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