Why Mummy Drinks Read online

  Saturday, 12 September

  In lieu of smoky jazz clubs, Parisian garrets and unsuitable boys, Simon took me out for birthday tapas last night and I got a bit more drunk than I meant to. I did achieve the inappropriate skirt and the whisky, though. Sadly, the whisky was just part of a cocktail in a very wanky hipster bar. I fear hipster bars are probably the new smoky jazz clubs anyway, now that smoking is banned everywhere.

  I also have a vague and unfortunate recollection of shouting ‘WANKY HIPSTERS!’ somewhat louder than intended before Simon managed to hustle me out of there and into a less-pretentious bar, with proper glasses rather than jam jars. The evidence on my phone suggests we had pretty much run out of conversation by that point and so I just took a load of selfies and photos of my cocktails and put them on Facebook with illegible captions, but it was about 11.30 p.m. by then, so Simon had to go home to bed or he would turn into a pumpkin. Remarkably, though, we had managed to dredge up enough to talk about that I didn’t resort to posting an annoying Instagram photo of my dinner.

  I did actually wake up this morning feeling marvellous, and very clever indeed for sticking to spirits instead of mixing my drinks and turning my teeth black with red wine. No, not me. Not this time. I was elegant ladylike refinement, sipping away on my cocktails.

  But then I got out of bed, and felt slightly less clever, and the pain has increased ever since. It quickly became apparent that I wasn’t actually clever in the slightest, because I had not dodged the hangover bullet after all. Instead, I had an epic slow burner of a hangover – the sort that tricks you into thinking you are all right, so you start going about your day like normal, but then it suddenly smacks you in the head like an evil gorilla and then you just want to die. I think a badger shat in my mouth.

  There were also some terrible hangover flashbacks. After the wanky whisky cocktail I had moved on to gin cocktails and there were unfortunate recollections of sobbing with the gin fear in the taxi on the way home and asking the taxi driver if he thought I looked like I was going to be forty in a year. I think he said no, but that was most likely out of terror rather than honesty.

  And then, as I prayed only for the pain to end, Hannah rang in floods of tears to say that Dan was leaving her. There is not really anything you can say when your best friend in the whole wide world rings you up to announce her arsehole husband is leaving her, other than, ‘Do you want to come round?’ and, ‘No, no, just bring the kids, not a problem at all.’

  Hannah is devastated, of course, and I am very sad for her, but to be perfectly honest, none of us could ever work out what she saw in Dan, who managed to simultaneously be the most boring man in the world and a nasty little control freak. Obviously, one can’t yet say these things in case he changes his mind, or she loses hers and takes him back, but to be honest this is probably going to be a Good Thing for her. I also at no point said, ‘Please can you cry slightly less loudly, because I have a very bad headache and I think I might be sick?’ I don’t know if that makes me a good or a bad friend.

  Wednesday, 16 September

  Today, as part of my excellent resolution to be a better, kinder, more caring Mummy, instead of panting up to the school gates at 8.59 a.m. while yelling ‘Run, RUN! LATE! LATE!’, I arrived at school at 8.50 a.m. and walked the children all the way to the playground, chatting delightfully to them about what they thought they might be doing today and the fun things they could look forward to in the new term.

  Unfortunately, though, thus it was that as I cheerily waved the little darlings off, Bloody Perfect Lucy Atkinson’s Perfect Mummy and her Coven of Bloody Perfect Mummies bore down on me to ask if I had ‘had a nice break’. Questions like these are always asked with a sympathetic head tilt and steely glint in the eye. They do not give a rat’s arse about whether I had a ‘nice break’ or not, they just want to make sure I know that they have been to Tuscany or Barbados and to check that I haven’t been anywhere better than them so they can humble brag about how they wished they’d had such a ‘nice simple holiday’ while gloating about their tans.

