Blue June

The Greens are on sabbatical.

What a May day

Knackered.

April Powers

Of all those who saw this bloke,
Who would remember him,
In lines on the screen?
Of evenings of languor and laughter and pause,
Internal applause, and fear and frustration
To boot?

Those who do
Might be writing of him in return
With salacious kind words,
Lascivious smiles,
And wicked lips crook’d in a curve,
On chat shows where nations can learn of their stars -
The ones that they’ve no chance of meeting.

Discreetly we learn of our place in the book
The right look, where and when, who and how ...
And wow! Doesn’t it all
Just fall into place,
While our sisters and brothers,
Younger and sharper,
Fall on their faces?

At last it happens and we don’t know quite how,
Everything just as wrong as before,
Conscious of the boring stream of crap we produce:
As loose in tongue,
And constricted of mind,As ever we were.



April Fools' Day. Or should that be April Fool's Day. And, if so, who is he? Or she? Me?

7am. The alarm's just gone and I've switched on Radio 4, and we're listening to Evan Davis, the new anchor for the Today programme, the one who squints a bit and is relentlessly chirpy - at least he was when he was economics editor and worked for Newsnight. He never seemed to mind the late nights then. Now, well, maybe it's the honeymoon, but he's relentlessly chirpy at seven in the morning too, only you can't hear the squint.

I get up to go to the loo, open the door and "WAAAAAAAHHHHHH!" perforates my eardrums. It's Jac, and I no longer need the loo.

"I think you'll find that's Hallowe'en, darling," I say, "today's more about tricking than scaring - convincing Daddy you're the new prime minister, maybe, then going, 'Ha! Got you! April Fool!'"

*****

I'm in a café reading the paper, waiting to do the school pick-up run. There's an article about a guy who broke his back falling from a tree while working up there and his optimistic message about life going on. Ha, I think, I'll save the article for Ian - my childhood friend who had a car accident and also relies on a wheelchair to get about (or one of those new super-dooper motorised ones that's more like a Ferrari than a hospital-corridor-negotiating device).

"Ahem. We don't do the mail." I look around to see what I've misinterpreted as Post Office signs, but can only see wistful scenes of French bucolic grandeur that look like they've been painted by someone to look like they'd been painted by Monet, or is it Manet? I can never remember the difference.

"The Mail," she says, pointing at my paper.

"Sorry, not with you."

"We don't allow fascist newspapers in the café."

"But Lord Whatsisname only supported Mosley for nine months, before he came to his senses - I mean, before the Lord came to his senses, not Mosley, I'm not sure... anyway, that was in 1935!"
"They attack Ken, that's racist!"

"But Ken's white ..."

"Some of the journalists there might be black ..."

"Ah, yes," I say, "that's terrible," suddenly realising she might assume I mean that it's terrible some of the Mail's journalists are black. I decide to demur. God, that's a good word, I wish I'd thought of it at the time.

I put the paper in my bag and bring out the Spectator magazine, the first copy I've ever bought - because I like Rod Liddle's writing.

"Boris Johnson," she says crisply, pointing the magazine back towards my bag.

"I've got the Sunday Times travel section?" We're thinking of renewing my contact with Derek, personal assistant to the Governor of the Seychelles, who complimented my rear when we were in a bar in Mauritius. Perhaps we could get invited to some choice dinner parties if we holiday on the islands? Hat doesn't seem the least bit worried about the possibility of Derek getting me drunk and whisking me away to a quiet idyll. Is it because she completely trusts me, or just doesn't care?

The woman shakes her head. "Rupert Murdoch."

"Here look," I say, catching on, "the Independent magazine from Saturday!" And I flourish it in expectant triumph.

"Perfect," she says, "for next time - you can't actually be in here with that other stuff." The "be" was accompanied by a sneer that wouldn't have shamed Simon Cowell.

*****



Had the most diabolical cold last week - worst for ten years, completely out-for-the-count, no protein shakes or fish suppers on the menu. The kids made me keep the driver's door window open, even in the driving rain, so I could sneeze out of it. And they had to wait for Hat to get home for dinner to be made - although Haughts did give one a go: lentil burgers, home-made, which Giles nibbled at, Jac "got four points" at (a refusal) and I "ate" very quickly then spat down the toilet (by running out looking like I was going to have a gigantic sneeze).

*****


The knocker goes. "I'll go," pipes up Giles. He opens the door. "It's Mantu," he shouts.

"Do you mind?" I ask Hat.

"Go for it," she says, and I gather my jacket and a brolly and head off to The Clock.

"Haven't see you for a while," I proffer.

"Been... busy," says Mantu. I've known Mantu The Bantu for a couple of years now, since we met in my yoga class. Ironic that we now only ever meet in the pub. He's my "glass hand", my drinking buddy, just as Hat has Sarah, her friend from Exeter days to go, to go... actually what is it they get up to?

We cross Barry Road into The Clock like we've done dozens of times before, and I've done hundreds (?). I've noticed how Mantu always "kindly" opens the door for me so that I make it first to the bar, and I recently observed that we always seem to sink an odd number of pints.

"The usual?" I say.

"Let's go wild and crazy, a whisky."

"Bells, Walkers?" asks the barman Caz, the sole survivor, amongst the staff, of the disappearance of the previous publicans in favour of the present managers.

"Glenmorangie!"

"Single, double?" I say

"Double." Why did I ask?

"And ginger," says Mantu.

"Glenmorangie and ginger?" I splutter.

"It's more refined."

"But I bet you couldn't taste the difference between Glen & Ginger and Bog Standard & Ginger."

"We could do a blind taste test?" It's a clever bluff. He knows he'll probably lose it, but unless I'm prepared to line up several drinks he's a fifty-fifty chance. Thinking of the cost, and the little incident after our last blind taste test competition, I decline.

"'Sup?" I ask, when we're sat down in the rear, which used to have (under the previous management) a rather dennish aura, with dark green on the carpets, the cloth of the sofas, the panels of the walls, and the plant that was the room's centrepiece. Now it's all pink, with girly squiggles.

"Shall we?" says Mantu, pulling out a chessboard. I grab two of the pawns, one white, one black, spirit them under the table and juggle them between my left and right hands. I put my fists on the table and wait for him to choose. He taps my right hand. I open it and show him the white pawn. "How comes I'm always white, huh? How come I'm always white." He's shouting now. "Are you trying to say I'm a coconut? Is that what you're getting at?" And he upends the chessboard and pieces and storms out of the pub. Wearily, and trying to avoid the baffled gazes of the fellow customers (and where I don't, trying valiantly to pull off a Gallic shrug), I gather up the detritus, sigh at my barely-begun pint, and leave.

I find Mantu creased up with mirth behind the wall next to the pub. "If you keep pulling that stunt," I say, "we'll have nowhere left to go."

*****


I wave a copy of The London Paper triumphantly as Hat walks into the front room one evening after work. "Paris's getting hitched!"

"Quoi?" says Hat.

"OK, OK, I exaggerate a little. Apparently Paris's parents really like this new boyfriend, this, er, Someone Or Other, largely, admittedly, because he doesn't drink, smoke or do drugs. Listen: 'It's a great love match and I've a funny feeling it's going to go all the way'. That was her mum."

"I've a funny feeling she's already gone all the way with him," says Hat.

"Miaoww!" I say. "You're just jealous cos she flirted with me."

"Flirted! Pah! She was just buttering you up." We had Paris to stay when she was trying to avoid the paparazzi after Hat's charity bash for The Mutts' Nuts at The O2. Those Shih Tzus, Iffy, Squiffy and Whiffy (pictured) practically tore the place apart, but we couldn't complain as she gave us a freebie for the do (a very rare thing in her calendar, I don't need to tell you), ensuring Hat got coverage in all the tabs, and a few of the broadsheets. Plus acres in the US too - The Mutts' Nuts has gone global!

"I wish!" I say.

*****


"It's outrageous," says Madame Zoë over coffee with us, one day, "I'm finished." I've always thought Zoë's moniker a little silly, giving evocations of a brothel madam rather than a spiritual medium. "You do know what they've done?" We shake our heads. "They've only gone and repealed the Fraudulent Mediums Act!"

