Why Mummy Drinks Read online

  However, all this just makes it even more baffling as to why the devil she always seems to wriggle out of hosting Christmas at her house and wangles having it at mine. I would’ve thought Jess would’ve been in her element, being the Queen of Christmas, casually shrugging off her immaculately tasteful decorations as ‘nothing’ while dishing up a Heston Blumenthal-style feast, before berating us all to play charades while Persephone entertained us on the Baby Steinway. Oh God. What if Jess always refuses to do Christmas because my children are too awful to have in her perfect house? Maybe she would do Christmas if I offered to drug them or something?

  I am not caving in to Jessica that easily anyway, so I replied:

  Hi Jess,

  I’m not sure what our plans are yet, I’ll need to talk to Simon and get back to you.

  E xx

  Ha. She will get her own way in the end, she always does, but at least I will get to waste some of her Super Busy and Important time with vague emails. Which will make me feel like I am in some way getting back at her for that jibe about the scratchcards!

  FML. The thought of Christmas with Jessica is enough to make anyone turn to drink. Anyway, it’s nearly the weekend, so a tiny glass of wine is perfectly acceptable. The dog just gave me one of his looks and shook his head in a most disapproving manner. ‘Don’t you judge me,’ I told him. ‘You don’t have to deal with Jessica!’

  Friday, 13 November

  Friday the thirteenth. The unluckiest day of the year. I am not superstitious, but I think there might be something about Friday the thirteenth because this morning I got an email from Simon’s sister Louisa. Or rather, ‘Amaris’, as she recently announced she would now be known, which apparently means ‘Child of the Moon’.

  Louisa/Amaris and her husband Bardo run an ‘alternative spiritual retreat’ somewhere in the Highlands of Scotland. They share their retreat with an ever-increasing number of grubby children that Louisa/Amaris seems to pop out on a distressingly regular basis. I think last time I counted they were up to four.

  Louisa/Amaris’ email went like this:

  Namaste, Ellen,

  The Goddess has blessed us with another gift, who we have named Boreas. Bardo and I would like Boreas to meet the rest of the family and thought Christmas (or the Winter Solstice Feast, as we prefer to call it) would be the perfect time. We will be closing the retreat for this important occasion and we plan to arrive with you on 22 December. We can sleep in Gunnar (our camper van, it means ‘Bold Warrior’ – lol) if you don’t have room for us in the house, and then we don’t need to bother you, apart from for cooking and using the bathroom. We thought we’d head home around the 29th, to give you all lots of time to get to know Boreas. We are doing a digital detox for the next two weeks and so won’t be answering emails, so if I don’t hear from you by noon today I will assume that is OK!

  Peace and love,

  Amaris

  Sent at 11.52 a.m. Bitch!

  I am not entirely certain exactly what form of ‘spirituality’ Louisa/Amaris and Bardo (meaning ‘Son of the Earth’, formally known as Kevin) practice. They seem to have a vague pick’n’mix approach to Druidism, Wicca and Buddhism, all mixed in with a generous dollop of what can only be described as New Age Wank. All I am certain of is that they float through life with a general air of superiority towards Simon and I, enslaved as we are to ‘The Man’, which at least gives them something in common with Jessica, who also feels superior to Simon and I and our dull suburban life.

  At least Jessica and her children are clean. Louisa/Amaris and Bardo/Kevin and their eleventy billion children all look like they need a damn good scrub with a wire brush and a bottle of neat Dettol. I still have not recovered from their ‘wedding’, which was a Wiccan hand-fasting ceremony, which I’m not even sure is legal. Despite my misgivings, I gave it my all and I turned up to their big day in an adorable fascinator and my best LK Bennett shoes, doing my utmost to channel my inner Kate Middleton. The ceremony turned out to be in the woods. The woods were muddy and my heels pegged me nicely to the ground, so the happy couple and a wide assortment of grubby people dressed in baggy tie dye and chunky silver jewellery (some of which looked suspiciously similar to the artisan fanny necklaces), got to look on and snigger while Simon hauled me free. Worse, it was raining, so not only was my frou-frou fascinator fucked, but my mascara ran, which meant I soon looked as unwashed as everyone else.

