I don't currently have a high-flying professional job to manage on top of the school run, I can't afford a nanny, and my husband isn't a total dickwad prone to disappearing off go-karting or to stag dos every other weekend, but I can still relate all too painfully to so many of the situations featured. The smug yummy mummies in the Teabags cafe making you feel vastly inferior to their manicured nails, perfect hair, high-achieving children and expensive cars while you sit at the "toilet table" wondering if you'll ever sleep again... The child who erupts with norovirus two minutes before an important event... The disastrous birthday party... The lack of enthusiasm among parents for PTA events that don't involve alcohol... The inability of a mother to listen properly to anything anyone tells her... The obsession with parking permits...
Though I was impressed with the turnout for their PTA meeting. I think we need to start holding ours at Teabags. But look, we've made a cake book! Buy it, please!
I do have two criticisms though - if these are busy professional mummies, how come they have so much spare school daytime to spend in Teabags? And how are they able to nip out to the pub so easily in the evening? Is there a babysitter surplus in Queens Park? And would a character like Julia really have such a juvenile husband? More likely to have one she never sees because he is working late in the city every night. But I suppose that isn't funny for anyone, just true. Mind you, the desperate phonecalls to him wherever he has buggered off to are very funny, and remind me of Graham Linehan's other masterpiece, Father Ted, when Ted would ring his friend Father Larry Duff on his mobile phone, to calamitous results.
We were once invited to a five year old's swimming party, which also went a bit wrong. The pool was having some building work and all the plaster dust in the air triggered the fire alarm to go off halfway through our session, meaning we had to get out of the water and evacuate the building. It was June, and sunny, but York is cold all year round when you are in a swimsuit. The pool attendants handed out space blankets in tiny packets which took so long to unfold that the alarm had ended and we had all contracted hypothermia before we managed to wrap them round our children. Never mind - the parents of the birthday girl plied us all with fine French wine afterwards to apologise and served up an excellent barbecue. And while the changing room was a total stampede, at least I wasn't wearing a white designer jacket. Because I only own waterproofs to wear to meetings.
We also held a birthday party at home one year, on our daughter's request. She spent months planning all sorts of random impossible games with rules that only she understood and frequently changed. She designed a treasure hunt and pass the parcel featuring no end of shit plastic jewels she had found on the ground, stolen from playgroups, kept from crackers or persuaded me to buy in the charity shop. She insisted on a princess theme. I had planned to turf all the kids out to the woods at the end of our road, but of course on the day, two weeks of sunshine dissolved into pouring rain, so we had to keep them all cooped up in our lounge, high on sugar. No vomiting bug, but I had gone down with a stonking migraine three hours before the party, and while my vision had just about returned to normal I still felt like I had been hit by a bus. I didn't quite resort to the "throw them a quid and feed them undiluted squash" but it came close. This year we went to a pottery painting place instead and it was so much more civilised.
We don't have family anywhere near who could help with child care (or refuse to help with child care, as in Julia's case), although something miraculous happened this half-term. During a trip to the Lake District, our daughter was suddenly old enough to tolerate my dad babysitting her for a couple of hours in the day (there may have been a teeny bribe involved), so my husband and I went out for a Michelin-starred lunch in Grasmere (Dad had given us a Forest Side gift voucher for Christmas), while Dad and his partner took the girl to Hayes Garden World and The Rock Shop in Ambleside, which she thought was brilliant, and my dad was nice enough not to squirm about. My dad never took us to such places on our Lake District holidays - he dragged us up mountains instead. I thought I was young when I think about the hills I was tackling at my daughter's age (Skiddaw, Helvellyn in a Force 8 gale) but then my brother reminded me that he was three years younger and only survived these expeditions through a perpetual supply of Fox's Glacier Mints. We're lucky if we get our daughter round a pond without her whining. The youth of today, eh? Don't know they're born.
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| Forest Side lunch, Grasmere |
