get a plumber out, obviously, but as our en suite and bedroom are beginning to look so past their sell by date as to be in with a chance of coming back into fashion among the uber-trendy before the decade’s out, we thought we might as well bite the boring bullet of doing decorating-type-stuff, and thus the Big Clear Out is on.

But, oh my, what a hassle it all is. Shortly after you read this we will have returned from our anniversary jaunt (which I’ll have to tell you about next week, because as of now I haven’t a clue where we’re headed) cleared out our personals, and decamped to the less than edifying environs of Joe’s old loft bedroom (double mattress on broken bed frame, Eminem back catalogue, gruesome Metallica poster, collection of illegally imported French fisherman’s penknives… ah, the fond memories of his tender years) while a man skilled in the arcane art of knowing which washers go where rips out our bathroom and brings us into the twenty first century. Out will go the two full-sized Victorian sinks, the brass fittings, the pointless bidet, the uber-twee Henley Regatta striped pastel tiles. In its place we will soon be enjoying the sensual delights of a slate and mosaic shrine to the joys of being clean, and a sink you could toss a Caesar salad in.

The prospect of which, frankly, was giving me a headache. Until last week, when Mike the bathroom fitter arrived to do the estimate and reminded me that there is upside to home improvements and its name is Getting a Nice Man In. With his tousled golden locks and his air of manly competence what Mike (like Jarrod, the loft bedroom man who came before him) doesn’t know is that while he’s upstairs toiling with the soil pipe, I shall be down here exploring his fictional possibilities as the love interest in my latest novel. Fancy me forgetting about that. Money well spent after all.

23^rd June 07 Being There

It’s the being there, as everyone knows, that really counts. The business of winning is just an optional extra. Absolutely not the main thing.

And how mad is this? I really MEAN that. Which is the last thing I thought I’d be saying. Well, not the last thing – I’ve been saying it flat out since the winner (who wasn’t me) was announced. But that’s been in public. In private I fully expected to be thinking in unprintable swear words and wishing Marian Keyes (who did win it) would just kindly, like, take up some other pursuit, and give the rest of us a chance of a look in.

But, strangely, I don’t feel like that at all. I look at my stylish glass trophy (which, in case you’ve been on your hols and don’t know what I’m twittering about, is beautifully engraved with ‘Shortlisted 2007, Barefoot in the Dark by Lynne Barrett-Lee’) and I still think ‘wow’. Not how I’d like to brain MK with it (crucially, her award is bigger, and thus heavier, than mine) but proper this-will-do-very-nicely proud. Indeed Jill Mansell (my fellow shortlistee) and I both agreed that as neither of us had got even close to winning anything since we got Blue Peter badges back in the sixties, we were pretty thrilled to even be allowed on the stage. And she’s done seventeen novels to my seven. At the very least, she deserves a long-service medal.

No such medals on the night, of course, but the next best thing - a dazzling array of book-world celebs. No Marian – a shame, because she always seems so nice – but judges Jo Brand (who also brilliantly compered), Joanna Trollope – astoundingly thin for an icon, Sophie Kinsella – the chic chick of chick lit, plus Gaynor Allen, who runs the book-buying department for Tesco, and who was, frankly, in most danger of being mugged, so desperate are us writers to get into her aisles.

But this wasn’t about grovelling for sales. Heavens, no. This was about literary RE-spect. And she rated my book, did Jo Brand. At least I think she did – she kept getting sidetracked by the need to make jokes, obviously, and my book, involving everything from missing trainers and chipmunks to a love-lorn accounts clerk called Simon (not sure why that’s so funny – it just was) provided rich pickings for her to plunder. But she mostly seemed to like it (and this is verbatim) because – get this – it ‘had a mad person in it’.

I’ve read a few book reviews in my time, but I think I can say with some accuracy that you’d be hard pushed to find one that cites ‘having a mad person in it’ as a principal literary strength. Still, Jo Brand thought it was, and I really rate her, so that’s fine. She was a psychiatric nurse in her previous life, of course, so that sort of thing probably strikes a chord. I think she was impressed that I’d a)treated it respectfully and b) done my homework. I told her Pete’s medical. She nodded sagely. Forget the love stuff, I think her expression suggested. Give me a writer who can really DO mad.

And , as I say, I’m properly chuffed. My mad person might only inhabit a sub plot, but you know what occurs to me? That the best things aren’t always necessarily the most lauded. In real life, as well as in art…

16^th June 07 Bingo!

My friend Liz, who’s a few years older than me, has been telling me – like, forever – that when you get to a certain age, it’s hard to keep the weight off. Reminded me down the local last Monday night, where we (plus Chris, plus Di – we’re all of a mind, us) spent an entertaining ten minutes comparing the size of our bingo wings.