  Louisa had recently sprogged and had generously kept and dried her placenta, which she had then ground up and invited us to sprinkle on our food if we wished. Until that point, I genuinely hadn’t thought that anything could have made Bardo’s ‘Lentil Surprise’ more unappetising, but after that culinary suggestion I couldn’t even bring myself to try a mouthful for fear of what the ‘surprise’ might be – Bardo’s scrotal scrapings perhaps? Simon kicked me repeatedly and told me to behave, after all, it was his sister’s wedding.

  Louisa used to be perfectly normal; she was a graphic designer at a big advertising agency and earned a decent amount of money. Then she met Bardo, who had once worked in the City but one day he suddenly had an ‘epiphany’ on the Circle Line, ‘And I just realised, man, what was I doing? I was like that train, just going round and round forever, and I knew something had to change, man.’ (Bardo seems to think he is some sort of 1960s’ hippy festival movie – ‘man’.) So he binned his job, sold his flat and went off to travel round India, which was where he found himself as Bardo. ‘So I built a fire on the beach, man, and I burnt everything that had belonged to Kevin, and I took this new name, and I left Kevin there.’ Basically, he got completely off his tits on drugs and set fire to all his stuff and we are supposed to somehow think this makes him deep and profound, instead of a pretentious tosser.

  Having found himself, Bardo decided it was time to come home and spread the message so that others could also find themselves. His decision to come back clearly had nothing to do with him having no clean pants or money, because he’d burnt it all. Actually, I have a horrible feeling Bardo probably doesn’t wear pants. Ew.

  Back in London, he met Louisa, who was always quite suggestible, and convinced her to step off the Circle Line too, and between the remains of the proceeds of Bardo’s flat and Louisa cashing in everything she owned as well, they buggered off to Scotland, where they bought 100 acres of scrubland on which they planned to be self-sufficient and run their retreat so that others too could see the unique light cast by Kevin’s pants burning on a beach.

  And now they have spawned again. Boreas. What sort of a name is Boreas? I can’t even be arsed to google it. I know Louisa will tell me at length what it means when I see her, which seems inevitable as I failed to answer her email in the brief window given before their ‘digital detox’. For that matter, what is a digital detox? I’m assuming it’s giving up all the horrid modern technologies, despite the fact that the few deluded souls who actually come to the retreat tend to book online. Maybe they’ve had their electricity cut off again, as using the last of their cash to install solar panels, in a wood, in the North of Scotland, wasn’t their most cunning move. It might’ve been okay if they had consented to cut down the trees around the panels, but apparently they couldn’t, because that would anger the Goddess.

  No doubt Simon or his parents will have to bail them out again if they’ve been cut off. I know I shouldn’t begrudge Simon giving Louisa money, she is his sister after all, but nonetheless I do begrudge it, because really there is absolutely no reason why Louisa and Bardo couldn’t go out and get ordinary jobs like everyone else. They are both well-educated and more than qualified for a range of jobs that would pay perfectly well, yet they choose to faff around with their alternative lifestyle, wasting what money they have on things like those stupid solar panels and then expecting the rest of us to finance their ridiculous ideas because they are on a Higher Plane to us and so can’t be expected to bother themselves with foolish mundanities like employment or money.

  Anyway, Boreas. Is that a boy or a
girl? Louisa has now had so many children that I can’t remember if I counted the Boreas bump when I thought there were four, or if Boreas is now number five. Either way, that is another present that will have to be bought, for Louisa to sigh pityingly over and explain why they only give presents knitted from organic yak pubes.

  I still haven’t told Simon about Jessica, and now I am going to have to tell him about Louisa too. Although he makes a lot of fuss about how close he and Louisa are, I know that secretly he much prefers it when she stays far away in Scotland with Beardo (Simon’s joke, not mine). Also, Jessica v. Louisa could get messy.

  FML, why is Christmas so complicated? Why are our families so complicated? Is everyone’s family like this? At least Simon’s parents have retired to France and show no signs of wanting to visit for Christmas, preferring to have their own pissed-up Joyeux Noël in their bijou chateau with various amusing neighbours, instead having the hordes of grandchildren to visit in the summer when they can be safely corralled outside in the pool.

  I really hope Louisa doesn’t bring her placenta …

  Saturday, 14 November

  FML. I forgot to do the online shop, so now we have no food, no loo roll (where does all the loo roll go? How can we go through so much bloody loo roll in a week? Are the children eating it? Do they smuggle it out of the house to sell in some kind of secret bog-roll black market? It is astonishing. Perhaps it is Simon who uses it all, as he is very proud of how much time he spends in the loo anyway) and worse, NO WINE!

