Girlfriends

This is painting by numbers for menopausal ladies - 1: Hot flushes, 2: Senior Moments, 3: Grey hair,  4: Wrinkles,  5: Divorce, 6: Grandchildren, 7: Wayward Children, 8: Musing on What Might Have Been, leading to 9: Trying to Recapture A Misspent Youth and 10: Feeling Old, possibly leading to 11: Being Told You Are Too Old by the New Bright Young Thing On The Block. Just splash on the concealer liberally then forget to rub it in.

Disclaimer: most of this was written after the first two episodes, so it's now kind of out of date. Arse. Been busy.

There has been obvious dumbing down for the anticipated ITV audience. "This is what sexism means." "This is what ageism means." "This is what being gay means." "This is how gay people have children... Yes, they CAN do that." "Here is a view of York Minster just in case you didn't hear the word York. Because yes, we are in York." Poor Kay Mellor - I would love to see what she originally wrote, because I know she can do things (like Love, Lies And Records) slightly more subtly than this.

Minster view

But despite all the cliches making my eyes roll, it does have a brilliant cast, who make light work (albeit with slightly randomised northern accents) of a plodding, inconsistent and stating-the-obvious script that is really trying to fit an awful lot in to a one-hour slot. Miranda Richardson plays Sue, Zoe Wanamaker is Gail, and Phyllis Logan is Linda. And that homeless bloke from Rev. plays Micky, who gets killed off in the opening moments, leaving questions unanswered other than "How desperate for a stage career must you be to take a job in the  P&O Ferries cabaret?" I know this was technically meant to be a swanky cruise ship, but I don't think they sail from Hull. Anyway, over his cabin balcony Micky goes - the perils of the North Sea. But did he jump, did he fall or was he pushed? The family, the insurance company and the police all need to know, as Micky seems to have left a trail of debt and a mystery woman behind him. His rapid drunken demise struck me as rather a waste of another fine actor, which makes me wonder if he shall return to haunt the leading ladies. (Ah, yes - just watched episode three...)

On the real North Sea you only get a porthole in your cabin, never a balcony

Trust me, it's the only way to get through the kids Disney cabaret...

The other burning question is how do they manage to get from Leeds to York and back again so quickly? Sue is the only one who seems to have a decent car, and she crashes that outside the sexual health clinic on Monkgate quite early on, before parking it illegally at the bottom of Stonegate. Unless it's by committing further traffic offences, how are they so immune to the daily jams that block the A64? (Them and the taxi drivers Sue uses after she finally gets her car towed.)

And it's not just the driving that has poor continuity - so do the characters. And you can spot this even if you don't live in York. Sue's seemingly supportive, content and carefree son suddenly turns on her at her birthday party to unleash a load of repressed issues that he blames entirely on her. Sue's total shit of a boss and part-time lover John tells her she is a waste of space and needs to move out of her penthouse (in response to which she throws a jug of mojitos over him in the Cosy Club on Fossgate), but he is then surprised to find her packing her bags in the flat the following morning. And she, oddly, seems pleased to see him, albeit briefly. Until the estate agent turns up.

Sue is features editor for the bridal magazine John owns, until he sacks her (or rather offers her a euphemistic "consultancy role") because she wrote an article about second marriages, which he claims doesn't build on the hopeful dream of marriage that the youth of today still have. They only want to think about first time around, not the possibility of second.

Yet all around Sue are middle-aged women looking for love. Herself included, though she seems to have finally dumped John, who doesn't want to know their son. Gail hankers after her ex, a driving instructor who (bit of a running theme here) hates her son. Micky's mystery lady was clearly after something. (Ah - episode three: turns out she's just bonkers and kills cats for fun.) Sue's mum is getting married to her long-term partner. However, Sue's stance against ageism doesn't extend to her own mother when she hears this. "Gross", Sue snips dismissively.

