Why Mummy's Sloshed Read online

  ‘So Mum says that you and her are like going to buy me a car?’ announced Jane.

  ‘What!’ said Simon.

  ‘I did not!’ I said indignantly, grabbing the phone off Jane, as Marissa cooed, ‘A car, Jane, darling? I mean, it’s marvellous that you’ve passed your test, it’s a very useful life skill to have, but getting a car of your own will only increase your carbon footprint and encourage unnecessary journeys. Why don’t you get a bike? It’s a really efficient mode of transport, and super eco-friendly.’

  Jane was making mutinous noises about a bike when Simon interrupted Marissa.

  ‘Why would you say that, Ellen?’ he huffed. ‘You can’t just make promises like that on my behalf.’

  ‘I just said I didn’t say that!’ I repeated. ‘What I told Jane was that I’d discuss it with you and we’d see if it was financially viable for us to do something between us, that’s all.’

  ‘And me!’ chirped Marissa. ‘I have a lot of valuable input to offer too.’

  ‘Why?’ I asked. ‘Are you going to contribute to a car for Jane?’

  ‘Well, no, but I can send you some information about how many miles of rainforest are destroyed per new car built, and also I’ve done a lot of research into bikes, so I can help with that, which I really think is a better solution and –’

  ‘But I don’t want a bike, I want a car,’ whined Jane. ‘I’ve got a bike. It’s rubbish.’

  ‘Yes, but Jane, if you had a really super-duper high-end bike, I think that would make a lot of difference,’ insisted Marissa. ‘Just think about it, OK, Jane? Promise me you’ll think about it.’

  ‘I think Marissa’s right,’ said Simon heartily. ‘A really good bike sounds a great idea, darling.’

  Jane made huffing and non-committal noises about thinking about a bike, and decided to move on to the next battle to be fought.

  ‘Why aren’t you at work anyway, Dad?’ said Jane. ‘Mum says I have to go back to school after this. Do I really?’

  I strained my ears to listen.

  ‘We’ve both taken today off because we’re going on a couples’ retreat in Dorset,’ said Marissa.

  ‘A couples’ retreat?’ said Jane incredulously. ‘Ewww. Is that, like, threesomes and sex parties and stuff? That’s totally disgusting, Dad!’

  ‘No, of course it’s not like that,’ said Marissa in her calmest, nicest, I-Am-a-Very-Good-Person-and-Shall-Not-Get-Annoyed-by-the-Inferior-Beings voice. ‘It involves a weekend of connecting as a couple, strengthening and deepening our bond through intense work with counsellors and trust exercises and –’

  ‘Do you meditate?’ interrupted Jane.

  ‘What? Yes, yes, couples’ meditation is one of the workshops,’ said Marissa smugly.

  ‘It sounds a pile of wank,’ said Jane cheerfully.

  ‘Oh, Jane,’ sighed Marissa. ‘Don’t be so quick to judge what you don’t understand. It’s vital to couples’ well-being to nurture and care for their relationship. You have to be proactive about relationships, you know, if you don’t want to end up alone. You often find that the reason a person has a string of failed relationships behind them is because they just couldn’t be bothered to put the work in.’

  Was that directed at me? That was definitely directed at me. Ouch! Oh, Marissa’s good, I’ll give her that – sweetness and light and discreet little barbs, just sharp enough to sting, but subtle enough that if you objected you’d either look paranoid and over-sensitive, or Marissa would look at you caringly and say, ‘Of course it wasn’t about you, but it seems to be resonating with you for some reason. Why do you think you feel that so personally? Would you like to talk about it?’ OF COURSE I DON’T WANT TO TALK ABOUT IT, I’M BRITISH. And if I DID want to talk about it, it wouldn’t be with you, with your stupid shiny hair, and your head on one side doing your special Caring Look. Single I may be, failed relationships I may have, but given the choice between being a sad, lonely, ageing singleton, and going on couples’ retreats filled with people like Marissa, spending the rest of my life with just me and my discreet box from Ann Summers under the bed doesn’t actually seem so bad …

  ‘It sounds expensive,’ said Jane. ‘Sounds like it probably cost as much as … ooh … say a car? Maybe if Dad wasn’t off spending all his money on wanky weekends, he could buy me a car!’