As it turns out – and I’m sure you won’t mind me tooting my drum here, girls – mine, by a short wibble, were the smallest, which made me feel pretty pleased. Though only briefly; you know you’ve hit the skids when ‘less ravaged/mottled/ wattled than average’ becomes a compliment. When – ugh – you know what bingo wings ARE.

Anyway, we were doing that dreary ‘have a starter as a main course’ thing, in order to save calories to spend on more wine, and it occurred to me that if Liz is right it’s not going to be long before I have to dispense with even that and instead just eat the napkin and the complimentary mint.

Which is no way to live. So I alighted on a plan. Clearly I must exercise more.

But when? I already play badminton three times a week, plus the odd game of squash (very odd in my case) and when I’m not visiting my fierce physiotherapist – and HURTING – I do the best thing you can in terms of calorie expenditure; I run.

None of these take that much time in themselves, but every one of them results in a sweaty pink mess and requires the application of much Pantene Pro V. I needed something I could slot in with meals out. And, as luck would have it, Rose rang. ‘Al and I thought we’d go out for a curry, but as it’s a nice evening, we’re going to walk. Up for that?’

The perfect solution and an exciting new regime! If I wanted a meal out, I’d have to walk there. In this case a munch-tastic five miles (as this would be) which didn’t require racquets or the application of lycra. Even better ,you could do it dolled up; in our case, an elegant maxi-frock-and-trainers combination, that had us girls billowing in an understated sort of way, and drawing many an admiring glance (all right, change that to ‘astonished’ if you must) from the huddles of teenagers that populate Cardiff’s green swards in order to discuss the big BB issues of the day.

And what a lot of green swards there were too. This being Al’s Scenic Route ™ there was grass aplenty, plus some seriously nice babbling, and also lots of Pete-eating gnats. It being so scenic, however, meant that by the time we finally reached a pub (harder than you’d think, in suburban Cardiff) and then the restaurant, we’d been walking for the best part of two hours. I was so ravenous it was touch and go whether I WOULD eat the napkin. (It was a posh place and didn’t do popadums.) Managed to resist, but,boy, I made up for it. Had a cauliflower thingy, half of Pete’s lamb kebab, a massive curry, a sack of rice, a whole naan. It was only by sheer inability to fit it in that I was able to wave away the mint.

So it’s back to the low-cal baked beans for me. As in tins of, for exercising bwings.

9^th June 07 Out on a Limb…

Piers Morgan, let me tell you, is enviably well connected. When his bestselling tome, The Insider, came out, his pal Mohamed Al Fayed, that billionaire shopkeeper about town, said ‘I’ll do you proud, mate; rustle up a little something in Harrods.’ I expect he didn’t use those words exactly, but you get the general drift. The lucky Piers turned up at the allotted time, was set astride a horse drawn carriage, joined by a scantily clad babe, and promenaded up Knightsbridge for a good bit before being ushered into the store amid much excitement, to a stuffed-to-the-rafters-with-adoring-fans books department – a crowd which, to Morgan, was really quite astounding – yes, he’d achieved a certain fleet street notoriety, but how thrilling to be so popular. Were they really all for him? Apparently so. They’d been tannoying his arrival all morning.

So far (for the fledgling author, at any rate) so ‘this is the literary life!’. But he soon began to suspect things weren’t quite what they seemed. The crowd, which soon wasn’t one, were now exuding a palpable air of disappointment. It was only after he heard the tannoy announcement for himself that all became clear; that ‘Piers Morgan’, as rendered over the in-store loudspeakers sounded altogether more like ‘Pierce Brosnan’. They’d actually expected James Bond. Ouch.

No ego to deflate with me, however. Being up to my, um, seventh novel (gosh, don’t they come around quickly? ) I have no illusions about how many people are going to rush into Cardiff on a precious bit of weekend, simply for the pleasure of a total stranger’s company and the prospect of a squiggle in a book.

However, for reasons that escape me, I persist in the notion that such profound humiliation – sorry, exposure - will serve some greater purpose. Selling books (ironically, this one’s called Out on a Limb) doesn’t seem to happen to any greater extent than if they were simply laid out on their own. In fact (and let this be our little secret) I personally think it happens less. Yes, I know I look quite benign in the picture, but one thing almost everyone who knows me agrees is that in reality I’m a bit ‘in your face’. I blame the solitary authorish lifestyle. If you only speak to figments of your imagination 9 -5, you kind of forget that real people like to get a word in now and then). And even were I to sit demurely behind my little table, it is a universal truth that people doing anything extra-curricular in a shop – especially if it involves a hastily erected display and some balloons - are mostly to be avoided. Because they invariably want to sell you something you don’t want. Which means I generally spend most of my signings not signing but trying to make eye-contact with anyone over eight. (Under eights mostly like me, as I exude mumsy cheer and apparently look a little like a fairy.)

It is, if I’m not being too melodramatic about this, the loneliest place in the world. Which is why I have decided to say no to future book-signing s until such time as I’m properly famous. Though as I really don’t fancy being properly famous, that time won’t be any time soon.