Sue should set up her own bridal magazine for the ladies of a certain age that she has become - it sounds like a good money spinner. (Episode four, maybe?) After all, tastes change within the same dream. Strapless skinny bridal gowns just don't sit right on someone over 40. Plus you have different priorities as you age. For example, I am now much more interested in articles about switching child trust funds to Junior ISAs in Woman and Home than ones guaranteeing orgasms in Cosmopolitan.

Sue's magazine just needs a honeymoon travel section with articles about Thailand so that Gail's son can mug up a bit more the next time he comes out of prison pretending to have been running a timeshare business "somewhere in the middle bit". That's if he gets let out again, having overshot his curfew by having sex with Linda's daughter. (Oh, there he is on the sofa in episode three - that was a quick spell inside.)

I am not sure how things will pan out. Who is telling the truth, Linda or mystery dress agency woman? (Ah, it's Linda - episode three.) Will lollipop lady Gail help the love of her life to cross the road, or will she go back to the ex before the decree nisi becomes absolute? Will Sue be allowed to babysit for the house of gay couples or is there just too much gin around for her to be trusted? Will Andrew get his anti-ageism day in court with "doesn't want to know" dad John? Will the ladies reform the band that protested at Greenham and performed at Linda and Micky's wedding? Will Gail's mother make another run for Scarborough in her nightie? Will Linda ever understand financial matters? Will Linda and Sue perform Morecambe and Wise sketches in bed? Will Gail get rid of her grandson's nits? (Oh, he got kidnapped in episode three.)

My husband works very near to the Trinity Centre in Leeds, and we've often been there for lunch with our daughter, sadly to overpriced but reliably child friendly chains rather than the pop-up street food that put the shopping mall on the map. Trinity also has several familiar clothes stores, an Everyman cinema, a Lego shop that we do our best to avoid and a glass roof that turns the whole place into a furnace in summer. The three girlfriends are spotted walking through Trinity on their way between the spa that serves the green sludge and the rooftop bar that serves the birthday cocktails, though where that actually is I have no idea.

Trinity, Leeds (Photo: David O'Brien)

I have been with my "girlfriends" a couple of times to the Cosy Club on Fossgate, where Sue makes the "scene" with the mojitos. We got free prosecco on one visit because they were slow to bring out our mains. We'd been so busy nattering that we hadn't even noticed how long our food was taking - but the waiter turned up with a bottle to apologise before we did. My kind of guy.

Strictly Come Dancing

Can you believe that we were Strictly novices in our house? Apart from the "my dad nearly being on TV with Len Goodman and Ann Widdecombe" incident, we'd never really encountered it. In our life B.C. (before child) we probably (though not necessarily) had more exciting things to do on a Saturday night than watch telly. In our P.C. (post child) life, during which we watch far too much telly, Strictly always clashed with child bedtime - bath, stories, cuddles, faffing, not going to sleep - so we could never sit down and give it a go.

But suddenly here we were as a family all willingly watching a TV series together for the first time. It wasn't Netflix or CBBC just being on and annoying in the background while our daughter played with her toys and we slightly more surreptitiously played on our phones. We were all focused and keen and - after a while - obsessed. It started when our daughter heard about Aston and Janette's Trolls dance from a friend at school and asked to watch it on iPlayer. Johnnie Peacock had already piqued Mummy and Daddy's interest in Strictly during an interview on The Last Leg. Then our daughter completely fell in love with him, and we just had to carry on watching. I couldn't be prouder of her first crush, which at one point I was worried would end up being Chase from Paw Patrol. If she brings home nice young men like Johnnie (or nice young women like Oti) in her future years, then all will be happy in our household. Just not so keen on the Alsatians.

I think our daughter's motivation was partly that it meant she could stay up late and postpone her bedtime faffing on both Saturday and Sunday nights. But how joyful it is watching people learning to dance. And how unexpectedly good some people turn out to be. Like Joe, who eventually won. And Davood. Susan Calman quickstepping with Kevin to Bring Me Sunshine was a personal highlight. Obviously the best dancers were the ones who had already had plenty of training and experience like Alexandra and Debbie, but I can see why they are the ones who struggle to get the votes at times - it's a very British thing to support the underdog.