  ‘Firstly,’ Marissa said, ‘you can’t actually put a price on emotional health, and secondly I paid for it. It was an anniversary present for your father.’

  ‘Lucky Dad,’ said Jane sarcastically. ‘Anyway, I was actually asking him a question, not you, Marissa, so if you could, like, stop interrupting? So, Dad, do I have to go back to school?’

  ‘Don’t be cheeky to Marissa, please. And if your mother says you have to go back to school, then you have to go back to school,’ said Simon firmly, still nonetheless making me out to be the bad cop.

  ‘She has A levels!’ I shouted down the phone. ‘She needs to work. They don’t pass themselves.’

  ‘Oh my God, Mother!’ snapped Jane. ‘I know I have A levels. How could I forget? I’ve only just finished my Mocks, and also you’ve literally talked about nothing else for months. Fine! Since no one cares about my emotional health, I’ll just go back to school. Don’t anyone worry about my individuality or being allowed to express myself at any point. No, that’s fine!’

  ‘Jane, I need to go. There’s a very tricky junction coming up and I need to concentrate. But well done, darling, and I’ll call you tonight, OK?’

  ‘No mobiles are allowed at the retreat,’ put in Marissa.

  ‘Oh, for fuck’s sake,’ Simon sighed. ‘Anyway, bye, darling, talk soon,’ and he hung up.

  ‘God, Marissa is a fucking annoying cow!’ said Jane.

  ‘Mmm,’ I said noncommittally, not wanting to make the mistake of bitching about Marissa to Jane, only for Jane to repeat it all back to Marissa at some point in the future when I was in Jane’s bad books and Marissa had bought her goodwill with ASOS vouchers. ‘And don’t swear so much, darling.’

  ‘Well, she is! Anyway, Mum, seriously, why do I have to go back to school?’

  ‘Because, darling,’ I repeated for what felt like the eleventy fucking billionth time, ‘this is your A-level year, and your A levels are very important.’

  ‘The Queen hasn’t got any A levels,’ interjected Jane.

  ‘That’s because she’s the fucking QUEEN!’ I pointed out. ‘She didn’t need A levels. You don’t become Queen because you were top of your class at Queen School.’

  ‘It would be more democratic that way?’ suggested Jane.

  ‘But you aren’t going to be Queen,’ I said despairingly. ‘And all those other hugely successful people who’ve got to the top despite not having A levels are the exception, not the rule. They’d have been successful anyway, and it might have been an easier path if they had had A levels, and for every millionaire A level-less entrepreneur, there are a million other people who never realised their potential because they didn’t get any A levels. In most cases it’s not because they didn’t bother to work for them, but that they never got the chance to, and given that there are billions of people in the world who are forced to work in dangerous, low-paid jobs because for one reason or another they’ll never get an opportunity to get a decent education, who would in fact give their right fucking arm for the educational breaks that you take for granted, then it’s in fact rather morally reprehensible of you to not take your education seriously and make the very most of it that you can!’

  I was rather proud of my little speech – it almost moved me to tears – and surely, surely somehow it would get through to Jane that she really needed to knuckle down and start working.

  ‘Oh my God, Mother,’ sneered Jane. ‘Have you actually just given me the educational equivalent of the “There are starving children in Africa, so eat your peas” talk? Sad!’


  ‘Just get in the fucking car,’ I said.

  Once a still-grumbling Jane was deposited at school, and I’d fortunately received no phone calls from the school complaining about a lack of a Peter, suggesting that through some miracle he’d managed to disconnect himself from the online world and made it to the bus in time, I drove on to work.

  I do rather like my job. I worked bloody hard to get there and, as jobs go, I’ve had far worse. I’m good at what I do, plus I have a great team to work with, and – an important point that’s never mentioned in school careers talks – no one in my office has killer BO (it’s astonishing the effect on morale That Person can have).