MUST let you know, though, a bit of thrilling insider info; Waterstones, Cardiff, noon till three, today - I think Daniel Craig might be signing…erm…something. Come on, ladies of south Wales, can you bear to stay away?

2nd June 2007 To Do or Die...

Doesn’t time fly when you’re having fun? You know, I just realised that it’s been a year since I first took up residence in this particularly well appointed bit of page . A whole year. Fifty two weeks during which I’ve been everything from pretty darned happy, like mostly (like last week), to pretty darned not – if you’ve stayed the course with me, you’ll also remember the senseless death of my nephew, Stephen, last September.

But what I mainly was when I arrived (and I can sense Stevie smiling at this – he was staying at the time) was in state of agitation re our wind-and-tree-challenged satellite system, in the run up to the World Cup. And guess what? Here we are again.

Not going to spend the rest of the column ranting about it, because no World Cup means no World Cup parties, so I can leave all the ranting (and fixing) to Pete. And in any case I have malfunction issues of my own. This week, you see, our aged dishwasher died, so we have mostly been Washing Up Ourselves.

There are many fine ways that life conspires to bring an over-excited woman to heel, and a dead dishwasher (and attendant bank-holiday-coming-up-can’t-get-a-man-out-to -fit-the-new-one-complication) is one of the best.

Those of you without dishwashers (and I know you are many; people who have no need of large scale dishwashing facilities on account of not having a house containing young people, plus friends, who think clean crockery, like clean pants, is simply THERE) will, I know, be shaking your heads in dismay that I should consider this a major inconvenience. But trust me, it really IS.

Though Luke currently lives a more appliance-lite lifestyle and so when home displays admirable washing up qualities (he uses ten saucepans, he cleans up ten saucepans. The pleasing symmetry of being Grown Up At Last) the other two are still largely unschooled in the art. (Pete, incidentally, isn’t schooled in the art of loading a dishwasher either – he thinks that if you put an upside down saucepan atop an upside down frying pan, the former, by some strange faerie magic, will get clean.) Thus, into our fourth day without a mechanised wash-n-rinse cycle, we have got through three bottles of washing up liquid and forty seven tea towels, some of which I might have paid for in shillings.

Getting out of doing the washing up has become the principle preoccupation of the entire family. And everyone seems to be better at it than me. Joe mostly invokes the ‘I have GCSEs coming up. Wouldn’t you rather I did some revising?’ classic, while Georgie has simply gone native. She’s not quite reached the point of dining off the woven fronds of next door’s tree-fern, but has elected, whenever possible, to consume only things that can remain in their packaging - such as microwave chips and punnets of strawberries – and all other foodstuffs, soup excepted, from paper plates left over from her party.

Pete’s strategy, as ever, is more cunning, deploying the full might of his chess playing brain. Last Monday night. The aftermath of our bank holiday roast. ‘Sorry, hon. Gotta sort the satellite,’ he said. ‘What ,NOW?’ I spluttered. ‘Harumph. I think not!’ He pulled out his trump card with a flourish. ‘But, darling, EastEnders is on in ten minutes. SURELY you don’t want to miss that?’ Checkmate. EastEnders is on four nights a week.

Hurry up, you dishwasher man.

26th May 2007 Fizz bang pop

WOW.

Ordinary Wednesday morning, and I was working. Heroine’s on bar stool in kitchen wearing Goddaughter’s Barbie dressing gown and clutching mug of tea. Love interest (husband’s stalwart BF) is adjacent, proffering Hob Nob, or possibly Garibaldi. Clinch coming up in two paras etc. (No, really. This is how I make my living.)

Anyway, there I am, hot-fingered at my keyboard, when the phone rings. Phones don’t always get answered round here, because I am An Artist, but this one did on account of there being a man due to call about a cistern. But it was Chris, from my publishers, bearing not sanitation-based info but a staggeringly nice bit of news. You are, he enthused, on a shortlist of six, for the inaugural Melissa Nathan Award for Comedy Romance. ‘It’s big,’ he went on. ‘Big award. Big judges.’ (Joanna Trollope! Jo Brand! Sophie Kinsella!) ‘And guess who else is on the shortlist?’ (I couldn’t). ‘Marian Keyes!’ THE Marian Keyes! Gad bloody zooks!

I’d like to tell you I’m recounting all this to illustrate some meaningful sociological observation, but that would be disingenuous. I mention the above for one reason only. Because this is the stuff of my dreams, and I simply can’t NOT.