Now we realise just how much we have missed over the years - all of Bruce Forsyth's, Len Goodman's, Ed Balls', John Sergeant's, Judy Murray's and yes, even Ann Widdecombe's appearances.

The timing of our new family obsession was perfect, as our daughter then got the part of a judge in her school play, Lights Camel Action!, which was a sort of Strictly: The Nativity. She played the Innkeeper's Wife, with lines like: "Never mind a bucket of frogs - it was fun, fresh and funky!" and "I loved the bells and watching all you young men leaping around!" Miraculously she learned them all perfectly. The teachers made her watch extra Strictly in class so she could channel her inner Darcey Bussell a little more effectively.

Though with essence of Craig at times...

Of course Caesar had all the best lines, darlings. The aforementioned bucket of frogs on the camel funk: "Legs, humps and hooves all flying around with no sense of timing." On the tango: "That had all the passion of a wet fish in a paper bag." But he did love the "extension in the arms" in the Angels' Ballet, and as for the Disco Star: "Give me big hair and some glitter and I'm away... "

It was a fun show and the teachers made their own Strictly dance video to show to parents at the end. So nice to see them still with smiles on their faces after the most interminable of terms.

Our daughter cried when Johnnie had to go home, insisting that Debbie should have been made to hop on one leg in the dance-off to make it more equal. She kind of had a point, but Johnnie was happy that the judges had made no allowances for his disability. Craig didn't like Johnnie's bum sticking out, and that was that.

The Miniaturist

Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam

The Miniaturist is a slightly odd book. My overriding memory is lots of people wandering around crying "sell the sugar!". But there's also hypocritical Puritanism, gay and extra-marital sex, spooky prophecy, childbirth, drowning, racial tolerance and intolerance, and a woman wandering around Amsterdam with a surprising amount of freedom and feistiness considering the repressive age in which she is living. (I have no issue with women being free or feisty; I'm just questioning the historical accuracy of the book's representation of a wife's lot in the Dutch 1680s.)

But I did enjoy the television adaptation. It looked stunning, with the darkness of a Rembrandt gathering but the brightly coloured dresses of a Vermeer portrait. The performances were beguiling and the plot utterly absorbing, right from the opening moments. The programme began not with the sinister and tragic church funeral of the book, but with the beautiful Nella sailing past windmills on the way to her new marital home on Amsterdam's Herengracht, full of hope and expectation.

Zaanse Schans

Of course it all then goes horribly wrong. Nella's merchant husband Johannes Brandt is often physically absent and unwilling to engage in any form of passion when he is around. His sister Marin rules the roost with pious coldness. Nella's companion parakeet escapes. Nella then discovers that her husband only has sexual feelings for men, one of whom turns up to murder the family dog. The Brandts' African servant Otto stabs him in self-defence. The owners of the sugar that the Brandts are supposed to be selling, the Meermans, spot Johannes and the dog murderer in a tryst at the docks and report him to the authorities. The dog murderer claims he was attacked by Johannes and that his stab wound proves it. Nella then discovers that Marin is pregnant, and not emotionless at all. Far from it, in fact. Nella believes that the father is Frans Meerman, who had been romantically involved with Marin in her youth. But the father's identity is only revealed once the baby is born with dark skin. Sadly, Marin does not survive the birth's complications. Johannes is sentenced to death by drowning by the court. Otto witnesses this vile punishment and returns to the Brandt house to meet his new daughter and to grieve. 

And all of this is somehow foreseen by the Miniaturist. Johannes gives Nella a cabinet replica of their house as a wedding present, and she seeks someone to furnish it. From Smit's List, the Amsterdam equivalent of the Yellow Pages at the time, she locates a woman who lives at the "Sign of the Sun". Nella requests that she make items like a lute and a box of marzipan, but instead the Miniaturist delivers a child's cradle, calligraphed cryptic messages on folded scraps of paper, and accurate doll figures of everyone in and involved with the family. And there's more - the figure of the family dog acquires a drop of blood shortly before he is murdered. A tiny sugar cone grows mould just as some of the ones in the warehouse are discovered to be rotting in the damp.