"But that sounds good," says Hat, tentatively. "You won't have to put up with those charlatan rivals." She winks at me, out of eyeshot of Zoë. We've always gracefully (we hope) declined her services, though we did let Giles bring her over to summon up the spirit of Diarmuid after he was run over by the bicycle of a wee girl - who was more traumatised by the whole thing than Giles. In fact it was his idea to "ease her karma" by summoning up Diarmuid's spirit in her presence. There were a few dodgy moments when we all held our breath, but fortunately Zoë managed to contrive, sorry, see that wee Diarmuid was now happily playing hopscotch in Gerbil Heaven.

"No, you don't get it," says Zoë, "the Fraudulent Mediums Act protected us."

"How so?" I say.

"It was practically impossible to convict any of us. I think there was less than one conviction a year since the act came in in 1951. Now we'll be covered by Consumer Protection regulations. And you know what that means."

"I can guess," says Hat, who has to have a cursory understanding of the law for her job.

"We'll have to give a sort of public health warning before each session, something like, 'The operative points out that they cannot guarantee that any persons appearing in this room are actually deceased or otherwise inconvenienced and are not actually recordings that the operative contrived with the help of her aged aunt who smokes sixty a day.'"

*****


Hat's on a latey so I settle down with the kids to watch Kenny, the Australian documentary about a "waste-management sanitation operative". Jac's been nagging me for ages after she heard me raving to Hat about it, having seen it in a free moment one afternoon at the cinema a few months ago. I decline to look at the rating on the box in case I'm not really supposed to let them at it. Besides, Jac's language is far more colourful than mine could ever be, and the film does largely consist of lines such as:


"It's as silly as a bum full of Smarties";

"They think I'm the poo monster";

[referring to kids:] "They s**t green, the only things that should be green are pears, apples and Martians";

"There's another classic example of someone having a two-inch ****hole and us having installed only one-inch piping".


Jac is howling, of course, prodding Giles at every risqué word. Even The Queen Of Hauteur smirks now and again, though I can see she is making a Boadicean effort not to be the least bit troubled by the infantile, but utterly charming, toilet humour (boom, boom!). If you think such things are "childish", in the sense of for-kids-only (and Haughts would agree with you), I refer you to the year I spent in a rented basement flat in West Dulwich with three friends. Sarah (27) could be reduced to wet-knickered helplessness by a mere mention of the word "poo". Apparently some renegade hangover from childhood.

*****


The word is out on the grapevine: SE22 magazine; the ED Forum; Lordship Laners. Mothers stop other mothers in the street to say, "Have you heard?" and the respondee knows exactly what they're talking about. Fathers snigger with each other in the few moments they steal together in gastropubs over Foie Gras Soufflé with a Yak Butter Coulis washed down with a white Rioja. And posters appear, that seem to have cost a fair lick, as if by magic, on park railings, saying, "Go get 'em, Zactastic!", "Claim back the language!" and "The street is the heat!" I've no idea what the last one means, but seeing as it's written in spray paint on some poor person's fence I wouldn't necessarily expect to.

And what is this fuss all about? Zac Fazackerley is a contemporary of Giles's at St Anthony's. He is rather known for his creative language, which makes our Jac's Anglo-Saxon epithets look like the mutterings of Mother Theresa on stubbing her toe on a leper. Rather more worryingly for Jane and Tom, Zac's parents, recently it's moved beyond the body-part name-checking that is the staple of English swearing, to the more suggestive of violence.

Hence they have taken a writ out on 50 Cent and So Solid Crew alleging corruption of a minor. Jac's not too impressed as if the action succeeds it could jeopardise the output of the Gangsta Rap scene in the UK. She gets up her own banner: "Rite to say wot we werxing want!" and cajoles the lot of us into marching up and down Goose Green on a Saturday afternoon engaging anyone in debate who has the nerve to challenge us. I manage to get in a call to Jane and Tom that it's nothing personal. "We feel it's so important to support Jac in her crusade, just as you feel you'd rather not have a son who says, 'Wossup, motherwerxers? I's smoke you if you don't got no Dorset Cereals's Organic Fruits, Nuts & Seeds every morning."

*****


A woman comes on the radio who dropped her middle and surnames and became known just as Louisa. Just like those singers Marilyn, Jamelia, Robin and so on. Bit of a cheat, really. Amy Winehouse, Boris Johnson, Ken Livingstone and Robbie Williams became known just by their first names by sheer ubiquity, whether that be through relentless drug abuse coupled with an incredible voice, verbal kerfuffling allied to a booming voice, a whiny voice allied to political power, or a decent voice allied to eccentric behaviour. As the presenter points out, if everyone did this, it'd be mighty confusing for the poor souls at the passort office. Apparently the woman did this to get past the Y-chromosome patriarchy of her old surname linking her back to just one line of male ancestors. Funnily enough, both Hat and I had a go too. I switched my names around at 18 after years of frustration of dentists, doctors and new teachers calling me by my first name. But I found my new name order just wasn't me. Frustrating as it was, my awkward name had become part of me, so I switched them back. This caused a few problems for university registration and a family holiday to Tenerife. Hat changed her name at Exeter to this symbol:











and became known as The Woman Formerly Known as Harry (or TWFKAH) which caused her no end of mayhem too, as she refused to put her name on exam papers and so had to repeat her second year after an OCD face-off: "My symbol is my name!" "Well, in that case your real name won't get any marks!"

*****


Found this on Jac's computer. What does it mean?


"..me listning to a christmass songgggggmattyy

"sed that makes me scene haha :

"Plov teh dude :

"Di bet yur realding this :

"Pan laughing :

"Dahahhasum1 tlak IM BORED"












John

Harriet

Hortense

Giles

Jocasta

The March of Thyme

Life is like riding a bike:
Sometimes you go too fast,
Sometimes too slow.
Sometimes you lean too far to the left,
Sometimes too far to the right.

You may have passengers
And they may slow you down,
But they may make the ride more enjoyable.
Sometimes you may need to ride alone.

You can run out of fuel,
And you can crash.
You can hurt yourself,
And others.
And you can ride with them,
With the same results.
And someday your journey will end.

In the mid nineties Hat and I visited our friends in Tennessee. They're a bit on the hippy side - Patrick's folks lived the kind of life in the Smoky Mountains that the green lobby over here would die for: house made of local wood with solar panels; processed their own waste, hardly ever visited the supermarket. In his brother's house in Knoxville I visited the loo and saw the following sign: 'If it's yellow, let it mellow; if it's brown, flush it down!'

I told Hat and she loved it: "Let's do that at home!"

"Er, OK ..." I said, hesitantly. And so a practice was born.

A few years later Haughts drew the poster that went above our own loo: an urchin peeing into a puddle and another pooing down a hole with the slogan above.

Jac's having a little trouble getting the hang of it, though: "If it's yellow, flush it below; if it's brown, let it frown!" she says.

"Hmm," I say, on opening the front door occasionally, "I can smell Jac's been at it again."

"Couldn't we drop the green loo policy?" I ask Hat one day.

"Jac's just gotta learn," says Hat, "She'll get the hang of it."

"But it's been a year now, and how much are we really saving anyway? - water is recycled after all."

"You know what they say, save the pennies and the pounds will follow."

"It's not the spending pennies I'm worried about."

*****

Off for a lunchtime Tuesday swim as normal. It seems the woman in front of me in the queue to pay thinks it is a leisure supermarket - she must be enquiring about all 85 different forms of membership. So my eyes drift to the right to the pile of leaflets on the shelf under the window. There is one for International Women's Week, with events in Peckham such as Powerful Poems to Punch our Weight and A discussion of Transgender Discrimination. I know Hat will love this but rather than shove it in her face I'll secrete it somewhere for her to find. It'll give her a reminder of her radical days at Exeter.

*****

It's an Insect Day (as Jac calls it) at her school so I'm escorting her around on my errands. In the newsagent's Jac points and says, "Look, Daddy!"

She's examining the South London Press and what looks strangely like Harry, pixellated around the chest area, arms akimbo, doing a parcel imitation (Jac's phraseology again) of Our Saviour himself, were he to have a sex change, or the bible stories to have a substantial revision - rewritten by Hat's old friends from Uni, perhaps. Above her is the headline 'Local demo given a clean breast'.

Jac and I read the story together: 'An East Dulwich woman was arrested on Wednesday for a breach of the peace after shouting slogans topless in Peckham Square.

