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
