flossing the cat

I live within walking distance of my children’s school, a beautiful seven-minute stroll through a forest of ivy-clad oak trees, ferns, ladybirds, and a stream. But before you stab me in the face with your car keys, let me tell you what it’s really like. First, there’s the seven-minute thing. 'Seven minutes' invites complacency. If you’re told that a journey will take you seven minutes, you think, “Oh, I’ll be there in no time .” So you fuck about. Seven minutes is not like an hour, which you take seriously, which you allow time for. If you live within a seven-minute-walk of your children’s school, you either need to be a) Allyson Lewis, whose bestseller ‘The Seven Minute Difference’ shows you how to break your actions into seven-minute micro-actions (but who, sadly, looks like a reptile) or you need b) an Atomic Clock that loses less than one second every BILLION years and also shouts at you. Now I don’t have an Atomic Clock. I have a collection of time-keeping devices that a...

Today is the day before Bin Day. And although it’s only ten o clock in the morning, I am already in the grip of pre-Bin Day nerves. For those of you blessed with a normal psychological profile, pre-bin day nerves is a nasty condition characterised by irrational anxieties about bins - and particularly bin collection. Imagine you’re in the middle of some humdrum housewifely activity, like watching your tears dissolve in the washing-up suds, when a question pops into your head. The first question might be mischievous, even playful, like “What happens if I forget to take out the bins?” or “What happens if I take out the wrong bins?” But then it all gets a little crazy, as in, “If I can’t entirely close the lid of the black wheelie bin (and the bin therefore represents a dire infringement of council health and safety guidelines), what is the maximum gap permissible between the lid of the bin and the body of the bin before the bin-men refuse to take the bin?” And “Will I get an orange c...

I’m not accustomed to awards. In my experience, awards were what you got if, instead of lying on your bed fantasising about Simon Le Bon and/or dreaming up spectacular ways of killing yourself to punish your parents, you practised your viola for five hours every night. But now it seems I’ve won the Liebster Blog Award, courtesy of award-winning mummy blogger Older Mum , and the rules say I have to blog about it! I don’t know what the fuck a Leibster Blog Award is, but who cares! I’ve not been this happy since my mother reassured me that although she didn’t like me, she still loved me. Gee mom, thanks. That means a lot.  I do realise, of course, that awards are just a shallow motivational device to get people hooked on Capitalism (cue deafening applause from parents who send their kids to Steiner schools), because if they weren’t, my extraordinary record of underachievement, dysfunction and just plain making a hash of things, would have been recognised earlier.  After all, I...

I thought I was a good person. I buy The Big Issue. I have never amputated a daddy long legs. I don’t covet my neighbour’s husband (even when he is chopping logs and the sweat is pouring down his back … ahem…cough... ). So imagine my shock when Tracey McMillan’s Huffington Post column, “Why You’re Not Married’, informs me that the reason I’m still unmarried is because I am either a bitch, a slut, a liar, shallow, selfish, or not good enough! (Well Tracey, for your information, I’m definitely not shallow.) Of course, this isn’t the first time my domestic situation has been the focus of moral panic. In the early days, my poor long-suffering mother was so "sickened to the core" by my sordid shacking-up experiment that she refused to enter our house. Instead she would stay in the car outside (whilst my father came in to see us), weeping with a gusto not seen since the days of the prophet Jeremiah.  At some point, my father would take her a flask of coffee, and from our vantage ...

If there’s one thing at which I excel, it’s under-achievement. I can imagine few more humiliating things in life than a girls night out/pub quiz in the company of Karren Brady, Nicola Horlicks, or Christine f**king Lagarde.   Over-achievers suck. I mean, what’s so wrong with doing well at school, going to university, doing a post-graduate degree, getting a really exciting job that’s full of prospects, and then, you know, doing nothing for six years!   (And when I say nothing, I mean raising three kids, but not having a CAREER or ‘IT ALL’…) So anyway, I thought I’d create an alternative list of skills I don’t have, especially for my partner – who today told me I trade on my insecurities. And since feeling inadequate is obviously the cornerstone of my identity, my main social currency, I should probably rehearse this list aloud every morning, preferably in the mirror, just before the school run.     This would be put me in the correct frame of mind for tak...