'Harriet Green, 47, stripped to her waist, is believed to have been directing her ire at the International Women's Week events then taking place at Peckham library and The Pulse, the local leisure centre, both of which are on the fringe of Peckham Square.

'Arthur Stevenson, 72, said, "I was just collecting my winnings from William Hill when I saw this woman, very well ... presented she was, chanting, 'We don't need no patronisation,' actually I think she was singing that one, and 'We are tough, we are strong, we don't need your subsidies!' Needs to work on her rhymes, I thought - why didn't she ask me? I was an understudy of Wilfred Owen, you know."'

"Ahem," says Dirwal. "This isn't Smith's!"

"Go and pay the man, Jac," I say. We walk back to the house and I pick up the phone, then think the better of it. I snip out the page and fax it to Hat's office. That way it should pass throught several hands before it reaches her.

*****

"Oh no, oh no, oh no!" It's Hat, it's early morning and she's getting dressed. I'm still in bed, listening to the radio.

"What?" I slur.

"Come and look at this - no don't."

"Do you want me to, or not?"

"I want a second opinion - no I don't - yes, come and look." I rollout of bed and wander over to where she's standing in front of our full-length mirror. "Down there." She points. "It's ..." she shudders, "... grey, isn't it?"

"Well, I'd have said ..."

"It's grey," she wails.

"I'd have said white, to be honest ..."

"And you think that's helpful?"

"Darling, I've got grey temples, where there is any hair; I've got grey chest hair, and yes, I'm grey 'down there' too. We're 43!"

"But you're a man!"

"The jury's out on that one."

*****

It's Friday afternoon, Hats is on a latey and I've promised to take the kids to the cinema. They're doing a retro series at The Ritzy and Haughts wants to see Dr No, a film made before even I was born. I think it'll work: for Haughts, to imagine being Ursula Andress; for Giles, the gadgets; and for Jac, a bit of the old ultra-violence. For once they all pile in the back of Momo - when ever does no-one want to ride in the front, I wonder, and for there to be a pitch battle for the privileged spot? "But you went last time"; "But I'm bigger"; "But Dad and I need to do a little bit of father and son stuff, mano a mano" (he thinks it means "man to man").

"We're Bonding, darlings," I muse, to a collective groan.

We arrive 20 minutes early so we can have a stint in the café upstairs. The girl behind the counter is v sweet with the kids, being really attentive to what they want rather than the frequent goth indifference that dictates teenagers' usual serving habits. Giles rather blushes when handed his hot chocolate and manages to spill half of it. "Don't worry," says the girl, "I'll fill you up."

After the film the kids are raving.

Haughts: "Oh my God, she is so powerful!"

Giles: "I want a Walther PPK."

"Pchew, pchew, pchew!" says Jac, shooting at imaginary targets. Perhaps not the wisest of moves in Brixton.

They hop in the car happily, and after I've buckled them in, I flounce round to the driver's door with a Conneryesque swagger, throw my keys in the air, and unConneryesquely, fail to catch them and they bounce on the drain cover below. Swift as a Premiership goalkeeper I throw myself to my knees and clutch at them, the first time half-holding them, the second dropping them through the gap. About a second later there's a "Plop!"

"Oops," I say, with Bondian understatement.

"I and I," sings Jah Wobble, as he slopes by on his bike, surveying the scene. It's the name we've given to the loopy but very happy bloke who rides around Brixton on a bike far too small for him, swaying all over the shop, singing as he goes.

"I and I is in trouble," I say to the kids. "Come on, we'll get the bus home and pick up the car later." The gay mood of a few minutes before tempers somewhat, except for Jac, who still hasn't quite acclimatised to the relative comfort of her present life vis à vis her previous, and so who isn't the slightest bit bothered by a bus ride home.

"Is Mummy going to give you a hard time, Daddy?" says Giles.

"Yes, Giles, especially since I've had three years to get around to buying a full spare copy of the key and haven't." The spare key with the original can make a full copy, but the spare alone will only unlock the doors, not start the car.

When we get home I ring the dealer (the nearest's in Kent). It's the answerphone. "Oh-oh," I say.

"Oh-oh," echoes Jac. "Maybe Mummy'll be too drunk to notice when she gets back from her work do."

"Good point, Jac, good point."

*****

I give the clan permission to wait up for Hat to arrive home. It's about ten when we can hear a shuffle on the doorstep. I get up and tip-toe to the door, whipping off my shirt as I go. I've left the hall light off. "Darling!" says Hat, as she comes through the door, a wee bit wobbly, and plants a lingering kiss on my lips, which I'd have said consisted of two vodka and tonics and a martini - shaken, stirred and with a lime plopped in it from a height of precisely three inches (she likes her filmic references and is very particular). "Oo-ooh," she says, rubbing a hand on my chest.

I brush her aside and take her by the hand to the lounge. The kids, now topless too, sing, "We are proud, we are strong, we don't need no council wonga!"

Hat giggles, and then, "Aahs." "I take it the fax was from you?"

"What fax?" says Jac - a criminal background can be so useful sometimes.

I look down at Jac, her slightly cleft lip slightly jutted, making her look proud, and her eyes expectant, partly joyful, partly saying, "Am I doing right?" I'm taken back to the very first moment when Hat and I saw her and we simultaneously turned to each other and our faces said, "YESS!" and we knew, and now I'm more in love with her than ever. It's not that I love her more than Haughts and Giles, it's just that, with her being more dependent, in demanding more from us, I know that she'll suck out more that is being a parent from us than the other two, who'll be flying off with nary a wave before they can say "Adios mis padres" (and in eight other languages)...

*****

In the style section of the Sunday paper was a photo shoot for Kate Moss, who still looks lovely... so far - what do ex-models do apart from become UN ambassadors? It was written by Inez van Lamsweerde and the photos were by Vinoodh Matadin, and I thought, 'How do you get such wonderful names?' Mine sounds like premature wotsit.

When I used to 'phone interview I started using the moniker Kirsten van Cooke - with bespoke South African accent - or Jean-Yves Vert, with a French one. Some of my junk mail comes to Heidi Kerfuffle but I wouldn't be able to keep a straight face using that over the phone. And my annual carpet fair invite still comes to Abdja Salabdje. It can get a bit tricky if you want to turn such a relationship into a formal one - either because you can't remember the name you used, or the fictitious date of birth. To this day I have to ring when I want to renew my subscription to the online phonebook because I can't remember when I was born.

§§§§§§§§§§§§

I decided to audition for a musical. My budding acting career had had a false start. I'd successfully auditioned for the part of Friar Laurence in Romeo & Juliet at school (I've just checked and it has quite a lot of lines but Mr Williams said there were only 12. Huh??). My second rehearsal on a Sunday morning coincided with an already booked driving lesson. I asked Mr Williams if I could have the rehearsal off and he gave me an ultimatum - I took the driving lesson.

I spent so long faffing about in hall that I didn't make it to the audition till 4. There were five of us sat in the narrow corridor waiting to go into the music room: a weedy looking bloke, a woman with a Mohican, a tall guy with a somewhat bouffant jet-black hairdo, me and... Harry! "Harr'!" I said.

She grunted something like, "Huh," and bowed her head back down. I took this as a fob-off and didn't harangue her.

First they saw the bouffant guy and we could hear his basso profundo voice filling the room: "La-la-la la-la-la, la-la-la la-la-la, la-la-la la-la-la, la-la-la la!" He came out with a broad grin. "See you at rehearsals," he saluted, to none of us in particular.

Next was the nerd. He couldn't sing for toffee but came out smiling.

Then Harry was asked in. The three of us were in hysterics: it was like a strangled cat trying to call a mouse to heel. When Harry came out she didn't even catch my eye and I watched her as she disappeared up the corridor.

It was five on the dot. Two young guys came out: "Hi, I'm Ant," said one.

"And I'm Dec," said the other. "I wrote the music for our new musical about Tutankhamun, and Ant wrote the words. I'm terribly sorry but our booking doesn't allow us to use the room beyond five, but as you two've made the effort, would you like to audition next week? We could probably use the piano in the corner of DH [Devonshire House, an administrative building]. You know: upstairs next to M&D [the Music & Drama room]?"

"werx off!" said the Mohican, and stomped out of the building.

"We can still do you if you like?" said Ant, who seemed to be the leader of the two.