  As Simon claimed he had some work to do this morning, due to him being so Very Busy And Important, I was forced to drag the children to the supermarket with me, which is vile at the best of times but even worse on a Saturday morning when you are likely to encounter the Coven ‘just popping in’ on their way home from their moppets’ new class in Ancient Greek Philosophy Taught In Mandarin, or the like.

  These encounters were doubly annoying this morning because for some reason there were many Red Label marked-down bargains to be had. I joyously filled my trolley with things like an enormous slab of topside of beef for £3.42 and fillet steaks for £2.54, delighted to think of the bounteous munificence my freezer would henceforth hold, instead of several bags of peas that have been repeatedly defrosted and refrozen due to being used as icepacks on Peter to thwart his ongoing attempts to end up in A&E again and have me reported to Social Services. The Coven judge the Red Label Love, and having spotted Perfect Lucy Atkinson’s Perfect Mummy and Fiona Montague lurking, a game of Supermarket Ninja had to be enacted, as we sidled around corners to check the aisles for them, before I charged up the aisle lobbing necessary items into the trolley at speed and hissing ‘Shut up, shut up, shut up’ at Jane as she asked in her loudest voice, ‘BUT WHY DON’T YOU WANT TO TALK TO LUCY’S MUMMY? DON’T YOU LIKE LUCY’S MUMMY? IS THAT WHY YOU SAID LUCY’S MUMMY WAS A TWAT YESTERDAY?’

  It was all to no avail, of course, for Lucy Atkinson AND her Perfect Mummy cornered us in the grains and pulses aisle, just as Peter was asking repeatedly what would happen if you kept holding farts in forever – ‘Would you explode? Would you? But what if you DID hold them in forever? But JUST SAY, Mummy, would you explode with blood and guts everywhere?’ – before he re-enacted what he thought exploding from held-in farts would look like.

  Lucy’s Mummy looked at us aghast as I hurled bags of quinoa into the trolley to cover the Red Label Love within and Peter writhed on the floor, making dramatic vomiting noises.

  ‘Gosh, Ellen, what an imagination he has,’ said Lucy’s Mummy, and then, peering at the lovely, middle-class quinoa, ‘Oh, how fun. You still eat quinoa. You should give the Carmargue red rice a try, sweetie, you’ll find it really helps with that bloating …’ And with that she sashayed off, Lucy walking demurely beside her (Sophie is right, her face is stupid), as I dragged Peter off the floor and replaced the quinoa on the shelf, because there is as much chance of getting Simon and the children to eat it as there is of getting Lucy’s Mummy to eat a Chicken Kiev sandwich (Peter’s current favourite meal – white bread only, obviously, and don’t try to fob him off with any of that half-and-half pretend white bread, he can smell the fibre). Also, I already have a perfectly good packet of quinoa in the cupboard. It may have expired in 2014, but it still counts.

  Further humiliation was awaiting at the till when the checkout lady looked at the number of wine bottles in my trolley, along with the litre of Export-strength gin, and chirpily asked, ‘Ooooh, having a party, are we?’ I should have just said yes, but instead all I could do was gesture at Peter and Jane, Peter now attempting to lick the conveyor belt and Jane wittering dementedly in a faux American accent as she doggedly recounted the entire plot of some appalling children’s TV show she is addicted to, and say ‘No. No, I am not.’

  Soul-destroying and hideous though the trip to the shop was, the game of Supermarket Ninja did at least finally remind me what the nagging sensation was that I had had for weeks about that clever notion I had had at the pub, before tequila shots wiped it from my addled brain. It had been Sam talking about dodging the Coven and the other Uber Mummies at the school gate and in the playground, and saying they were like ninjas. In a moment of genius, I mulled that perhaps there should be a computer game or app for mums about doing the school run and all the other parenting scenarios you find yourself in, in which you have to successfully negotiate them. Perhaps you could earn glasses of wine for each hazard you avoid, maybe progressing to gin as you move up through the levels. I could call it ‘Why Mummy Drinks’! It might even make a bit of money, and I could have the ruined sideboard professionally restored as a surprise for Simon. I may have finally had a Good Idea (which obviously deserves wine) …

  I dashed home from the supermarket to start working on my app straightaway, which so far has consisted of googling how much successful apps can make; gnashing my teeth at articles about twelve-year-olds selling their brilliant apps to corporate giants for billions and squillions of pounds; the discovery that Flappy Birds allegedly made $50,000 a DAY at its height (if you’ll pardon the pun); imagining what I would do with all that money (put it to better use than any spotty teenager ever could); choosing which Louboutin shoes I would buy with $50,000; working out how much $50,000 is in pounds; looking at the clock and wishing it was time for wine, and getting up every ten minutes to get someone a snack or shout at them to stop hitting each other. When I am rich beyond the dreams of avarice with my lovely app, I am so getting a nanny. Or at least an au pair.