  Obviously I did not have a ‘nice break’, because a nice break implies lounging around somewhere decadent, reading splendid books by the likes of Jilly Cooper and Penny Vincenzi while a nice man brings you cocktails. Drunkenly shouting at Simon to see what he can make with the Aldi gin and the dodgy bottle of mystery liqueur we got in Malta twelve years ago and have been too scared to open, while scrolling through Netflix to find something, anything, that the children haven’t watched, other than The Inbetweeners (which, it turns out, is actually highly unsuitable for children, as was evidenced by Peter asking his teacher how she got to school and then telling her that she was a Bus Wanker) is not ‘a nice break’. Obviously I was not going to admit this to the Bloody Perfect Coven, though.

  So we danced the dance whereby they asked if we were ‘just at home’ and then they sighed about how exhausted they were from dragging their many perfect children around the world all by themselves because The Nanny had insisted on having a week off to visit her own family. Meanwhile, I smiled and gritted my teeth and swore to myself that the next one to make a patronising remark would get smacked soundly round the head with her own duck-egg-blue Céline bag (obviously, I would not do any such thing. I would wallop them with my own cheap Primarni bag and steal the nice Céline bag for myself while she was still stunned from the blow).

  FFS, is it any wonder I drink when I have to endure the Coven? It’s a wonder I don’t drink more. I was going to be very good tonight, but after the Coven, and then an hour of Peter telling me ‘jokes’ after school (the very best one was: ‘What do you get if you cross a goat with the moon? MOONGOAT.COM!’ The others were even worse …), I was a bit broken. So when I noticed there was a bottle of Sauvignon Blanc in the fridge with only a glass-worth left in it, it seemed rude to leave the poor wine to be lonely by itself when it could happily join its companions from last night. It turned out to be quite a big glass, actually.

  Friday, 18 September

  Wine is my friend. Wine is Hannah’s friend, too. She made Dan look after his children then she came round and we glugged pink sunshine wine and shouted ‘Dan is a wanker’ a lot. Simon hid from Hannah, as he copes badly with emotional women at the best of times, let alone if there is an excellent chance that his wife’s best friend might cry in front of him and he might be forced to talk about feelings. Simon’s idea of a frank and open exchange about one’s emotions is to pat one awkwardly on the arm and mumble, ‘There, there’, while frantically seeking the nearest escape route.

  We did manage to corner him at one point as he tried to slink into the kitchen to get another beer when he thought we were preoccupied with singing Gloria Gaynor songs. We insisted that before he left he must admit that Dan was a massive dickhead. Luckily he has never liked Dan either, in fact, he had often complained that he looked like a goblin (he did rather), so there was no boring awkwardness about him ‘not taking sides’ because obviously there is no question that he is to be on Hannah’s side – she is my best friend, and he is my husband, so he is obliged to take the side I tell him to. Obviously I would do the same for him if one of his friends got divorced and would declare the wife to be a shameless harlot. Unless it was one of his wanker friends, of course.

  I fear wine will not be our friend tomorrow.

  Monday, 21 September

  Muchos excitement in the playground this morning. There was A MAN there! Obviously there have been men in the playground before – this is not some completely Stepford Wives’ suburb – but the men in the playground usually take the form of either Super Busy And Important Daddies In Suits who burst in and out, either throwing the children in at the gate or dragging them out at high speed while talking loudly on their mobile telephones so we are all aware that they are Super Busy And Super Important and only here because The Nanny was so inconsiderate as to get appendicitis; or the House Husband Daddies, who are lovely, but always look in need of a bit of a wash and seem to be a b
it lost and teetering on the brink of tears. There are lots of other perfectly nice, normal men who do the school run sometimes, too, but they just sort of blend in, not really standing out or fitting into any of the categories above.

  Today, though, today there was A Sexy Man. There had been A Sexy Man once before, it’s true, but that ‘man’ was in fact twenty-three and the French boyfriend of one of the gorgeous au pairs, and we all felt like Harry Enfield’s Lovely Wobbly Randy Old Ladies as we peered at him and mumbled ‘YOUNG MAN!’ to each other while cackling lasciviously. He never came back, oddly enough.

  This new man is age-appropriately sexy. He has got that tousled hair, stubble, leather jacket thing going on, but in a really cool way – not a sad, midlife-crisis way. In fact, he looks exactly the sort of man who would sit beside you in a smoky jazz club and whisper indecent proposals in your ear. And he has a really nice arse.