"Just for me?"

"Yup, oh and a couple of others we're undecided about."

"Er, OK," I said.

§§§§§§§§§§§§

News 24 reports protesters throwing themselves in front of the carriers of the Olympic flame in Greece as it begins its journey around the world to end up in Beijing. "Isn't that Herm'?" I ask Hat.

"Her?"

"No, Herm': Hermione."

Hat gets up and walks to the TV screen to scrutinise the large figure being manhandled by plainclothes Greek security guards to keep her away from the vehicle carrying the Olympic Torch through the streets of Olympia. She twists her head and squints. "Could be. Blimey, that girls gets about doesn't she. Plus she's always banging on about global warming ... wonder how she got out there..."

John Harriet Hortense Giles Jocasta

The Month of Groundhogs, Pancakes & Love

The monotonous notes of the xylophone play all day,
While the rain is a reminder of home.
Little bubbles form in the puddles,
Quiver and hover a bit, then die.
The drip, drip, drip off ledges and branches
A soothing symphony, evoking
Long and lonely afternoons of the past,
Stripped by nostalgia of their gloom and doom.
Schooldays were never nice –
Don't let anyone delude you about that –
But at last the holidays,
Staggering home under a mountain of books
Never to be touched,
Incurable optimism the tonic of youth.

Games against walls and garage doors,
Gliding down an ad-hoc mud-chute
On the lawn a Sunday afternoon,
Incurring the wrath of a father
(Twenty minutes undoing
Twenty weeks of care);
Rescued from the freezing playground of a road,
Where death-defying feats abound,
To a warm and dry kitchen,
And reclothed.

Sentimental moments are recalled
From the grandfather chair of latter age,
But when you do get home
You're confused to find
It's all vanished.
The real unremembered, unembellished life of home
Is mundane.




What a day yesterday! Everyone knows I always leave the tax till the last minute - actually one year when I managed to wangle a way to present it two months late without penalty, I did next year's straightaway ... nine months early! But the other four years out of the last six I've been online on the 30th or the 31st of Jan, sweating over it.

Hats knows to stay out of the way - "It's your funeral, and the hundred pounds is not coming out of the joint account!" - and leaves it at that.

I read today that 160,000 tried to present their return online yesty, and the servers crashed. "You've had since 6th April last year!" said the man on the helpline.

"So you're trying to pay your credit card bill on the last day and you ring the bank and they say 'Our system's down, but you'll still have to pay the late fee as you've had three weeks to pay it!'" Actually I didn't say that, I thought of it several hours later. I ranted, but in an uncharacteristically calm way: "It's plain human nature, whether the last day is 31st Jan or 4th December or 8th July there'll always be a glut of people presenting on the last day. It's farcical that your bosses haven't put a plan in place for this eventuality to say, 'We're sorry about the problems - there's an extra week's grace to file your return.'" And guess what, a few hours later they did just that, only they gave us a day, not a week. I sent a message in to HMRC, this week's name for the tax office, that as I was due a refund this year, I would be charging them if it were late.

Meanwhile, after trying the five different ways to get to the online filing page several hours later, I got in. It takes about an hour - it's the preparation that costs the donkeywork. Most hire an accountant. Being a Maths guru I pride myself on being able to do it myself. Trouble is, though I can do the Maths without a calculator and have now got the forms off pat, I'm less organised than a dog running a multinational. I couldn't find a bunch of the paperwork I needed so had to bluff through without it. They may well spot the difference on their inconsistency matrix but it doesn't actually alter the tax aspect. And when they do, I'm going to have fun producing proof of the Lapwing Sushi I sourced for Mitsuhiro Ito last November, the Bengal Tiger waistcoat for a certain It Girl who shall be nameless, and the Krasnoyarsk oysters wanted by a certain Fulham Road-based oligarch - I actually think this last one was a wind-up, a sort of test of my ingenuity, rather like the prat of an editor of the financial magazine I worked at ten years ago who asked me on my first day to get an interview with George Soros.

§§§§§§§§§§§§

Later that month I bumped into Harry somewhere between Birks and Marsden (my, and another, hall). "Hey!" I said.

"Hey, cowboy," she said.

"What cuts?"

"Not much, we only have six hours of lectures a week. There's a lot of reading, but I learnt to speed-read when I was eleven. You?"

"Thirteen - I can read a book in a sixth of the time of most people - about, say, an hour for a standard novel"

"Not bad, I've got it down to forty minutes for Clockwork Orange, hour and a half for Jude The Obscure."

"Pah! I can halve that … Don't ask me any questions afterwards, though, I won't remember a thing!" She laughed. "I expect you can remember the exact words Annabelle uses to Jude the second time they meet!"

"Arabella, but very good. I can see you're well-versed."

"'A mars a day helps you work, rest and play,' I believe."

"Quite so," said Harry, "you have an uncanny ear for the lines in a Victorian novel - I'd better go, got a meeting."

"Oh, yeah? For what?"

"The Lick."

"The Lick?"

"The Lesbian International Knights' Collective."

"The... Lesbian... International... Knights'... Collective. I didn't know you -" and stopped myself halfway through.

"Wanna come?"

"Me? Not... sure I'd be very welcome..."

"Nonsense, expanding horizons and everything." And off we trotted to DH and one of the smaller meeting rooms. On the door was draped a large black piece of cloth with "The Likc" written on it in bold white letters - in helvetica, if I wasn't mistaken.

She pulled me into the room. She introduced me to four women: Jo, wearing what appeared to be a jumper her gran had knitted her; Ellen, an American post-grad who glared at me constantly; Shinza, a sweet, elfin Canadian girl with short, bleached white hair; and Shock, a woman with orange hair who looked like the clown from Billy Smart's circus.

They dragged Harry into a discussion on The eclectic in the radical, effectively cutting me out to stare into space. Out of loyalty, I stayed half an hour before slipping out to what I could swear was the kind of shocked hissing tut you get from an audience when someone's mobile goes off during a performance.

§§§§§§§§§§§§

Meet Giles (the other one) and Consuela at Borough Market. It's sunny so we can be out and about most of the day. They were invited to stay with us but Consuela chose a central hotel. A relief, really, as Hat wants to kill Consuela, especially since the court case last year. "What that woman's done to you ..." she says.

"I know, I know ..." I sigh wearily, just relieved that someone's sticking up for me.

We dodge round the stalls, eyes on mulled wine (for Giles) and mulled apple for me. I get very tetchy in crowds - it's a struggle to move at more than a snail's pace. The stall that was selling mulled apple juice last week is gone this. I find one selling round courgettes and decide to get some for Mum - her "Zucchetti" is better than most restaurants' ratatouille, and maybe it'll give her a lift to know I'm reminded of it. It's M's and K's birthdays next weekend and I'm popping in for lunch.

We find a hot drinks stall manned by a woman who serves so slowly that the drink turns to icicles before it hits the cups. Giles gets his mulled wine, I a mulled lemon, ginger and honey, and Con an indian tea. We wander along the south bank and manage to get in at the dim sum place I intended. The three of us are sat together, yacking away and it almost feels like it was all those years ago. Almost, since many men have learnt to their cost that this black widow is charm itself until a hitherto unnoticed threshold is crossed.

Giles has been struggling with his new career as a freelance spy (he doesn't like the title private detective) and is a bit down. Of course the idea of the business was so much more glamorous than is the actuality, and he only has two clients - his mother's boyfriend, who is getting him to snoop on her, convinced she is cheating on him. Oh the irony: the woman's son by the man she cheated on is snooping on her for the man she cheated with. With me here he calls them "Client X and Object Y". Client Z is a Peruvian oil baron who wants to make inroads into the markets in London and has hired Giles to check out the scene here. Cons thinks they are only in town for me, which makes it a double disadvantage for me as she will be going on about making the effort to bring Giles here for the next three years.

I feel sorry for Giles as I too know the clouds of the big, black dark dog. Consie is about as much help as a spark in a fart factory so I just try to be as understanding for Giles as I can. He knows he may well have been happier with Hats and me but is now a grown man so it doesn't make much difference if he is here or in Latin America.

