Why Mummy Drinks Read online
Page 6
‘Do you remember the artisan fannies?’ sniggered Hannah. She has never forgiven me for the time I made her come to one of these parties with me, only for us to discover to our horror that the ‘designer’ mummy hosting the party had, for reasons known only to herself, decided to create an entire range of jewellery based on her own vagina, to celebrate its fecundity. Given the eye-watering price tags attached to the fanny jewellery (earrings, pendants, rings and bracelets!), her front bottom was extremely fecund indeed. However, all the raised eyebrows at the prices were dismissed with the retort that the jewellery was artisan and thus it was perfectly justifiable to charge the GDP of Luxembourg for a necklace with a sterling silver twat hanging from it. It appears that a similar justification is made in the local cafés, should anyone baulk at paying a tenner for a bacon sandwich; apparently this is quite an acceptable price, as the bacon is from a special pig that went to tap dancing lessons and enjoyed skydiving in its spare time or something.
I have never seen anyone look quite as appalled as Sam as Hannah explained about the fanny jewellery. He actually looked even more horrified than Simon (a man who cannot even utter the word ‘vagina’) had when I told him about it, but I suppose Simon was at least safe in the knowledge that no one is ever going to try to make him go to a jewellery party.
So horrified was Sam that he declared tequila to be a medical necessity to numb the horror of the thought that someone believed that making replicas of their own genitalia to sell to their friends was a good idea.
After a couple of tequilas, I couldn’t shake off the feeling that Sam had said something earlier which had given me an awfully good idea, but I couldn’t for the life of me remember what the clever idea was, except that it was quite astonishing in its great cleverness. That is the problem with tequila. Well, one of the problems with tequila.
Monday, 9 November
Blimey, we really must have annoyed the neighbours with our grenades and rocket launchers last week. The Jenkins across the road have put their house up for sale.
Of course, the first thing I did when I saw the sign was exactly what the rest of the street was doing at that moment, which was rushing off to look on Rightmove and frantically calculating if the asking price for the Jenkins’ house meant the value of our own houses had gone up or down since the last time someone moved. Then, of course, I had to look through all the photos and judge their décor, muttering things like ‘OMG, those curtains! What was she thinking?’ and ‘FFS, lazy slatterns, they could have put the lid of the loo down and hidden the bottles of cleaning stuff before the photo was taken.’
I do love Rightmove, it is so much easier than in the olden days when you had to ring up the estate agents and pretend you were actually interested in buying the house before you could stalk your neighbours. You can also nosy over dream houses you will never ever be able to afford – the sort of houses that you used to only be able to look at in the front pages of Country Life when you were at the dentist.
I got rather side-tracked this morning, though, and started coveting a wildly romantic Scottish tower house and a grimly brooding, Manderley-esque Cornish manor house. There was even a rather nice little Oxfordshire Queen Anne rectory that I could settle for at a push (actually, that one cost more than the Scottish tower and Cornish manor house combined). Anything other than my dull surburban villa.
All this sighing over dream houses meant that I suddenly realised it was 8.45 a.m. and I hadn’t even begun the lengthy process of repeatedly shouting ‘SHOES ON, ARE YOU READY? WE ARE LEAVING NOW! HAVE YOU GOT YOUR SHOES ON? WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU DOING? JUST PUT YOUR BLOODY SHOES ON! NOW! WE ARE GOING NOW! IF YOU ARE NOT READY, I WILL LEAVE YOU HERE! NO, I DIDN’T MEAN IT; NO, IT’S NOT A JOLLY GOOD IDEA! JUST PUT YOUR SHOES ON, I CAN’T LEAVE YOU HERE, IT’S ILLEGAL!’
All of this seems to be the ritual chant to enable the children to leave the house in the morning, and so without it we were late for school, which resulted in knowing looks amongst the Coven gathered chatting at the school gate in their yoga kits, clutching their little Costa cups of soya decaff skinny latte with an extra shot of smugness. Seriously, who has time to stop and get a cup of takeaway coffee on the way to school? Why don’t they just drink coffee in their own houses before they leave like normal people? Is it just to show off that they are sooooo super organised they can leave the house with an extra twenty minutes to spare (probably because their nannies got the children ready) and are rich enough to pay £3+ for a tiny cup of coffee?