  I am very ashamed of myself, as a respectably married thirty-nine-year-old mother of two children, to be looking at another man’s arse in the playground, surrounded by the innocent hearts and minds of impressionable children, but fuck my old boots, it was a really nice arse. Anyway, Simon might deny checking out the au pairs’ arses when he picks up the children, but he’s blatantly lying, it is impossible not to notice the au pairs’ arses. The mummies in the playground spend much time discussing if we ever had arses like those of the au pairs. On reflection, we suspect probably not, due to being British and so spending our formative years drinking cider and eating chips, unlike the healthy Continental people who eat salad and go cycling.

  Anyway, back to this fine arse. Even Perfect Lucy Atkinson’s Perfect Mummy was all of a tizz. (She will get thrush if she keeps getting that overexcited in her lululemons.) The jungle drums had already been beating, of course, so she was able to breathlessly reveal that the name of the object of our attention is Sam. (Of course it is. Naturally a splendid, manly arse like that would have a solid, no-nonsense, manly name like Sam. An arse like that could not be called something like Norman.) He is a single dad because his wife left him for another man and callously abandoned the children as well (BLIMEY, what sort of arse must his rival have had?), he also works in IT (really? He doesn’t look like it, but oooh, something in common) and he has two children – a boy in Peter’s class and a girl in Jane’s (more in common!).

  Would I be a terrible person if I tried to encourage my children to befriend his children so I could get a better look at that magnificent backside? Yes, obviously I would be, but you could see every other mother with children in those classes thinking exactly the same thing.

  My precious moppets offered up very little by way of information about the new children in their classes; Jane managed to recall that the girl is called Sophie and is ‘quite nice’. Peter looked blank when asked about a new boy and eventually said, ‘Oh, do you mean Elliott who had the Ultra Rare Golden Moshi Monsters?’ Elliott left last term. I despair of my children sometimes.

  Obviously, I am only going to start brushing my hair and putting on extra makeup for the school run as part of my new resolution to make more of an effort and be less of a lazy slattern. It is a complete coincidence that Sam and his arse have happened to arrive in the playground. Nothing more.

  Wednesday, 23 September

  This morning Jane reminded me at 8.30 a.m. that it was her school trip today. This caused panic stations enough as I tried to remember if I had signed the slip and given the school the enormous sum of money it apparently costs to take the children to visit somewhere free (it appears hiring buses is a very expensive business. Maybe I should go for a career change and buy a bus and hire myself out? Edie McCredie in Balamory seemed to enjoy her job. Was she a bus driver? Maybe she was a taxi driver. I refuse on principle to google Balamory to find out, as those days are behind me. I have no wish to revisit Miss Hoolie’s fixed grin or wonder just why Archie the Inventor had so many yoghurt pots, or ponder whether or not Josie Jump was actually speeding off her tits. Oh bugger, I googled it. She was a bus driver. I feel dirty now).

  At 8.40 a.m. Jane casually enquired if I was looking forward to coming on the trip too … ARGH! Surely I hadn’t ticked the ‘I would like to help’ box, had I? I had, though why I would have done that was beyond me, unless perhaps I was pissed when I filled in the form? Why would I offer to help on my ‘day off’ – known to me as my ‘Trying To Make The House Less Of A Shit-tip Day’ and to bastarding Simon as my ‘Having Coffee Day’. Not only had I accidently ticked the box, I had also not bothered to check the children’s homework diaries and therefore had missed the nice note from the Lovely Teacher summonsing me to render assistance with supervising the cherubs, which is a task more akin to herding cats.

  Ten minutes. That was all I had. Ten short minutes to make myself look presentable and respectable and also just a little bit sexy just in case Sam’s Arse was on the trip, too. NO. No. Bad and wrong. I did not need to look sexy, Sam’s Arse or no Sam’s Arse.

  In the end I settled for brushing my teeth, tying back the crazy hair and slapping on a bit of makeup to cover the worst of the horror. When I got into the playground I was quite glad of the lack of time to transform myself into a radiantly glowing Sex Goddess because the tarmac was a moist sea of lip gloss and fluttering eyelashes and slightly-too-tight sweaters, with everyone clearly thinking the same impure thoughts about Sam’s Arse. However, there was not a sight of the Sacred Bum to be had because his childminder was dropping the kids off (and looking fairly tarted up herself, it had to be said)!