*****

Hat's taking Monday off from work so I can have a lie-in tomorrow as I'll be up late watching the Superbowl with Max at Planet Hollywood tonight. We drive over to Surbiton for lunch, a bit of the river that I'm totally unfamiliar with except for the Goods (Tom and Barbara). Of course it wasn't actually filmed there but was supposed to define suburbia so the fictional place was there. The pub on the river (an old boatyard) is one of those that hovers on the cusp of the knife between rather groovy (all armchairs and sofas on several different levels) and rather naff (Jade Goody trying to be Jade Jagger).

Unfortunately the others are upstairs in the restaurant bit. Trying to keep the youngsters at the table is like trying to keep rats on one. Haughts wants to be outside in the icy wind imagining herself some Heathcliffian character, Giles wants to practice a swivel karate kick on one of the revolving chairs downstairs (the barmaid allows him to kick the empty beer bottles into the recycling bin), and Jac wants to practice sliding in her socks on the see-your-face-in-it wooden floor upstairs (unfortunately just the bit that the waiters use the most) or hassle the chefs - "What's a roo?"

In case you're thinking of going there, the starter and dessert are bland - both the risotto and crumble are too gooey. I can do a risotto that good, which is why I'm not working in a restaurant, while my crumble is way better ... as long as you have the fifth one. The mains, though, are great: my sos and mash had a gravy rich in the effort of the combining of flavours which a good sauce does - I completely forget to ask what was in it. I'll take Mum and Dad there sometime.

We pop in to see P&O afterwards, who have just moved to the area. Both granmas are there - O's ma doesn't have much English and P's not much Serbian.

*****

Super Duper Pooper Scooper Tuesday.

I pack the kids off to school and plan the evening. We've already agreed they can stay up some to watch the coverage of the US Primaries, only they can't - I assumed Newsnight would extend into the night but the only coverage is on Five Live. They'd never zonk out to radio, they'd just be bouncing off the walls, so a plan is in order. I mix up a combo juice special: wodge of yoghurt, a pound of blueberries, a pound of raspberries in the blender; a kilo of carrots and a pound of Cox's in the juicer; make pot of valerian tea. Stir in a teaspoon of ginger into the juice; don't combine the three till needed...

Hat crashes at 10. Jac's working out on the exercise bike. Haughts and Giles are glued to Gavin Esler, slurping my concoction.

"Well?" says Haughty, at the end of Newsnight.

"Err, I made a wee boo-boo!" I say.

"Daaaaaaaaaaadddd!" Then "What?"

"It ain't on TV but you can listen to Five Live!" I spout, optimistically.

Rhod Sharp comes on and gives us the lowdown in California, New York and so on. The thing is, even in UK elections you don't really know what's going on for sure till the following morning, so with the five to eight hours' time difference, well ...

They feign interest and it takes about twenty minutes for the lack of visual stimulation and the disguised Valerian in my brewski to take effect – without the "juice" they'd just have kept the neighbours up. Haughts goes first - wordlessly, she shuffles to her feet and hauls herself upstairs. Giles poops out on the sofa and I carry him to bed. Jac's resists all enticements to sample my Underground Juice Smoothie and I have to hypnotise her for peace.

*****

I'm driving the kids to school. I'm transported back fifteen years to a summer camp in the States. My friend Myra and I have decided to head out on Ice Cream Break - the regime at camp is harsh, with (officially, anyway) no drugs, no drink and no meat. It's not that the food is "health farm" - most of it would convert the most hardened Turkey Twizzler English schoolchild to vegetarianism - but everyone needs their breaks, both from the saintly food, and the physical boundaries of the camp.

We're taking her three girls (say, from around seven to eleven, if memory serves) and a friend of theirs to the local ice cream parlour - you know the type, everything ludicrously oversized, which may explain why Myra and her kids are somewhat oversized too, a physical distinction only embellished by Myra's lack of vertical distinction.

On the way out, a sweet song comes on the radio (Stay, I missed you – must try and find it) and the girls start singing and swaying in unison. My jaw drops, and I almost fall in love with Myra on the spot. I stress "almost". It is the most beautiful thing I've ever heard. They should ditch the original singer and get these girls to record the track because the whole country would buy it.

I'm dragged back to present tense by a traffic light. And I sense the reason for the memory - Jac and Giles are singing. SINGING!

"Stick your toothbrush up your bum." - Jac.

"Up your bum!" - Giles.

"Then take over with your thumb,"

"With your thumb!"

"Mummy's getting drunk on rum,"

"Drunk on rum!"

Then both: "Stick your toothbrush up your bum - up your bum!"

"For God's sake, please, please, please don't sing that when Elaine comes round," I say, then have a second thought: 'Won't that just encourage them to do it?'

*****

Vally Day.

The great spontaneous gesture was not a good idea as I'm sick as a dog. "Out! Out! Out!" shrieks Hat in a panic. She hasn't missed a day's work through illness in years - only one when we buried Harry The Hamster and the bairns insisted we have a rather portentous full day's ceremony on a Tuesday, with horse-drawn carriages, bounteous bouquets and a speech from the vicar (a man from our local I'd bribed the previous night to put on a dog's collar and whom I helped rehearse a few pieces from the Book Of Common Prayer).

So I haul myself off to the study, take off the bed all the gear I'd laid out there ready for despatch - a faux-diamond 80-piece chandelier, a metal detector, a set of those thingies that support your cutlery at posh formal dinners, and a frazzled cat (a stand-up client wants to reprise the classic Hale and Pace Microwave The Cat routine at his next gig). If this'd been a week ago there'd've been all the usual extravagant bouquets, gimongous teddies (but of exotic creatures), and cards you could barely get through a front door that right this minute were being opened, purred over or grimaced at while calls were made to offices of inexplicably sudden illnesses.

Which made it all the luckier that I don't have an office to plead sickness to. When I worked at the magazine the editor never believed I was ill - "Well come round then, Richard, if you don't believe me, I'm lying in bed with Richard & Judy."

I won't say Hat is annoyed - we don't have arguments - but I know she's not exactly chomping at the bit to add a school run to her dash to the office. And no-one would ever cross her about an illness-based absence there. She gets more from the average work minute that mere mortals manage in an hour. I have a slight resentment, though. Since she's the one bringing home the vast majority of the bacon, how come it's still me who has to come up with the grand romantic gesture? I know also that she will withold any Vally stuff she's done me until I produce. And I'm not going to, not today, anyway.

I mourn my winging-it approach, but decide to tough it out. After all, a surprise isn't a surprise if it isn't a surprise.

This feeling lasts till four, when panic takes over, as there's nothing worse than Hats' scorn, and there's that awful realisation that I could have done something slowly, compensating for my inability to move, and now I was going to act really fast, in a blind panic, with a super-100 temperature, throbbing head, heaving gut and swollen gills.

I take a cab to Elephant and bowel down to the Bakerloo line choking back the bodyweight's worth of other people's skin I'm breathing in each minute (I loathe the tube). I make it to Temple a few minutes before five and hunker down behind a paper next to Pee, the tramp. Apparently I nod off for a while, as when I come round I find my hat's fallen off as I'm dozing, and would you believe it?, there must be a hundred pounds in it in loose change. Pee is grumbling and jostling me as he says I've invaded "his patch", so I give him half and resolve to donate the rest, and an equivalent amount to match it, to a homeless charity.

I'm right on the point of giving up and going home when I spot Hat out of the corner of my eye so reaffix the disguise and bow downwards so none of my face is visible. To see her as a stranger does is breathtaking and it's all I can do not to hobble over, pick her up in my arms and collapse on the pavement.

She grabs one of the free papers and darts into the tube. I head off after her, about four "customers" behind. I'll bet she always stands under that particular posterboard, I muse, which today has a picture of a leering Kylie, lips bigger than the rest of her face care of the fish-eye lens that took the picture, advertising her comeback-from-cancer tour.

As luck would have it, Hats gets on at the very last door of the carriage I'm at the other end of, so I bound on. I stumble through towards her end, and since I look like Pee The Drunk, people part away like they've smelled a real one. Maybe people will take pity on me and not beat me up?, I muse. As I get to the other end, I say, prodding an attractive woman in the shoulder, "My seat."

As she looks up, Hat's face contorts as seventeen different expressions fight in her for supremacy: horror, wonder, shock, surprise, panic et c, et c.

"I don't think so!" she says, recovering her composure in about a second and a half.

"Always sit there," I retort. At this point an elderly gentleman with a stick gets up from his seat and waves me in.