So. Got the news, did one of those footballers’ fist- pumping yes! yes! yes! manoeuvres in the middle of the kitchen, jumped up and down, did a twirl (one should always do a twirl), phoned Pete. Who listened patiently (as, of course, is his job) until he escaped to see a patient. Put the phone down, was about to pick it up again. When it rang. And, fortuitously, it was Rose. Was about to welly in with my brilliant news, but turned out she’d phoned to tell me about the unfortunate side effects she was suffering while taking some form of rabid penicillin. I sympathised , of course, but all the while I pondered - what’s the etiquette regarding blathering to a friend who is experiencing major gastro-intestinal distress? I decided to risk it. She could always do a runner. Kept her on the phone for a good fifteen minutes. Put it down. Heard my mobile. Got a text from Di. ‘Guess what?’ It said. ‘Just got the keys to the house!’ (Di’s moving back to Wales next week - hurrah!). ‘Fab,’ I texted back. ‘Lt me no if u need n.e. help.’ Which was enough. But I just couldn’t help it. ‘ Have MARVELLOUS news!’ I tapped. ‘cld not help but txt!’

And so has gushed the wellspring ever since. I emailed my friends on my e-writing forum, and they all emailed back – to a woman – saying ‘Woo!’ I emailed my sisters (even friends of my sisters) and writer friend Jane, who went ‘YEEHAHGORBLIMEYTHATSBRILLL!’. I abandoned the clinch and the biscuit choice issue and took my mum to M and S to tell her. I told the man with the cistern, and Hannah, my esteemed editor ( who, if memory serves emailed something unprintable about what previous publishers could go do). I told Liz, I told Rachel. Hell, I told most of Cardiff. Plus Dee who’s in Canada and was probably asleep.

And here’s the thing; I know I’ll need loads of luck to win it, but why stress? Because the telling’s made me realise that with friends such as I have, I’m already (uh-oh – sociological observation alert) about as lucky as anyone can get.

19th May 2007 To Do or Die

I know Edwina Currie has already beaten me to this, but goodness, isn’t it just SO true that what a woman really needs is a wife?

Because as I write this, it strikes me - for possibly the zillionth time - that it’s amazing I manage to get a single word down, let alone sustain the sort of career which mostly requires thousands a week.

I was hoping to bring you a corker of a column this Saturday; the aftermath (trust me, there is ALWAYS an aftermath ) of the Old Gits five-a-side football team’s annual beer fest – sorry ‘tour’ –which took place in Milan last weekend. But however delicious it would be to spill the beans, I’m too distracted by all the non-work-related faffing I have to do. In fact, my To Do list, which is so huge in my life that I even gave one to my first fictional heroine, Julia, is so long that some items (get glittering career, get a life, have-it-all) are even growing mould.

This week’s To Do list (which also has ‘decide on dinner’ and ‘take stuff back to M and S’ as permanent items) starts with a jolly orthodontic paradox; this one being that I need to phone to explain that, contrary to what they think, it was ME who made the appointment, not them, so it’s kind of ridiculous for them to be writing to remind me to ring and tell them if I’d like it, however sniffily they exhort me to do so. Even so, I must, or they’ll cancel it regardless, which’ll mean I have to do it all again. Except they’re always engaged or on answerphone. And , crucially, you can’t leave a message.

Then there’s Joe’s blood test, the results of which I can only get between four and four ten on a Lunday, which window I keep managing to miss on account of being on hold for the orthodontist. Then there’s the seventeen (it’s always about seventeen) disparate items on my ‘go into town’ list, except every time I find an hour to do so, I can’t, on account of some parcel or package being delivered between Might and October and no they can’t be more specific than that. And when I DO go out it takes me all day to get back. Call me Mrs Moany but why is it that the bank isn’t near Staples and Staples isn’t near the school uniform shop and none are even remotely near IKEA (THINK when buying light fittings) and IKEA, though great if it’s meatballs you’re after, is also nowhere near the tile place that are doing the bathroom? I’m always out faffing around for HOURS .

Which means ‘Georgie – Gym shorts ‘, to her growing distress, are still ongoing. As is ‘what shall I do about the dishwasher knob?’, ‘still haven’t fixed that bloody lock on the loo’ , plus the closely related ‘oops, my sister’s coming to stay soon’. And we’re also out of ketchup. Again.

But to top it off, the mother of ALL faffdom this week. The nightmare that is the Lost Passport Emergency Replacement Application (say it slowly), for someone who’s off on a business trip imminently and who’s un old enough signore to know better. Except he needn’t (at least, not once they allowed him back into Wales again), because, happily, he has a wife.

Is, er, anyone passing M and S?

12th May 2007 Stile-ish Pursuits

Remember what they say about the second world war? How, despite the stress and the terror, everyone had such a good time? Well, you know what? I think I kind of get it. Because we’ve been out a-rambling in the country again - with both a route and such friends as never learn.

And we do give good walk. Well, Pete does. While I skinned shallots for the casserole I had promised the kids (sensibly seeing Spiderman rather than joining us) I’d make for dinner, he amused himself, as he does, in Amassing Interesting Facts, from the news that the Flush Plate in Groes Wen (it’s a geodesic whatnot) was happily affixed to a pub, to the little known detail (imparted as we crossed Tesco’s car park, as I recall) that the founder of Cardiff Medical School was the great-great grandson of some architect bloke who was buried in the graveyard nearby.