Nella and the Miniaturist did meet briefly on screen at the end, which they don't as far as I recall in the book. This was an attempt to solve some of the mysteries of the text, but we still didn't get all the answers we seek. Just how does the Miniaturist of the title know so much about the families she makes things for? How does she predict the future? Where did she come from, and where does she go? 

And what will become of Nella, Otto and Cornelia and baby Thea after the deaths of Johannes and Marin? How can they make a success of the family firm with such scandal behind them? Will they ever sell that sugar?  

One of the mouldy sugar cones made it to the Castle Museum in York

The Dutch scenes were filmed in Leiden, rather than Amsterdam, which makes sense, since Amsterdam is far too busy to be a practical shoot location. You are not really going to get that authentic 17th century feel with hoards of Japanese tourists sailing past in glass Lovers canal cruiseboats and all those distracting shop windows in the seedier parts of town, which bring a whole new meaning to "sign of the Sun". The gabled houses are lower in Leiden, but it's such a wonderful city. We spent a couple of holidays camping in nearby Rijnsburg, and loved popping over to stroll along Leiden's waterways, take a boat trip, explore the not insignificant museums, visit the windmills and botanical gardens, or just shop at the Saturday market for cheese, stroopwafel and kibbeling before lunching at one of the many floating cafes along the canals.

Lower gables than Amsterdam

Lovely Leiden

We went back to Amsterdam this summer, while staying with a friend and former colleague of mine in Beverwijk, which is how I finally got to see Nella Oortman's dolls' house in the place that inspired Jessie Burton to write the story. It was the rainiest day imaginable (thankfully the only one in an otherwise glorious week), and the Rijksmuseum was the fourth we had visited that day because it was impossible to do anything outside. We bought annual museum passes which saved us hours of queuing in the deluge. Our return to science centre Nemo had gone down well:

But the Van Gogh Museum and the Stedelijk less so with our six-year-old philistine. Moan, moan, moan.

Officially "the worst museum in the world"

Mondrian art appreciation

So the Rijksmuseum was seriously pushing our luck, even with a promise of pancakes at the end of it. Which possibly explains why our daughter was prepared to give us a maximum of 20 minutes to see the whole museum. And why the snaps of the dolls houses are very blurry - blink and we would have missed them as we hurtled past.

We also managed to catch glimpses of The Night Watch and the Milkmaid, which have now merged in my mind into images of the Brandt house from this superlative televisual feast. Thankfully the girl was safely in bed during the broadcast so I could watch it with all the time in the world. Nice work, BBC.

A House Through Time

Have you ever wondered about all the people who lived in your house before you? Who they were, what they did, how long they were there? You may of course already know the answers - you may live in a relatively new house that's only had one set of previous owners (like the house I spent most of my childhood in), or in a house that has been in the same family for generations (like my dad's house in the Lake District, which was first lived in by my great, great grandfather). But generally, it's information a lot of us don't have.

Ours for generations

If you've bought your house, you will normally have met the previous owners to you, though not necessarily. The owner may already have moved out or be an absentee landlord, or the house may be a probate sale owing to its occupant's demise. There may be neighbours around to fill in some of the gaps in information, depending on the friendliness of your street. But however much or little you know about your house's previous occupants, everyone who has lived there before you will have left their mark somehow - their choice of bathroom or kitchen, a scrap of wallpaper several layers below yours, a wall built or knocked down, a forgotten box in the loft, a bush in the garden. Their ghosts live on, though not necessarily in a supernatural sense. For unless you completely gut the place, it will never feel entirely yours.