"There you go, young man." I'm flattered, no-one's called me young for ages, not even a nonagenarian City gent. This buggers the plan a tad, so I have to studiously ignore him.

"Want that one," I say, trying to reprise that character from Little Britain – what's his name? And I haul Hat from her chair across the carriage. Now this is the dangerous bit – certain "chivalrous" men usually see it as their duty at this point to "give me a bit of a slap". Fortunately Hat quickly knees me in the nethers and, with Kubrickian timing, hurls me out of the carriage doors at Cannon Street onto the platform, and lands astride me, like Boadicea on a conquered Roman general, to the cheers and applause of the crowd on the tube train.

As the carriage doors close she holds her fist aloft until the train is moving down the platform, then laughs, notices I'm not, looks down and sees I've passed out.

*****

Half term. I take the bairns to Chandelier, the "new" café that it's taken a year for me to get round to going to. Jac is wearing her Snooping Diggedy Dogg outfit: McKenzie tartan deerstalker hat, figure unhugging jeans, loose white T-shirt under a khaki anorak and "severe bling", as she terms it - a ludicrously heavy brass chain around her neck with one of those mini-fridges attached to the ends of it ("I'm so cool" - ha, ha, ha). She can barely walk under the weight but I see it as laudable - it's exercise, after all. The look came about after Mum gave Jac the Sherlock Hound I'd given her for Christmas some years before, which had sat on the spare room's window-sill unused for years - same tartan deerstalker, plus John Lennon glasses. I say unused - it's battery-operated, and walks and barks as it "investigates" a crime.

Haughts, to complete the bi-polar aspects of the comparison of my daughters, is wearing a ball gown we bought in a charity shop in Frinton - the seaside town that had been a mythology to me since some then contemporaries of mine in their early twenties bought a cottage there as a weekend bolthole from their shared flat in London, that I finally visited the other weekend en famille - replete with elbow-length faux-silk gloves. She sees herself as a sort of Tilda Swinton- (weird and mysterious) Jane Austen (staggeringly accomplished on the writing side) hybrid character.

Giles has got on his cricket whites under an overcoat that my dad wore when he worked in The City in the late fifties.

Hang it, I've thought, if you can't beat them, join them. So I've put on the gear I'd worn when I and my flatmates had appeared on the Glam Rock edition of The Big Breakfast in '95: a seventies leather jacket and a large leather cap given to me in Toronto. The then girlfriend and I were staying with relatives of one of our fellow travellers. I'd complimented the hosts on this amazing cap they'd shown me and they went on to explain it belonged to their son who had decided to "live life to the full" when he found he was dying of cancer. "But I can't take this memento of your son," I said. They insisted. I'm still rather proud it got an outing on Channel 4, even if only in the background for two seconds of a sweeping shot.

The four of us look like performers on our way to a Dickens cum Mark Ravenshill cum Wizard smorgasbord at the local theatre ... if there were a local theatre.

Haughts likes the café the most - "It's so elegant!" she says, as she sweeps in, swishing the hem of her dress round as if expecting the whole café to acknowledge the presence of a grande dame de théatre.

We order hot chocolate and cakes ("No, they haven't got Smarties, Jac.") and settle down. One of the waitresses is Polish so Haughts tries out: "Me yarvitz gloopy". "Bar! Karl Kovitzay!" is the reply. If I could just find someone to translate it, assuming I remember it right.

A while later I'm drifting away while looking at a Gauguin on the wall - 'What would it be like to live on a desert island?' ... 'Which eight records would I take with me?' ... 'What if Hat were chewed up by a shark, and there turned out to be a dark, dusky maiden who emerged out of the surf à la Ursula Andress - how long would I honour our relationship before cavorting in the waves with the local? Six months? Never? A day? As long as it took to work out the lingo for "What's a woman like you doing in a place like this!"'

"Shtop shtaring at my breashts!" I jolt, as I find I'm looking at a topless Tahitian woman in the painting. It's like waking from a dream about piranhas and your mind flapping about for bearings in the dark. Then I notice that Giles's jaw is hanging open by about three inches, and follow the line of his gaze to a large woman breastfeeding an infant. She looks like a way less attractive version of the TV psychologist Jenni Trent-Hughes, and without the gorgeous voice too - I feel sorry for the child who has been sentenced to another seventeen years' listening to a chainsaw with its pitch raised two octaves by being speeded up four times.

"Well, when you're out, then, keep 'em in!" says Haughts while my lips flap for inspiration. The woman's so floored by being challenged by an eloquent ten-year-old she utters not another sound. Thank God the women in this family have got balls!

*****

I wake up. It's morning. "You've been screaming," says Harry.

"I had a dream about Paul McCartney, performing at The Brits in only a tiny pair of black pants. What does it mean?"

"Well I see two possibilities:" says Hat, "One, it's The Brits tonight, and you just never know, maybe Paul McCartney will perform there in a pair of pants after Heather has found a way to spike his drink, make him look a … well, you know ... in the eyes of the judge and get all his wonga. You can see The Sun, can't you – MUCCA'S MACCA-WANGER TRICK WINS WONGA. Two, you're secretly gay."

"Dad's gay!" yelps Haughty, somewhat triumphantly, it seems to me, from the other side of the door.

"What have I told you about snooping!" I shout. "That's Jac's job." I turn back to Hat: "I'm serious, darling, we need to get a dream reader."

"Ask down at Soup Dragon, or Trevor at thingummyjig."

"Can't wait to tell everyone at school," says Hortense.

*****

We, meaning I and the kids, are on the train on the way into the West End, and we appear to have got on the Performance Express. Some very loud reggae is wafting over from the end of the carriage. It's curious: the human mind wants to categorise everything, hence all cowboy movies' characters being divided into goodies and baddies, the Indians originally being the baddies, then everyone realising it was really the other way round, so instead they made half the cowboys good and half bad (who usually wore black), and left out the natives completely. But things don't always segment so nicely - I love that there is music in the carriage, just hate the fact that it's reggae. While everyone between 1986 (when I left university) and 1996 (when people my age stopped being so precious) would cheer when Bob Marley came on at parties, I would groan. I look at Jac conspiratorially, knowing that for her reggae is gangsta rap slowed down and with the interesting words taken out. For me, it's the tedious version of dub. Giles and Horts, on the other hand, are swaying to the calypso song, and admittedly the guy does have a very good voice.

John Harriet Hortense Giles Jocasta

January Blues

The only way to fall in love is slightly,
Slowly and lightly as the wings of a dove
Climb gently to soar in the skies above;

To hover and swoop, loop and tumble,
Aware the crumble could come too fast,
Sprawled, defeated with no last gasp.

The only way to run is to walk,
More time to talk, to feel the passage
Like daggers of death brought forward to haunt;

To let it go, just when you know
That everyone else is after your prize;
To watch it fly, to turn away,
And pray for its safe return.

Our new arrivals, Prototype I and Prototype II, came yesterday just in time for the start of the US Election process, so Giles suggested we parody the elections with our own year-long system to decide on their permanent names, hence the rather perfunctory intermediate ones. The girls let out one simultaneous groan but had such fun coming up with the seven leading names that they soon warmed to the idea. So, on the Democrat side we have Tsarina, (The Gay) Hussar and Smarmy, while on the Republican there’s Tardelli, Oven Chips, Oh Lord!, and Salt Lake. We can’t wait for the Iowa Caucuses tonight.

Giles’s form teacher was so impressed she’s decided to follow our elections in his class throughout the year. Giles is tickled pink because if he doesn’t do Classics at Cambridge his second choice is PPE at Oxford (Politics, Philosophy and Economics - what I’ve always regretted not applying for, instead of failing to get onto Cambridge’s rather hardcore Economics course, and having to make do with the humiliation of Exeter).

*****

Great Aunt Esmerelda and Mad Uncle Bernard stayed until the 2nd. It was so nice to have them, especially as everyone except me was shooting out of all orifices with this new Noviro virus. Esme, 92, shows no signs of flagging and is quite the character. Christmas is a time of rituals. On Christmas Day we celebrate the annual event of her giant post-turkey-dinner fart en masse by joining in to the following bars of the theme tune of Radio 4's I'm Sorry I Haven't A Clue, where her wind is the opening trombone bass note. So it goes something like "Phhhhhhrrrrt – ba-ba-bah bah-bah ba-ba-bah!" and we all collapse into giggles.