We set off three, under benign skies. But this being a bank holiday, a persistent drizzle settled in just as we left the shelter of the Taff Trail and struck steeply uphill towards the fabled pub – sorry, plate. By now I’d already had to deploy my pashmina as headgear (I had not, being an optimist, brought a just-in-case mac because I’m not, you’ll recall, Welsh by birth). We spent an indulgent hour there (well, the walk was half done and the crisps were very more-ish,) leaving only after Pete had rallied a number of bemused locals in failing – utterly – to locate the flush plate, and dragging us round the graveyard, where we found the promised headstone and went ‘woo’.

Not remotely concerned that it was already five thirty (lovely stuff, wine), we set off through the now sheeting rain. At which point, of course, we got lost.

There’s an art to getting lost, and we’re spectacularly good at it, particularly in situations involving high-altitude moorland, copious rain and all the women needing a wee. And this was one such. Having failed to locate the promised ‘high-pressure main’, ‘ruined barn’ or, indeed, ‘remains of the isolation hospital’ (which, in retrospect, is kind of the point, one imagines) we found ourselves marooned on what must technically have been the Rhymney Valley Ridgeway but could equally have been the Siberian tundra; bleak, inhospitable, shrouded in mist, and utterly devoid of habitation. This we yomped across for best part of two hours, discussing, as you do, about it being so wet that perhaps it didn’t matter that Rose had lost her tissues; we could all just wet our pants. Who’d notice? Thus preoccupied, we arrived at an abandoned-looking farm, where a very scary horse was persuaded out of what looked like an urgent desire to bite someone’s bottom. (Rachel’s a horse whisperer, which is handy.) But the farm led to a track and that led to a lane, and then another, where finally we flagged down a van, whose occupant (many piercings, large shotgun on lap) told us to continue down it and that shortly (a criminally insane definition) we would find ourselves back behind Tesco.

We arrived home at nine pm, soaked to the marrow, our kids starving but doubled-up with mirth.

And provided none of us dies of consumption in the meantime, I daresay we’ll be at it again soon. Getting lost , you see, is such life-affirming stuff. As long as you don’t lose your tissues.

5th May 2007 Pie-r-squared

You’ll forgive me, I hope, if this week’s column seems a little rushed. Of course, it is, I hear you thinking. That’ll be the party fall-out. Chances are she’ll still be removing cans of contraband cider from the hedge, cherry tomato pips from the kitchen ceiling, and party popper carcasses from the depths of granny’s perm.

But you’d be wrong. Yes, I’ll admit to all of the above (not to mention the almost total deforestation of the banisters on our landing, over which we’ll draw a veil) but that’s not why I’m having to dash this off so fast. No, I ‘m rushing because I’ve been busy doing an exam.

My daughter’s key stage three maths SATS past paper, more specifically, which should never have been left in my unsupervised vicinity, because I’ve been at it ALL DAY.

I am, you see, one of those rare people who suffer not from SAD but SEE. Seasonal Examination Envy. Curious affliction, possibly incurable, and right now, it being almost that glorious season, the symptoms are getting pretty bad.

I blush to admit it because it’s probably notifiable, but I’ve always loved exams. Love everything about them. Love the change in routine, the adrenalin rush, the disgorging, the focus, the gut-churning dread; the whole ritual of sitting behind a small formica-topped table , calculator and pencils in a clear plastic bag, sucking disconsolately on fruit-flavoured Polos and thinking grim, apocalyptic thoughts.

(And exam envy isn’t just about the exams themselves. Much as I’ve revelled in the hysterical panic that accompanies not being able to distinguish your dorics from your ionics (a personal favourite), there’s also the unalloyed pleasure that exists in those other pockets of exam-time enjoyment; the bits you spend sitting around on newly mown grass trying to learn the periodic table by rote and feeling joyously tragic. Can’t beat it.)

Anyway, couldn’t resist. Had to have a stab at it. Which is why, when I should have been working, I’ve instead been immersed in such intoxicating byways as calculating the possible germination outcomes of the sweet pea growing exploits of Meg and Ravi (and no, you may NOT use a calculator), inverting fractions, rotating cuboids, and wondering when it was that the term ‘angle bisector ‘ceased to have any sort of meaning in my life.

Boy, did that one have me stumped. Because – hell’s bells – what WAS one? I simply couldn’t remember. All I knew for sure (because it said so) was that I’d need a compass and a straight edge (which I presume is post-modern-speak for ‘ruler’) to find out. So after staring at the diagram for ten minutes in the hopes that my brain would engage (it didn’t) I decided that if I found some compasses, I’d be in with a chance. At the very least, I could attach them to my pencil and draw some circles, which would be a start.

