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