  Our company seems to be full of complicated politics, though, and that side of things is a bit pants, with Shakespearean levels of intrigue and backstabbing over everything from who gets the better desk to who has the more comfortable office chair, and ridiculous levels of virtue signalling over what fucking brand of coffee to buy for the office. (‘This is Fairtrade’; ‘Yes, but this is Fairertrade’; ‘This one is grown by a co-operative of blind orangutans orphaned by the evil palm oil trade’; ‘But THIS one is grown by blind, ONE-LEGGED orangutans orphaned by NAZIS and palm oil’; ‘THIS one is grown by blind one-legged orphaned orangutans still traumatised by Dominic Cummings driving to the zoo where they lived, to taunt them about his SUPERIOR EYESIGHT.’ No one ever seems to make such a huge, show-offy fuss about tea, do they? It’s always the coffee drinkers carrying on.)

  If we could all be left alone to get on with our jobs, instead of being summoned to pointless meetings about bastarding coffee, we’d probably be a lot more productive. In fact, if certain people didn’t spend so much time wanking on about stuff that doesn’t have anything to do with what the company does do, just to make themselves look important, we probably wouldn’t have a threatened merger hanging over our heads, potentially risking all our jobs.

  I’d thought when I started at my current company that perhaps this would be the job that I found a passion for – it’s an achingly trendy technology company, with ‘thinking spaces’ where creative types draw on the walls (while drinking the hotly argued-over coffee) and have ‘blue sky moments’, whatever the fuck they are. I’m not achingly trendy, nor am I creative, and after years of child-rearing I have to bite my tongue to stop myself shouting at the hipster creatives in their braces and beards and too-short trousers that drawing on the walls is NAUGHTY and I’ll smack their bottom if they do that again. Mainly what stops me is that Daryl, who has the biggest beard and the shortest trousers, looks rather like he’d enjoy a spanking from a woman old enough to be his mother.

  Despite my normal-length trousers and the fact that I prefer to play Buzzword Bingo with my colleague Lydia while the creative sorts are whanging on about how, going forward, they’ll be reaching out to take ownership of the synergy outside the box and drilling down to circle back to make this happen in a transparent and diverse value-added paradigm, blah blah blah, wank wank wank, I’ve done rather well at this company. The short-trousered ones come up with things they want to make, and my team and I provide the software to make this happen. I’m in fact now the head of my department, which means that I get an office with a window (and the comfiest chair), and also means I’ll be the first one sacked if anything goes wrong.

  I’d be pretty devastated if I lost my job, actually, quite apart from the financial impact it would have. I try to tell myself that I have many transferable skills, and would easily find something else, but I’m forty-eight and I don’t want to start over at a new company where I don’t know that you mustn’t mention After Eights in front of Eric from Marketing because of an unfortunate incident at the Christmas party, and where I don’t know where the toilets are.

  Of course, if I got made redundant, perhaps it would be an opportunity to do something completely different. I like my job, but it would be wonderful to have a vocation, something you spring out of bed in the morning raring to go out there and do – something I love. I invented a very clever game app once that made me quite a lot of money – not retire-on money, but enough to make my finances less precarious, until I decided to get divorced, which made things a little rocky again. I’d thought that app invention might have been my vocation, but it turned out all the other ones I tried to invent were rubbish. But it would be nice to have the sort of job I could talk about at length at dinner parties and people would find hearing about it interesting. The trouble is, the older I get, it turns out that the things I love and that might be my vocation mainly seem to be watching rubbish TV, eating cake, sleeping, talking nonsense to my dogs, reading Jilly Cooper, and drinking wine, gin and vodka. I’ve tried and tried to see how I could turn any of these things into a vocation or a paying job, but so far I’ve not come up with anything.