On Boxing Day after our game of Campaign she chases Bernard with a sprig of mistletoe, though "chase" might be stretching the Trade Descriptions Act a bit. Lonely old codger that he is (66), he sportingly tolerates this.

The elder two children adore them, and so, in her way, does Jac, though Esme is a little wary of her after last time, when she awoke to find Jac had given her a rather recherché hairdo – "It's weaves, innit?" said Jac.

Given the team sheet, I represented the family to the local NYE and NYD do's – a big thanks to Jeanie and Norman – I shan't forget the Twister and profiteroles!

*****

The scores are in from Iowa and Hussar and Oh Lord! have taken first blood in the year-long naming battle. Tardelli is living up to his name with a dismal showing. His decision to leave the beef for later states could be disastrous – personally I think he would have swept it in 2004 and has missed his chips.

*****

Off to the dental hygienist this morning, which always terrifies me, but not as much as the dentist. I’ve noticed that I’ve scrubbed too hard and worn away one of my lower gums. There’s no real trepidation going to the doctor, is there? So why is it that the dentist seems more terrifying than going to a cancer specialist. I blame that scene in the Marathon Man, and the whirring noise the drill makes.

*****

There are two things a woman particularly hates about men - being pestered when she doesn’t want to be pestered, and not being pestered when she wants to be.

*****

Shock results from New Hampshire. Tsarina came back from the dead and Oven Chips proves that you don’t have to be under 60 to be popular with the electorate. Funnily enough, Prototype II is a bit grey at the gills, so perhaps this would be an appropriate for him.

*****

Hat has been back at work for the first time since her illness took her out in September. This first morning I have to tread on eggshells. She’s a little grumpy. So I prepare my Devil’s Scramble With Smoked Salmon special, and tease a "Don’t go thinking you’re getting that every day!" which would normally have elicited an affectionate grin, but today gets just a grunt.

"Coffee!" she says. I make a full, dry, Gusto e Ricco-blend, peppermint mocha (her favourite, because it helps her 'evacuate' before she leaves the house).

§§§§§§§§§§

I stood in the queue on the first day of what is called Freshers’ Week. I suppose this is the British equivalent of the American university ritual of deciding which fraternity or sorority you are going to join. Should it be Phi Beta Kappa, or Alpha Gamma Omega? (Presumably the latter are known as The Deities.) If you asked most university-educated Britons, they’d say that our societies versus their sororities and fraternities were a no-brainer, but then our view of them is somewhat drawn from National Lampoon’s Animal House, so we may not have a very nuanced assessment.

The initiation rituals sound very familiar to any man who has been to an English public school. In mine, my own housemaster warned me and my parents of these when we were being shown round. He seemed almost proud when talking of the Blue Goldfish. The suggestible boy would be asked, "Would you like to come and see the Blue Goldfish?"

"There can’t be!"

"It’s absolutely true. It lives in the water system of the toilets here. Come, stick your head down close in this one and you may just be able to see it. Further, further, it’s very small ..." Flush!

I hadn’t a clue which societies I wanted to join. Should it be the Lacrosse Society - I’d get to meet lots of women? Take up chess again - I wouldn’t meet any women but I’d keep my brain exercised? Or the Hang Gliding Society - I’d meet lots of both sexes but might not know them for long?

I took the bit between my teeth and decided on Hang Gliding, Pooh Bear and Proust. A guy called Jeremiah I’d met over breakfast in hall one day had said he was setting up the Pooh society which sounded so ludicrous, naff and fey you couldn’t help but admire his chutzpah. Plus he seemed to have a lot of women in tow so I shrugged and sailed with the wind on it.
As I hoped to do with hang gliding! It was indulging a whim for adventure, with a deep breath and a quick signing of the cross for good measure - atheists oftern turn to religion in times of stress.

Proust was ... well, I used to quip, "I’ve tried studying Proust but I don’t have the time!" based on my sole knowledge of the title of one of his books, which I’d gleaned from a Monty Python sketch.

So here I was in the Proust queue, murmuring that line to no-one in particular, but the woman in front of me turned, a woman the likes of which I’d never encountered before. My sole experience of girls were those in the neighbourhood in the Surrey Hills where I grew up; the daughters of friends of my dad; and the Jacqueline Smith/Moira Stuart/Lesley-Anne Down sorts from TV (remember that scene where she swims naked in the outback? What was that film called?). Such is the torpor of an English public school, Old School version, where you were stuck with your own sex for five years. And they wonder why half the Secret Intelligence Service were gay! What happens in prison when men are stuck without women for years on end?

She was fairly short, early five foots I’d have said, with baggy black jeans - I’d only ever seen blue ones before. They covered what must have been a fairly ample butt. She had a pinky/ochry T-shirt on which I’d like to say "covered" her ample chest, but "drew your attention to" would be a better description, as my first encounter with a braless woman felt like two people pointing at me saying, "What are you looking at?" A point rammed home by the writing across the T-shirt, which said, "What are you looking at?"

She had three earrings in her right lobe, just very simple, thin, plain metal; another in her nose, on the right side, and a stud in her left eyebrow. Her hair was shaved incredibly short - from what I know now, I’d say a number two.

"So a Proust expert, then?" she said.

"Not exactly ... I ..."

"Harry," she said, proffering a hand. I laughed. Harry seemed to be an appropriate moniker given this scary vision of a woman. Bear in mind that this was pre-Huffty of The Word, pre-Demi Moore’s radical shave-all-her-hair-off moment, pre-, well, women looking like teenage boys who’d gone a bit large on the pies. It was strangely, and perturbingly attractive, though. Besides, one of the main goals once having made it to university was to turn myself from a boy into a man. And I had to start somewhere.

"John."

"You doing English, then?"

"Economics. But I want to broaden my horizons. I saw him on the Python sketch."

"The Reciting Proust competition?"

"I was better at the bathing costume section."

“I was better at the evening dress bit,” she giggled. Making a girl laugh is a first step on the road to ...

"You?" I said.

"Huh?"

"What course?"

"English."

"I’m intimidated."

"Don’t be," she said, "I went to a comprehensive in Hull - if you went ‘A la recherche du temps perdu’ to one of my erstwhile schoolfriends, they’d think you were taking the wee and you’d likely get clocked."

"'Erstwhile', huh?" I chuckled. "So isn’t doing this a bit like taking work home?"

"I get to meet true intellectuals like you." I couldn’t tell if she was ribbing me. She was now at the front of the queue so our conversation dried up.

When she was done I stepped forward to sign up and she said, "See you round."

"See ya," I said, "Birks, Raddon, B205." I was expecting her to give her campus address in reply but she just smiled and tipped the right corner of her forehead towards me and sloped off.

§§§§§§§§§§

With Hat back at work, I’ve got just two days left with the kids till they’re back at school. I can’t wait for Wednesday, frankly. But two days of treats it is, so we’re off to the Science Museum en masse. Jac is playing video games in the front room, Giles has got his karate costume on and is chopping his way round the house - "High YA! YA! High YA!" - and Haughts is in the study starting her third novel. I could just slip out of the house and come back in before Hats gets home from work and no-one would be any the wiser ... if it weren’t for that bloody social worker. What was her name? Elaine?

"Elaine says, ‘Jocasta must be enveloped in a warm, loving, yet challenging environment where she can develop as a person,’" says Haughts, in caustic mimicry, with "‘person’" accompanied but that academics’ shibboleth of the two fingers of each hand arched into proxy apostrophes. Social workers spend most of their time talking in apostrophes.

"Elaine says, ‘We mustn’t expect Jocasta to adapt unqualifyingly to our own mores and assumptions.’"

"Elaine says, ‘Jocasta will shift the very centre of gravity of the family to a new balanced position, natch, this is a necessary if not even a sufficient condition of adaptation to her new milieu.’"

Three more years of this, three more bloody years!

“I’ll bet she doesn’t know what ‘mores’ means, anyway,” says Haughts, “probably thinks that it’s an eel.”

“Or a Scottish estuary,” pipes in Giles.

I rouse from my reverie and shout, "Girls! Giles! We’re off - five minutes!" Hortense keeps tapping, Jac keeps Wiiing and Giles keeps chopping. After six minutes, I hit the mains switch. This is a pain, as a load of things subsequently have to be reset. But the VCR and DVD-R, for instance, will resume their merry path as long as they don’t stay cut off from their food for long.