Of course, I was then late for work, so I had no time to buy a scratchcard on the way to attempt to make my Dream House dream come true (because scratchcards are obviously a far better investment than £3 cups of coffee. I’m so Jeremy Kyle sometimes, I’ll be going to Tesco in my pyjamas next).
Luckily no one noticed I was late, so I was able to nip out at lunchtime and get a scratchcard then (okay, five scratchcards), none of which won. I don’t know why I am still so surprised when scratchcards fail to provide the fortune I am eternally hoping for, as I have never, ever won more than £1 on one, which obviously I promptly ‘reinvested’ by buying another card.
I should know by now that I never win anything, whether it is on scratchcards, raffles or even tombolas. The sum extent of my raffle wins are a furry tissue-box cover in the shape of a dog, which I won when I was seven, and, more recently, a turnip. A. Turnip. Who even puts a bloody turnip into a raffle at a school fete anyway? I was very upset about the turnip, as I feared winning it had used up the whole lifetime’s worth of luck that I had accumulated by never winning anything, but on reflection, I decided that there could be fewer things more unlucky than winning a turnip, so therefore my luck was intact, ready to all be squandered on one big win, probably on a scratchcard, as I like the instant gratification and can’t be arsed with waiting for lottery draws.
Since my scratchcard failings meant my latest property porn dream had been crushed and I wasn’t about to move to my dream house, I rang Hannah instead and told her of my new Very Good Idea, which is that rather than trying to buy Dan out of their house, she should just sell up and buy the Jenkins’ house and come and live across the road from me. She was a bit dubious about this plan, as she was unconvinced that she would be able to afford it, once Dan had taken his cut and the lawyers had been paid, but I pointed out that after Fireworks-gate it will be easy for us to continue with the anti-social behaviour and thus successfully manage to lower the house prices in the street. I could get Simon a string vest and chuck some empty cans of Special Brew in the garden. We would have to return to being middle-class once Hannah moved in, of course, so we didn’t affect prices too much (i.e. the price of our own house).
I should adore Hannah to live across the street; we could pop in and out of each other’s houses for a glass of wine in the evenings instead of meeting up once a month if we are lucky, having carefully synced childcare/children’s activities, etc., to let us out of the house, at which point we tend to be so excited to see each other and be out that we generally end up getting hammered.
Instead, we would sit at each other’s scrubbed kitchen tables and laugh merrily, while throwing together effortlessly delicious and wholesome suppers that everyone would eat without complaining. I have attempted to pursue this vision with the odd neighbour that I thought might be a kindred spirit, but so far they have all proved sadly disappointing and say things like ‘Oh no, no wine for me, it’s Tuesday’, or ‘Sorry, I’m doing Slimming World – do you know how many “syns” are in wine?’ I have rubbish neighbours. I need better ones. Like Hannah.
This afternoon, all the managers were out of the office doing something managerial like team building, so I spent the time browsing further on Rightmove under the guise of ‘research’ to demonstrate to Hannah why her buying the Jenkins’ house makes perfect financial sense. The good thing about being in IT at an untechnical company is that everyone is afraid of computers, so no one has the slightest idea how long anything should take. This means I actually ge
t to doss about quite a lot, as I can convince people that a job that will take me about two hours will actually take two weeks, but at a push, just for them, I might be able to do it in ten days. Then, if I am feeling magnanimous, I might even deliver it in a week, so everyone thinks I am a genius superstar when actually I spend most of my time shopping online and reading celebrity gossip forums.
Being so very cunning at my job also means they let me work from 9.30 a.m. to 3 p.m., and I have every second Wednesday off. These perks almost make up for all the times at parties when people ask what I do and I say I work in IT and you can see their eyes glazing over before I have even got the ‘T’ out. However, I do live in fear that one day they might decide I am clearly horribly overworked and get someone else in to help me, which would be fine if it was a like-minded lazy bastard but I would be completely buggered if the worst happened and they employed someone with an actual work ethic.