  I’ve also tried to expand my hobbies, to see if perhaps I could find my calling that way. Mostly, I found that I really like Vesper Martinis, which not only make you feel very sophisticated when you’re drinking them, but are also an excellent drink choice for ladies who perhaps were not quite as vigilant with their pelvic floor exercises as they might have been. They’re very small, you see, but also extremely potent, so they get you extraordinarily pissed for a very little amount of liquid. Unfortunately, Hannah and I tested this theory to the max when she got a Saturday afternoon off from Little Edward and abandoned him to his father so that we could go out and be ladies what lunch, and we drank four of them after wine at lunch and then we couldn’t speak. Jane called me ‘disgraceful’ when I got home, and also ‘a shameful example’. In my defence, I never ever claimed to be a good example and always held to the theory that since I wouldn’t be a good example, I’d better stand as a terrible warning instead. Of course, on the Day of Shame with all the Vesper Martinis, I was quite unable to communicate this to Jane, being forced instead to mumble that it must’ve been something I ate, and that I needed a ‘lil lie-downy’.

  I’ve tried rather more adult ways to find my vocation as well. I always quite fancied being an archaeologist, and thought for a long time that perhaps that would have been my vocation if only I hadn’t done computer science at university to spite my mother, who thought it sounded like my course would be full of bespectacled boys in nylon anoraks and how would I ever find a decent husband on such a course, and who would want to marry someone doing such a male course? My mother thought I should do English Lit like nice girls do, and try to bag a law student early, or maybe a nice doctor. Secretly, of course, since I went to Edinburgh, where all the posh boys that don’t get into Oxford or Cambridge go (or they did before Prince William went to St Andrews), she was hoping I might manage to snag myself a title, but failing that, a lawyer or doctor would be acceptable. Or some nice chap who was going into the City. I don’t think it ever occurred to her that perhaps I was going to university to further my education and pursue a career. As far as she was concerned, the only possible reason for a woman to go to university was to find herself a rich husband, like she did.

  Since I’d been so unreasonable and clearly scuppered my chances with the lawyers and doctors by tainting myself by association with the beige-anorak brigade (who were actually perfectly nice and normal and didn’t wear beige anoraks at all), she was relieved I did at least manage to get myself an architect in the form of Simon, though I was annoyed at myself that to some degree I had followed my mother’s formula and met a nice boy at university and gone on to marry him. In my defence, I probably had a lot more casual sex with random blokes than my mother ever did in her day, and when I met Simon I was so utterly head over heels in love with him that getting married just seemed the natural next step, because of course we wanted to spend the rest of our lives together, so why wouldn’t we get married?

  I always had a hankering for archaeology, though, especially after it turned out that Simon and I wouldn’t be spending the rest of our lives together after all, and so I took part in a community dig in our village a couple of years ago.
It turned out that archaeology wasn’t my vocation. I’d thought it would involve careful sifting through priceless artefacts and then perhaps some Indiana Jones-style adventures with a rugged and dashing archaeology sort in a tweed jacket with leather patches on the elbows. I had a vague vision of myself with my hair in a prim bun, and some academic-looking spectacles, and at some point I’d take down my hair and remove my glasses, and the rugged and dashing sort would exclaim, ‘Why, Miss Green, you’re beautiful,’ and then we’d snog loads while fighting off the bad guys trying to steal our amulet or something.

  It wasn’t like that. There was a lot of mud. Archaeologists’ clothing turned out to tend much more towards sensible man-made fibres than tweed jackets, and even if there had been a rugged and dashing sort there, there would have been no snogging, since there were also twenty-five OAPs getting in the way and telling me off for using my trowel wrong. They made me draw pictures of stones. I don’t know why I had to draw the stones and we couldn’t just take a photograph. I suspect they made me draw the stones to give me something to do and stop my overenthusiastic trowelling, even though I don’t even see how you CAN trowel mud wrong. I lost a pencil and got told off. I did see a shrew, though, and I liked the shrew, and also I like my dogs, of course, and I have three chickens who only semi hate me, so then I wondered if maybe zoology was my calling, but I googled it and it turns out the top job for zoologists is not being David Attenborough but being a zoo keeper, which even I can guess probably involves dealing with a lot of poo, especially if you get the elephant or rhinoceros enclosures. So it was back to the drawing board again.

  Friday, 1 February

  So. We have a development. Margaret, who lives in the cottage down the road from me, put her house up for sale a few months ago, and when I popped in for a drink with her tonight, she told me it’s been sold.

  ‘To a nice, young, single fellow, my dear. He was very handsome when he came to view the house, and rather charming.’