"Huuughiiieeeueaih!" scrangles Haughts - it’s the only description, a sort of strangled scream.

"I warned you to keep saving," I say.

Jac just shrugs and rushes into the hall to start attacking Giles - all the training in the world in a recognised martial art (to brown belt, I might add), won’t cope with someone to whom the Queensberry rules (or whatever are their Karate equivalent) are but an inconvenient distraction, or an rather an advantage, if your opponent is using them and you aren’t.

"Nippon!" shouts Jac, pinioning Giles to the floor.

"It’s ‘Ippon!’" says Giles, "and anyway, that’s Judo."

Ten minutes later we’re off to the bus stop, after I nearly lock us all out till Hat gets home by leaving the keys on the mantelpiece. The 63 bus comes so frequently since Comrade Ken spent squillions on subsidising them that we don’t have the embarrassment of icy stares from fellow passengers at the bus stop, only on the bus. Jac’s response is to roll her eyes into her head and stick out her tongue - truly worthy of the grimmest horror film since it’s huge - her tongue is, I mean. Giles is reading a book about chess - I’ve no idea how he manages, I’ve always got travel sick reading on buses and in cars, so it didn’t come from me.

Hortense is reprising the plot of her second novel to an elderly West Indian woman in a pink coat, green-and-white patterned scarf, and the kind of hat that Maggie Thatcher used to wear. "Yes, dear," she says indulgently, about every thirty seconds. It's difficult to tell if this means she is genuinely interested or it’s a kind of mantra she can repeat without thinking, while she gets on with planning what kind of present she’s going to buy her great nephew in the sales.

I tune out myself and dream about Wednesday - a whole day of criminal self-indulgence before my own sales shopping starts. I can pocket 50% of the reduction for anything I buy the clients, so I can make as much in a month as I normally make in three. A banker wants an old-fashioned blue pinstripe (so imaginative), a PR guru wants Laboutins - "Choos and Blahniks are out, dahling," she says, in a clipped Swedish accent. And Cressida "must have something special." God, that girl makes her parents run around like hamsters in a cage. "Cressida’s learning dressage," "We decided to keep Xianthus [the pony] stabled here," (their garden’s barely twice the size of ours), "Cressida’s bored of boarding so we’re daying her now," despite this meaning an hour’s drive there and back to her new school before work each morning for her dad (she has to take the train home - I gather you could hear the tantrums in Hounslow).

We get off at Blackfriars Bridge and walk the river west. Praise the lord they all like walking. Have you seen those families with a wailing child suspended by one arm being dragged along? Jac has a new project of taking pictures of tramps. Esmerelda gave her a "table camera" - one of those throwaway ones they sell in tourist locations. This means we have to get the film developed, of course. Never thought I’d hear myself saying those words again. I have to tip the subjects 50p, since the last thing we want is a smelly old man chasing us down the riverbank screeching, "I was one of Mario Testino’s you know, I’m not free!"

When we get to The House, Jac wants us to do a pose. Since these cheapocams have no shutter delay she enlists the help of a Japanese tourist to take the picture, which is of us posed as a gangsta rap band. "Fitty sen," he says laughing and nodding. "In say ithy menray!"

"Insane in the brain!" raps back Jac, and walks off with two fingers in each hand pointing down, legs far apart in a ludicrously wide gait, rocking exaggeratedly.

We pick up the 360 to Exhibition Road.

*****

I have to say, all in all the museum trip was one of our better days out. Jac was so stimulated that while you’re always wary, when you’re out, of what she might do next, it ... it ... I suppose the best theory is that it filled her stimulation cortex so that in the days afterwards she was calmer. And this is good. While you might want Giles less calm at times, you definitely wouldn’t want that with Jac.

Brilliant evening last Saturday. Caz had her birthday dinner at a Greek restaurant. The food was awful, just awful - Hat had to nip out for a "fag" (she doesn’t smoke) so she could visit the Chick Chick Chicken further down the street, and I think I could have used the Baklava to plaster the hall. But they had the waiters and waitresses doing traditional dancing, and invoked the birthday girls and boy, and the couple on their engagement night, to do their own turns. And then a dose of plate smashing, which Health and Safety had obvioulsy sanctioned, since it was about eight times less exciting than it sounds - a pile of plates on a mat in the middle, and each of the celebrants tossing theirs into the middle. Clonk! Plate splits. I’m sure when you do this in Thessalonika it’s madder, more dangerous, and more fun.

Then Abba, Britney and the rest till closing, teen girls chatting up the waiters, and the prospective groom and his best man doing the traditional Sikh dance (the one that looks like Cossack dancing) to Punjabi MCs. We sang along to the ones we knew the words to, and sang along to the ones we didn’t. "The winner takes it all, The loser standing small, Na na na na na nah, Na na na na-na-nah ..."

*****

10am. Rat-at-at! Our pal Wendy has two doorbells - one for the house, one for the garden. What a great idea! But we've never got around to changing our door-knocker. Is it original? Who knows? I do know you can't hear it in the summer when you're in the garden.

Grudgingly I get up and go to the door. Jehovah's Witnesses? Some scouse lad selling sponges? Or the guy from Grimsby who sells fish door-to-door but hasn't been in a couple of years? It might as well have been him, given the stink. "Susan," I say, with a weary sigh. "You know damn well you're not supposed to come here without making an appointment!"

"Worriaseashorntel." She's drunk as a skunk and I'm shocked to see there isn't a can of Tennents Super in her hand.

"It's Jac, now, you know that. She's at school. Come in for a minute." She staggers in and slumps on the sofa. I make her sit on the leather one as she has been known to have a weak bladder on these occasions.

"Izzaburrday."

"No, that's not till March. You can come over then. Cup of tea?"

"Wizz key?"

"Tea it is, then." It's probably better she doesn't fall asleep on the sofa as she weighs 15 stone, so I bung two Earl Grey teabags in the mug - it's all we have. She won't notice.

"Wozzdizmuk?" she says, sipping the tea, into which I've lobbed an ice cube so it isn't hot enough for her to pan it out.

"PG Tips!" I lie.

"Tezlykhorsdung."

Conversation's stilted, which I don't discourage as it makes her feel awkward ... unless she nods off. After a quarter of an hour on the dot I say, "Right, then, lezzbe-avinyou!" mimicking her slurry speech pattern.

Luckily the Superglue's got leather seats too (a decision whose prescience I was inordinately proud of), and we loll off to Brixton tube, where I hover till I can see she's down the steps and heading back to Islington.

*****

Couples have their balance points, don't they? In one he will do all the DIY, she the housework. In another he always puts the kids to bed, she gets them up. My folks are old school. She didn't work a day from when they got married, and ran the house. My feminist friends are always going on about the "oppression" from those days. Well maybe in those Andy Capp families where he spent the whole evening in the pub, then came home drunk and beat her up. But in the families I knew, and bear in mind these women started out married life before Sixties liberation, the men worked and the women stayed at home. And of the six families in the neighbourhod I grew up in that I knew really well, not one of those women feels aggrieved with their lot. Except maybe the one who sprinkled the cyanide on his cornflakes.

Maybe because of that, I always wanted a wife who worked. And did I get one! Harry was the only woman I could find to take in a wastrel like me! I won't say I was a natural father. Before Haughts was born we went to a summer camp in the New England forest - all Californified with vegetarian food, shared cabins, African drumming classes and "clothing optional" by the lake. I offered to mentor a child and got Suzanne, the shy seven-year-old daughter of a woman called West Wind.

The only word she said to me in the day we spent together, where I took her from the Russian Peace Group to the Painting With Tea Class to the Forest Elves Expedition, was a gentle "Mmmmm ..." where her head would incline downwards to indicate this could mean yes or it could mean no. The following day I sailed to the West Wind (!) and told her I didn't think it was really working.

On the back of this, when we got home I took up tutoring, and slowly, over time, as my students, at first GCSE, got younger, I warmed to them and once Hortense came along I was more of a natural than Hat, and we made the difficult decision, what with our relative incomes, to forego weekends in Normandy for villas in the Caribbean, and for me to be Kids' Man!

John Harriet Hortense Giles Jocasta