Thursday, 12 November
AAARRRRRRGHHHHHH. The Christmas emails have begun. IT IS NOT CHRISTMAS UNTIL DECEMBER! Why are my stupid family doing this to me? In fairness, I suppose at least by waiting until November they have heeded my mega meltdown last year when they started sending them in August and I told them all to fuck off and die, they were RUINING THE MAGIC OF CHRISTMAS.
The first email arrived this morning from my smuggety-smug-smug-pants, super-clever, corporate-fat-cat, rich-as-Croesus, practically-perfect-in-every-way sister Jessica:
Hi Ellen,
Just thinking about what we are going to do for Christmas, with Mum and Geoffrey on their cruise, and Dad and Caroline going to her children. I know it’s my turn to have everyone to mine, but I’m just totally snowed under at work and there is no way I have time to host Christmas, sorry.
So what I thought might be nice was if we all went away somewhere together – have a look at Ferraton Hall, it’s a gorgeous country house hotel and they’re doing an amazing deal over Christmas, two nights for only £500 per person, and they’ll do Christmas dinner for £75 a head as well (plus wine), but we’ll have to book now, they’ve only got space because they’ve had a cancellation.
Also, if we went there, we could just get each other treatments in their spa as Christmas presents, there is a list on the website.
Best wishes,
Jessica
What the actual fuck?
A) My own mother is buggering off with my stepfather on a cruise over Christmas and hasn’t bothered to tell me. When was she going to do that?
B) Okay, fair enough, I knew Dad would be going to stay with his wife’s children because it’s their turn to have them for Christmas, but I still feel vaguely huffy and like he loves his ‘new family’ more than us, even though I was twenty-nine when he married Caroline. I sort of want to stamp my feet and shout ‘BUT HE’S MYYYYYYYYYY DADDY, NOT YOURS!’
And most of all, C) £500 each to stay, plus £75 a head for Christmas dinner? Just because my darling sister likes to modestly protest that she doesn’t quite earn seven figures (thus hinting that she is not far off it) she expects us to shell out £2,300 before I’ve even bought a present, because she is too bloody busy to host Christmas. She knows perfectly well that we just don’t have that sort of money to spend on two nights in a hotel, and also Peter and Jane are not quite like her perfect moppets Persephone and Gulliver (so-named because ‘we just wanted something classic and yet unusual’), and are likely to run amok, either smashing or stealing the tasteful antiques that such hotels tend to have scattered about. Also, what sort of cold-hearted witch ends their emails to their own sister with ‘Best wishes’? It’ll be ‘Kind regards’ next, you mark my words.
I emailed back:
Hi Jess,
Hotel looks fab, but bit on the pricey side for us at the moment, sorry.
E xxx
Bing! For someone who is too busy to think about ordering a Christmas dinner online from M&S, she is pretty quick off the mark to reply to emails about it.
Hi Ellen,
That’s such a shame about the hotel, it looked so nice – I hope you’re not still wasting money on scratchcards, ha ha.
Persephone and Gulliver are so looking forward to seeing their cousins at Christmas, and it is a time for family, after all. Maybe if you don’t want to go to Ferraton Hall we could come to you for Christmas Day? I know it is my turn, so I wouldn’t be expecting you to do all the work. I will bring the Christmas pudding.
Best wishes,
Jessica
And she’s done it again. Somehow, she has guilt-tripped me into hosting Christmas, and in the space of two sentences turned it into a fait accompli – ‘I will bring the Christmas pudding’ – before I have even agreed to them coming here. Apparently because it’s ‘a time for family’, when even our own parents can’t be arsed with us! There will be no escaping Jessica’s decree that we are to spend Christmas as a family by pointing out our absentee mental parentals, though, she will just reply that that is all more the more reason for us to spend it together.