  The trip was vile, obviously. I had no idea of the stench that a bus load of children can create. What are their parents feeding them? Thirty children, in a combined space, apparently farting non-stop from the moment we got on the bus until the moment we reached the very large museum containing many priceless artefacts for the children to be educated by, while the adults tried to stop them stealing or smashing anything. My eyes were watering and my lungs were burning by the time we disembarked. I actually thought someone must’ve soiled themselves, the smell was so bad.

  Teachers should be issued with gas masks if they have to spend all day in that fetid fog, though when I remarked on the farting to the Lovely Teacher, she laughed merrily and said, ‘Oh, you soon stop noticing it!’

  I don’t think this is true; Peter came home puffed with pride last year, announcing that he had made his teacher feel sick with a particularly rancid fart he had done. Peter is quite revolting, though. One poor little girl had to be moved away from him as she found Peter farting and then laughing hysterically each time to be quite distracting. You would think that living with Peter, and my foul dog and his cheesy bum, that I would have become immune to the stink, but I haven’t. Maybe the Lovely Teacher is on drugs. That would explain a lot.

  Anyway, the trip was horrible. The class ran amok; I saw Freddie Dawkins wiping bogeys on one of the glass display cabinets, but at least since everyone is now suspected of being a paedophile I didn’t have to take anyone to the toilet.

  Apparently they were there to learn about the Egyptians. I suspect they learnt exactly nothing, except how to squander their money on tat in the gift shop. Jane seemed to be under the impression that I was there to provide her with an endless supply of cash to purchase all the said tat and became quite huffy when I declined to spend £35 on an umbrella with a ballerina on it. £35! On an umbrella! FML, I didn’t even know it was possible to spend £35 on an umbrella, although in fairness I tend to buy my umbrellas in Poundland and they die or I lose them after three uses, so in the grand scheme of things I have probably spent considerably more than £35 on umbrellas over the years, and maybe what is missing in my life is a statement umbrella. Maybe I should have bought Jane the £35 umbrella, and then perhaps she would grow up to be a well-rounded and functioning adult who would not still think ‘when I’m a grown up’ even in her late thirties? Bollocks, I have failed in my parental duty again.

  Being a virtuous and saintly person who helps on school trips and doe
sn’t paint her face like a harpy in order to look alluring to a man with a nice bottom has clearly earned me Wednesday wine, though I have to go to boring work tomorrow because it turns out buses are quite expensive and you have to pass a test to be able to drive one. Since I barely passed my test when driving a very small car – getting the same examiner for so many attempts that he finally said he had only passed me because people were starting to talk about us – there is no chance I could pass a test driving a bloody enormous bus.

  Friday, 25 September

  Breathing. Breathing. Breathing. Today I had a half day at work, as I had a dentist’s appointment and it wasn’t worth going back to work for half an hour before I picked up the children, so I took the dog for a walk round the park before school finished. And who should I have met there but the gorgeous Sam and his Arse as I chased my buggering pig dog round the duck pond, bellowing at him to come back and stop trying to do that to the ducks. Sam was walking his rather lovely Staffie, and although my pig dog made a show of me by behaving very badly as usual, he did decide to run up to Sam and jump all over him, while I shouted ineffectually for the wretched beast to stop it. But on the plus side, it gave me an excellent excuse to actually talk to Sam, without looking like a sad desperate tart (because ‘Obstreperous Terrier Owner’ is a much better look, obviously). So we talked about the dogs, which both turned out to be rescues, and then he said he had seen me at the school (gasp) and weren’t our children in the same classes?

  Sam Noticed Me! Sam. Noticed me. Me!

  And then he said (which was a bit of a let-down, suggesting that perhaps Sophie had pointed me out as Jane’s mum, rather than Sam being struck with wonder across the playground by the way that I totally rocked my laddered tights and frizzy, caught-in-the-rain hair yesterday) that Sophie had said she liked Jane and wanted her to come for a play after school, and what about this afternoon? And to bring Peter as well, because he could play with his son Toby.