A House Through Time, written and presented by social historian David Olusoga, aims to chart the history of a single house, 62 Falkner Street in Liverpool, from its first occupants to the present day. He has gleaned information from archived documents and newspapers. It's an approach a bit like the one used in Who Do You Think You Are?, only without the celebrity starting point. Our starting point is instead a picture of fields, owned by the farmer after whom the street is subsequently named (though with a misspelling). The house was built in 1840, and was originally number 58, its number increasing to 62 as more houses were built piecemeal onto the road. Nowadays, it's a strikingly substantial Georgian-style (because technically it's Victorian) terraced property in what looks like a highly desirable part of town. It may have since lost a lot of its original features and fireplaces, but back in the day it had a drawing room, a maid, bespoke furniture, the works. The house was bought for around £1,000 by its first owner, Richard Glenton - a seemingly lazy and unambitious clerk in the Liverpool docks, which were then at their height. Glenton had lodgers to help him pay the bills on his meagre £50 annual income - the rest of his apparently lavish lifestyle being funded by the "bank of Dad"; a dad who had also got him his clerk's post in an extraordinary level of nepotism apparently quite normal for the time. Once Dad died, leaving his fortune to Richard's unmarried sister, Richard had to sell up and find himself a more humble abode. He sold the house to a couple called the Orrs, who had been in service but ended up the equivalent of millionaires in today's money. The husband, a former butler, worked long hours as the manager of the "newsroom" at an exclusive gentleman's club, overhearing conversations which enabled him to make shrewd financial investments.

Then the house was owned by Wilfred Steele, a cotton trader who experienced every extreme imaginable in his short life. Boom, bust, battle. He lost two young sons and ended up in a debtor's gaol, yet abandoned two stepdaughters to a miserable fate in a Liverpool workhouse. He benefited from slavery but fought in the American war against it, though the latter was probably for the money rather than the morality of the issue. David Olusoga quite understandably did not take kindly to this man, although many of the facts were speculative rather than pure.

I am very much looking forward to the next instalment. And the programme makes me want to find out more about our house in York. It was built around 1910, and for many of its recent years was a student rental property, before being sold to our vendors, who did a lot of crazy renovations, the majority of which we have had neither the luck, skill nor money to undo. We met said previous owners once - they were both academics, and like us, had moved to York from Crouch End in London, which seemed like a good omen. They spent the three months between us viewing the property and completing the sale chain-smoking and cooking greasy dinners, the aromas resulting from which it took us about ten months to eradicate. We never quite got rid of the dirt.

Edinburgh nights with Walter Scott

Our house has a name, Waverley, etched into the glass above the front door. But I have no idea when this was done or why. None of the other houses on the terrace have a name, though they all have the same Victorian tiled hallway floor. Was it Waverley after the Walter Scott novel, the steamship on the Clyde, or the great station at Edinburgh? I do know that the house was already called Waverley 50 years ago, since by chance last summer I met another previous owner. She happened to walk past when I was sitting on our new bench outside in the front yard and stopped to chat. She had bought the house with her husband but when they had two young children found it as impractical as we had with our young toddler, with its steep stairs, narrow rooms and deep draughts. They, unlike us, had got their act together and traded it in for a 1930s semi with a garden a few streets away. Their legacy was to remove a picture etched onto the glass behind the word Waverley, to knock the kitchen through into the toilet outhouse to create a downstairs bathroom, and to board out a storage area under the eaves to install a train set, where we now keep our suitcases and cat carrier.

The place I sit to learn about our house

Another previous resident turned up mildly stoned on our doorstep one night to say he liked what we had done to the front yard, since it was just a hole in the ground when he lived there. I am not even sure if he had the right house or why he had felt so compelled to knock on the door, though the story of the giant hole makes me wonder if there are more to the suspiciously diagonal cracks in our walls than my husband will ever believe.

And then there is the story of a certain school administrator who I discovered had a boyfriend who still lived with his parents in our house many years ago. "Ooh, the fun I've had in your lounge!" she merrily told me. Our lounge was his bedroom, as the family rented out the top of the house to lodgers working on the railway. I've never quite felt the same about the four walls surrounding our sofa since.