Of course, all the children are a year older now, so surely it will be more civilised? Last Christmas Peter and Jane had eaten an entire selection box each for breakfast by the time Jessica and her almost mute husband Neil arrived (they have been married for fifteen years and I still don’t know whether Neil does not speak because he hates us or because he is too scared of Jessica to voice an opinion, or whether he is just rendered dumb with horror by the chaos of my house and the feralness of my children. Either way, he tends to sit in gloomy silence, responding only to direct questions by mumbling, ‘No, I’m fine, thanks, yes thanks, I’m fine’, while occasionally twitching).
Persephone and Gulliver had received tasteful, quiet and ethical gifts from their parents, whereas Peter and Jane had mainly received noisy, annoying computer games from us, which they were attempting to play at the same time as hurling themselves around the house like sugar-crazed fiends.
Persephone had written a composition for the piano as her present to everyone and demanded to play it as soon as she arrived, which meant she was crying within ten minutes of setting foot in the door, because apparently our rather rickety upright piano that came courtesy of Gumtree was not of the same standard as the piano that she was used to playing, and also Peter and Jane wouldn’t turn off the PlayStation during her recital. Then when Simon forcibly wrestled the controls from their hands, they made up words to Persephone’s song which went along the lines of ‘Persephone is a poo face, a stupid, stupid poo face’ and Jessica’s mouth got so like a cat’s bum that I thought her whole head was actually going to turn itself inside out, which really beggars the question why she even wants to come to us for Christmas?
I did once ask her why she is so set on us always spending Christmas together, and she looked surprised and said, ‘I just want our children to have the same sort of magical Christmases that we had – you know, everyone together, the big family meal, the games and traditions. Not like it was … afterwards.’
I think Jessica might have got the Christmases of our childhood muddled up with a John Lewis advert, as my recollections are of Mum swearing behind closed doors because Granny (Dad’s mum) was being a complete bitch to her, while she tried to beat the lumps out of the packet stuffing and neck enough gin to numb her to Granny’s comments about her weight. Dad would snatch any toys involving batteries from Jess and me because clearly we couldn’t be trusted to put the batteries in by ourselves and so he would have to ‘set them up’, by which he meant play with them himself, while we whined to have them back. Mum having failed in her wifely duty to provide him with a son and heir, furnishing only two feeble girl children instead, meant that Jess and I got a lot of battery operated presents like train sets and car racing tracks, which were clearly destined for his non-existent sons.
By lunchtime Mum would be on the verge of a nervous breakdown and would burst into tears halfway through eating the Christmas pudding because she had only just remembered about the stuffing she had left in the oven and which
was now incinerated. By the time we got to the Queen’s Speech, which Granny insisted on watching, no one would be speaking to each other. At about 6 p.m., despite no one ever wanting to see any food ever again, Mum would make a martyred performance of laying out the ‘Christmas Tea’, consisting of various leftovers fashioned into sandwiches and, for some inexplicable reason, quantities of pickled beetroot. Mum would then shout at us all until we ate a turkey sandwich and a mince pie, and only then would we be permitted the high point of the day, which was to watch the EastEnders Christmas Special.
To be fair, the ‘Afterwards’ Christmases do actually make those Christmases look quite rosy – ‘Afterwards’ being the years after Dad got caught shagging his secretary and Mum kicked him out. ‘Afterwards’ Christmases were always accompanied by a nagging guilt about whichever parent we weren’t with, despite the bright assurances from them that they would be absolutely fine, and not to worry about them.
Poor Jessica. I shouldn’t be so mean about her. Even before ‘Afterwards’ she was always the perfectionist, trying desperately to shape Christmas into the ideal she had in her head – distracting Granny from her spiteful remarks with games of Trivial Pursuit (though part of me still suspects she always picked Trivial Pursuit to show off how clever she was), and valiantly stuffing down mince pies in an attempt to stop Mum storming out of the room while shrieking she didn’t know why she bloody bothered. I still remember the first ‘Afterwards’ Christmas, when we went to stay with Dad, and at teatime on Christmas Day Jess produced the jar of pickled beetroot she had bought especially on her way home from school, in an effort to make Christmas seem more like ‘Before’.