But do you think I could find any compasses? Forty five minutes I spent rummaging around. Forty five minutes in the sure and certain knowledge that I must have bought scores of the bloody things over the years. But no luck. And thus defeated, I had to look it up on Google, which feels like a terrible shame.

But on the bright side, my search wasn’t entirely fruitless. 3 x cherry tomatoes + 2 more x Scrumpy Jacks = not a completely frittered-away day.

28th April 2007 The Conservative Party...

Stressful times ahead in the Barrett-Lee household, because it’s Georgie’s fourteenth birthday this weekend and I think I might have unleashed a monster.

No, not HER, obviously. Just the party. The party that, after last year’s ruinously expensive and not terribly thrilling trip to see Starlight Express, seemed like a really good idea. Especially given that we’re now at hormone central and pouting and preening and standing in self-conscious clusters eyeing boys are currently the order of the day.

I got quite excited about it. No forking out for foul nugget-and-chip leisure centre suppers, no irritable DJs, no logistics with lifts or transportation of cakes. Just a good old fashioned bash with some streamers and party poppers, a few ironically-played games (possibly including Twister), and perhaps Pete in his pinny by the Barbie.

Hence negotiations – those cornerstones of modern family life - commenced, the outcome being the making of a number of adjustments (mainly hers ) and concessions ( mostly ours ) which dispensed with all things involving either party games or a jauntily dressed father cracking lame jokes whilst flipping burgers, and eventually the promise – writ in blood would have been her preference – that having installed and fed the guests (never leave a burning chocolate fondue unattended) Pete and I would head off for a very quick curry , leaving older brother Joe and a few helpful friends in charge, only to return once her coolness credentials had been properly, unimpeachably, established. Upon which we could cut the cake, sing, and send them home.

Not the easiest decision for a parent to make. A great deal can happen in ninety minutes, after all. But Joe and his pals being (as well as acceptably hip) a responsible lot, and trust being something we set a great deal of store by, we decided that as long as certain embargoes were clear (no need to list them – just think bottle confiscations; no-go areas; a CRB check), we could leave them to feel terribly grown up for a bit.

But we had, of course, made one serious error. We had forgotten all about MSN. MSN (and no, I don’t know exactly what it stands for, either – Microsoft Supports Nihilism?) is not a neutral sort of acronym. If you know what it is, you’ll know exactly what I mean.

Which is that, thanks to that miracle of modern communication and a certain young lady proudly advertising the glacial cool that was the fact of our brief intended absence, it seems (if the growing spate of rumours are true) that said party is now THE hottest ticket in town. And is apparently going to be gatecrashed by the whole of year nine, a gaggle from year ten, even some (frankly sad) party animals from year eleven, plus possibly, since MSN is such a far reaching tool, by your sister’s neighbour’s nephew in St Clears. One lad, so dizzy with anticipation, I imagine, even turned up last Saturday by mistake. Pete growled. He shot off. Don’t imagine he’ll be back. But even so, come tonight, there’ll be no quiet curry. Instead bar coded invites and retinal scanning, strip searches, customs, and passport control. And, as our land, like the Falklands, is vulnerable to invasion, a continuous, dog-assisted border patrol.

Pete’s dug out his searchlight and is ready to repel boarders. Pubescent ravers of Cardiff take note; you approach Castle George at your peril.

21st April 2007 Sucking Hell...

Well, it was bound to happen, wasn’t it? Everyone knows that the more feverishly you look forward to something the more disappointing the reality.

I speak, gentle reader, of my blower. Not that it’s just a blower. It’s a sucker as well. And a shredder. Which means, if you believe the hype (and I did), that it’s actually all things to all people.

People who have a lot of leaves, at any rate. Which we do. Which I know doesn’t necessarily mean you need to spend silly money on kit. For Pete, for example, leaves are best dealt with by a) waiting for a windy spell and hoping it’ll relocate them to the end of Rod’s garden across the way, or b) should Cardiff be becalmed for an extended period, by getting the broom out and sweeping them up.

Not so me. I’ve wanted a leaf blower for two years now; ever since I saw that fit TV gardener bloke using one. That’s what I need, I thought. My own personal blower. So I can vacuum al fresco on nice sunny days.

‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ said Pete. ‘We don’t need a leaf blower. And besides, I wouldn’t want one on principle’. Pete thinks leaf blowers, like pressure washers, are harbingers of the sad slide into suburban middle age. Though I don’t know why I should listen to him. He thought buggies were harbingers of the end of youth and freedom, and I foolishly once let him have his way. Ten days in California is no fun with a 20 month old and no buggy, let me tell you.

Anyway, he held me off last year, but what with the heat and the dust and, well, the leaves and everything, this year I made him cave in, sketching out an attractive scenario in which leaves and their husbandry would no longer be one of the burdens of his busy life. One in which I wafted round the garden on a daily basis, sucking/blowing as required, like a kind of garden Cinderella, freeing him, after a hard day’s clinic, to come home and sip lager in a leaf-free environment.