  Wednesday, 18 November

  Jane was going to a friend’s house after school today, so in a fit of maternal optimism I thought it would be nice for Peter and I to spend some time together, bonding. We would go to a lovely café and he could have hot chocolate and I would have coffee and we would share a cake and chat about our days and it would totally be a special moment. Also, I could probably take a photo of him with his hot chocolate and put it on Facebook and tag it #happymemories so that people think I am a loving and functional parent and might envy my close relationship with my darling son.

  Things got off to a slightly sticky start when Peter point-blank refused to consider sharing a cake with me and demanded his own. He also took shameless advantage of my attempt to create a special moment and rejected hot chocolate and insisted on Coke. I knew deep down that I was going to regret that Coke, but in the end I caved, so that I looked like a nice mummy.

  Peter then proceeded to witter at me mercilessly about wretched Pokémon …

  ‘What is your favourite Pokémon, Mummy? Not that one. No, that’s a rubbish one. No, not Pikachu, everyone says Pikachu. Eevee should be your favourite, Eevee is a good one! Why isn’t Eevee your favourite? How haven’t you ever heard of Eevee? Just say Eevee is your favourite, okay?’

  Finally, worn down by all this I said, ‘Darling, do you think we could talk about something that isn’t Pokémon?’

  Peter looked blank for a moment, because talking about something that wasn’t Pokémon clearly did not com
pute. Eventually, he thought of something to say.

  ‘Who is the best Jedi, Mummy?’

  ‘The best Jedi? Oh that’s easy! Luke Skywalker, obviously.’

  Peter looked at me in horror. ‘NO, MUMMY! YODA is the best Jedi! Everyone knows Yoda is the best Jedi. How do you not even know that, Mummy? Why are you so stupid?’

  I remonstrated with Peter that he should not call people stupid, but he stuck to his guns and insisted that anyone who didn’t know that Yoda was the best Jedi was stupid and there was nothing he could do about it. He also wouldn’t let me take his picture, on the grounds that I was so stupid.

  Later, when Jane came home, he took great pleasure in telling her all about how I taken him out for cake, which was clearly proof that I loved him more, to which Jane retaliated by telling Peter that he was adopted. Much screaming then ensued from both of them as I attempted to persuade Peter that he was not adopted and Jane that I did not love Peter more than her, until I gave up and bribed them with iPads to go away and be quiet.

  Once they were in bed, I indignantly related the Yoda/Luke Skywalker conversation to Simon, and how outraged Peter had been, and how he really shouldn’t have called me stupid.

  Simon looked at me with the same expression Peter had and said, ‘But Ellen, Yoda is the best Jedi. Peter’s right, everybody knows that Yoda is the best Jedi, and if you don’t then you are stupid!’

  FFS. Fucking Jedi. Fucking Pokémon. Who knew that despite all my qualifications, I’m stupid, because I don’t know about that bollocks. I shall have a tiny glass of wine to numb the looming existential crisis that is threatening to engulf me due to my ignorance of foolish things. The dog needn’t give me any of his judgy looks tonight either, he looks like a Wookiee at the moment. See? I do know stuff about Star Wars.

  Saturday, 21 November

  Drinkypoopoos with Hannah and Sam. In a fit of Pollyanna-ish optimism it has occurred to me that if the Jenkins’ house has not sold by Christmas, Louisa and Bardo and four or possibly five small children living in a camper van on our driveway for a week should be more than enough to lower the price of their house to something Hannah can afford. The downside of this is that property prices in the street may never recover. I pointed this out to Hannah in an attempt to cheer her up, but she still maintains that she won’t be able to afford it, and refuses to even view it. This is selfish of her, because I would love a proper nosy round the Jenkins’ house – there is only so much you can glean from the photographs.