That sold him. So last weekend we bought one. Eschewed electric, naturally, because cabling and I aren’t compatible, and purchased a high quality petrol driven leaf blowing/sucking/shredding thing with a two year guarantee.

And you know what? It’s hateful. Indescribably so. And I say that having thought of many appellations, most of them unprintable here. For starters, it’s not just a case of pouring in some unleaded and pressing go. Oh, no. You need additives. They do send you a little bottle to start you off, but then there’s the working out a 1:50 ratio for a 587 ml container, and then you need a funnel, and if you want to suck you have to take off the blow tubes you just screwed on, and then prime this, jiggle that, rip your whole arm off trying to start it, and it’s right handed and I’m left handed, and it weighs a bloody TON, and it spits boiling air and bits of leaf into your eyes, and it makes your ENTIRE BODY vibrate. And not in a good way. It’s horrid.

‘But it’s a POWER TOOL,’ Pete observed, trying not to titter. ‘A big, man-sized power tool. And – don’t take offence, now – you’re a woman.’ And much as I wish it were otherwise, he’s right. It’s the end of dream. Leaf blowers suck.

14th April 2007 Splice the Mainsail

God, don’t you just HATE clothes shopping? And isn’t it, right now, a nightmare? Because this summer, it seems, is the season of the smock, which is not something a shortish, oldish, solidish kind of gal like myself can hear with anything approaching equanimity.

Fashion’s so tediously like-it-or-lump it, isn’t it? Which is awkward. Because there’s currently nothing in the shops that I’d want to call my own. Which is, I admit, something of a turnaround. Back in October, I was all enthusiasm on the smock front. And why wouldn’t I be? Ask any one who, when faced with the word ‘muffin’, would automatically add the word ‘top’ rather than butter, and you’ll see someone for whom the smock opened up whole new vistas; mostly of the back of the wardrobe, where the ill-advised, hipster jeans had been flung. But what constituted a good look back then (snuggly fabrics, flatteringly deep colours) doesn’t come off half so well when made in the sort of cheap cotton you’d mostly dress a dodgy B and B bed with and patterns that when used in a clinical situation could trigger a Grand Mal.

And then there’s the rest. Put an averagely lumpen middle-aged slightly short-arsed female body into a smock and then swap jeans and heels for cropped leggings and a pair of those ubiquitous man-made-fibre ballet pumps that once removed from your foot curl up like spam sandwiches left out at the end of a buffet - and smell even worse - and it’s not so much a case of something being lost in translation as someone – yes, me – having lost the will to live.

Even if you’ve got the sort of bod that can accommodate three metres of billow without people wondering if you’ve opted for a fashionably late pregnancy , what species of troll chose the palette? Cruise the high street and all you’ll currently see is a smorgasbord of garments themed mostly (and I’m sorry if you’re eating your breakfast) around bodily functions. Spittle, for example. Accents of bogie. The water in the sink after you’ve rubbed through your smalls. There’s also plenty of bile, a soupçon of sick, dandruff, crusted nose-bleed and belly button fluff. And though there’s some turquoise to leaven the grim picture, it’s mostly of the sort that says not so much ‘tropical ocean’ as ‘generic block of chemicals to sanitise the loo.’

Many of you, then (and I don’t doubt we’ve met, weeping, in a changing room somewhere ) will be cheered by some encouraging news. Instead of queuing from last Wednesday to snap up the rags – sorry, must-haves – that are likely to be touted by whichever retailing monolith opens the next super-store, consider this. Between 2001 and 2005 – a scant four years – the number of garments bought in the UK increased by more than a THIRD – and most of that will end up as landfill. I know my green credentials aren’t as emerald as they might be, but if there was ever a reason to avoid the jumble-sale that is - insert store of choice - and fight over horrible plastic pumps and shapeless frocks that look like they’ve been made from nursing home curtains, this would seem to be it. Stand firm. Eschew the high street. Seek out one expensive, anachronistic but breathtaking creation and wear it – feeling gorgeous – until it falls off your back. And if that’s not a fashion statement I don’t know what is.

7th April 2007 When in Rome...

Nothing like a good acronym, is there? And SFU is definitely that. Last week, I had a chance to join Pete on a work trip to Rome. He was in Business Class. I was with the tourists. So SFU (which means Suitable for Upgrade) was what I was determined to be.

As I always am, being such a born blagger. Though sometimes it comes off unexpectedly; having worked myself into a hysterical rant at Atlanta airport once because the flight was full and they told me Luke - then 3 - would have to sit with a stranger my genuine distress translated into two of the best seats American Eagle had. Left Pete back in cattle class, but hey, needs must.

Sometimes, however, it doesn’t. Another time, having scrimped enough to take a brace of grannies with us and our friends skiing, they then made a similar spectacle of themselves, in their quest to obtain seats in the already full smoking section. Cue immediate upgrades. Not for us but for them. Cue a ten hour flight – which WE’D paid for - with us and kids down the back and them behind the cockpit downing bubbly.

Sometimes even God intervenes. Last time I went to Rome with Pete, I was scuppered by the Pope. Having expected a realistic shot at getting behind the curtains, I found myself flying out crammed between two overweight funeral-bound priests, and flying home amid a wild pubescent gaggle from Stratford upon Avon Girls Grammar, who, de-mob happy after so much enforced piety, made like a cabin full of Tiggers.

Last week, however, I was hopeful. Assuming no-one else of Catholic significance keeled over before take off, there was a reasonable chance of my joining Pete in Club. Just as long as I could get stamped SFU, or else CIP (commercially important passenger).

Which, if you plan, can be done. Though I’d probably stop short of baking the check-in staff a cake or wearing a fake plaster and pretending I broke my leg, I did see potential in my passport. Have one that says something impressive, like ‘Doctor’ or ‘Reverend’, and you up your chances markedly. Couldn’t pinch Pete’s, of course – he kind of required it – but flashing my own, which says ‘novelist’, seemed worth a shot. Add the right look, and I would be, I figured, halfway there. Hence I travelled out in the sort of eccentric-boho-insane get-up that screamed ‘important literary type’. But not the right type, clearly, because it got me nowhere. Not even into the executive lounge. With hindsight, I suspect they thought Pete was escorting a recently discharged lunatic on a mad religious quest.

The return, therefore, needed a rethink. Dispensing with my more outlandish fancies, I opted for killer heels, smart skirt, chi-chi Jacket , and a handbag I picked up for peanuts in a market, but of the type that could equally have cost the price of a small boat. Thus attired – joy! - Pete got me into the lounge. ‘Result!’ I twittered at him, as I teetered down the jetty. Only to remember something vital. That sticking out of my bag was the racy ‘Pin Up Priests’ calendar I’d bought off some bloke by the Trevi Fountain. Aaargh! What SFU, CIP person would do that? I was exposed as the trying-it-on tourist I was. The stewardess didn’t comment, but if expressions were acronyms, hers would have read IYD.

I’ll leave you to work that one out.

31st March 2007 Wine, women and song

Here’s a poser. How old do you have to be before you become properly grown up? You know - the sort of sensible grown up you become just before the slide into senility; the sort parents become at about the time their children have swapped getting into trouble for scrumping apples for getting into trouble with intoxicating liquor instead. This is the sort of grown up-ness to which I’ve always aspired. But just when am I going to achieve it?

Not soon, if Saturday’s shenanigans are anything to go by. I finished off a lovely but emotionally draining week looking after my sis, by being a guest speaker at the British Society of Comedy Writers’ annual get-together, which, this year, took place in Cardiff. Did a spot with my fellow novelist friend, Jane, chaired by the lovely Carolyn Hitt - who readers of this paper will know. Went, I think, pretty well. (Not for nothing are Jane and I considered the Trinny and Suzannah of Chick Lit. Though minus Trinny, perhaps. We’re neither of us sticks.) Anyway, once we were done, I made my excuses, rattled home, had lunch, waved off my sister, did some pressing domestics, performed a slap-n-wardrobe turnaround and headed on back, the evening’s activities being just what I needed; a fork buffet supper, copious amounts of bonhomie, some stand-ups, and plenty of wine. This much is clear. What follows is not. So now, in no particular order, I must use this esteemed organ for the purposes of setting certain records straight.

To Peter – no, not my one – I mean you in the checked shirt who may or may not be involved in the production of short films for environmental charities; please disregard everything I said, as my memory suggests I used the phrase ‘yes, but what about the ice cores?’ about one hundred and seven times, and I suspect you might have been trying to talk to me about something entirely unrelated. Apples, was it? Or mullioned windows?

To the rather fit comedian who was telling that joke; please don’t take the explosive guffaw I emitted during your mention of peeing in wetsuits as in any way indicative of my being someone who would make a habit of relieving themselves in inappropriate situations.

To the man standing by the ‘forthcoming attractions at Chapter Art Centre’ pamphlets; I do apologise. I wasn’t trying to chat you up. It was just that I’d spat a shard of Tortilla chip on your shirt and was anxious to remove it before you noticed.

To the woman to whom I sang a perfectly pitched but entirely unsolicited rendition of the entire H R Puf-n-Stuf theme tune; please be assured that I am quite, quite sane and that it’s safe for you to come out from behind the soft drinks vending machine now.

To Phil. Or was it Gareth? You know who you are; look, I was only trying to show you my arthroscopy scar, okay?

To my lovely pal, Rachel, who kindly brought me home; mate, three a.m. is way past both our bedtimes. In future, just say ‘Lynne, shut up and get out of my car NOW’.

The irony? I didn’t even have that bad a hangover. Which is what happens when your brain shrinks. Which is what happens when you’re old enough to know better. Which is, I think, where I came in.