Spring has sprung and things, or rather people, are on the move. My friend and neighbour is relocating to ghastly Cobham, home of Chelsea Football Club’s training ground, thereby exchanging Desperate Housewives for Footballers’ Wives.  On the plus side she has sold her house to a real life celebrity – not, thank God, a Kardashian – but someone whose most  recent film was on at the local Odeon only weeks ago.

I can’t remember when the neighbourhood was last in such a tizzy, possibly  not since Brad and Angelina took their children to the local Pottery Cafe but in this instance I had a cast iron excuse to pop round with a bottle of Bolly and introduce myself which would have been slightly out of place at a kiddy painting party.

And what delightful people they are!  In a spirit of neighbourlyness I even offered to vet the guest list for their house warming party – so easy to invite quite the wrong types when you are new to an area – and to organise some staff for the evening which, thoroughly grounded as they are, they declined.

Big mistake.  Half the people I know, and that would be the male half, only ever accept invitations in the certain knowledge that their hosts’ home will be awash with nubile young teenage girls in very short black skirts plying them  with drinks.  It is almost unnecessary to provide food at all!  People were going to be seriously peeved.

The invitation stated that we should arrive from five o’clock. “That’s because he has to be up early for filming” we opined knowingly before wondering whether the dress code would be cocktail or tea dresses. Oh the social minefield to say nothing of the choice of gift.  I opted for an Oxfam allotment, a follow up to the goat that I gave everyone last year.

Prior to my arrival Useless the Younger went up and down the street about twenty times noting the names of the other guests, the price I had demanded for taking him with me.  Good sign – no cars outside.  Everyone had obviously arrived in a limo.

When I worked at ITN  I was constantly and irritatingly asked if I met lots of interesting people, such is the myth of glamour that surrounds anything to do with the telly.  The answer to which was, of course, a resounding no, never.  And so it proved with the so-called starry party goers.  Far from standing around being famous and handing out signed photographs, they were all just rendered speechless at the thought of being somewhere where we all knew each other – all too well – where you could park your car outside your house and it would still be there next day and where no-one is selling drugs on the street corner.  Round here they are probably delivered.  By Ocado.

This was a world previously unknown to them, the like of which they had only ever read about in scripts which never got made.  Best of all it proved a salutary lesson to Young Useless.   90% of famous people are small and dull and you don’t want to be one of them.  As for me I think I’ll be house hunting too.  Celebrities?  There goes the neighbourhood.

 

 

We Londoners are still dizzy with the excitement of the recent elections and I have yet to recover my composure after finding a message on my answerphone from Boris Johnson himself.  My dilemma is that although, like any right thinking person, I dislike almost all politicians and politics,  I consider it completely unacceptable NOT to vote, given what people through history have done to ensure that we can.

My life in politics got off to a bad start from which it has yet to recover when my mother developed a massive crush on Jo Grimond, then leader of the Liberal Party.  This resulted in my sister and I having to deliver thousands of electioneering leaflets on foot to remote homes in Southern England at an age when we had far, far better things to do than break our nails wrestling with reluctant letter boxes and fleeing rabid hell hounds.

Matters were not improved by my first political outing with ITN when I was sent south of the river (Surely some mistake?) to cover a by-election where a beardless youth called Peter Tatchell was standing.  He was in the middle of a battle with the media who had dared to suggest that he was gay.  When he arrived for the count wearing a glittery jacket and even more mascara than me I realised that my suspicions  about politicians not being altogether straight, on more than one level in this case, were all too correct.  I think history shows that he has somewhat changed his stance since those far off days.

On one General Election night a friend who had never directed anything more taxing than an interview with a Booker prize winner was ordered into the front line election trenches and found himself locked in an Outside Broadcast lorry with a very left wing crew; his own leaning being somewhat to the right of Nigel Farage.  Too tempting.  Hoping to enhance his miserable evening, although perhaps not in an entirely positive direction, I personally delivered a small hamper from Fortnums and a 10 by 8 glossy of Auntie Margaret, apparently signed by her own fair hand and thanking him for his constant support.  I hope it cheered them all up.

One of my more memorable elections was spent outside Number 10 with my legs firmly crossed and wondering why a female Prime Minister had failed to address the lack of women’s lavatories in the SW1 area.  Stumbling back to ITN as dawn rose (By cab, obviously) I was diverted from my dash to the comfort station and told to ‘Get into the Green Room and keep Cecil Parkinson happy’. And second prize?  Ever the consummate professional I spent the next few hours pouring wine down our throats and listening to his soppy liberal views.

For a politician he seemed to be a pleasant enough man so imagine my horror on returning to work after an extended holiday to discover that a sex scandal was raging about his hapless head.  I walked into the newsroom and one of the newscasters greeted me with a broad grin. ‘Didn’t you spend election night with Cecil Parkinson?’ he enquired. ‘Think yourself lucky you’re not pregnant too!’

‘But I am’ I replied.  Imagine his surprise.

There has been a lot of talk of late amongst the chattering classes about gender.  At the risk of going out on a limb I am female, always have been and have never even imagined going down market and becoming male.  If in these difficult times you are not totally sure about someone (He or she?  It?) there is an acid test which will solve the problem in a trice, beyond reasonable doubt as we say in law world.  Tell the person you have just got a new car and if the first question is ‘What colour?’ you are in the presence of a woman.

I have, unusually for me, done some research on the subject.  During 20 years of marriage we owned no less than 27 cars and so it’s a fact.  Men always ask something dull about the maker, the cost or the ‘engine capacity’ – nothing that I could reasonably be expected to know.

27 cars may sound a little excessive to the untrained ear, especially in a family where the main breadwinner was not a car salesman or a car thief but it was our own special way of saving the planet. I would never dream of taking my gas guzzling 4×4 just to pop out for lunch.  Nothing less than serious trips to the garden centre could justify such careless consumption of the world’s limited resources although I must confess that for me ‘off road’ only ever meant parking on the pavement.  When we spent long periods of time in Cornwall it would have been certain social death to be seen in such a vehicle, marking you out immediately as a tourist, almost certainly from London and possibly even a caravan tower and therefore not privy to all the advantages that are automatically bestowed on small cars with Free Kernow stickers, especially with regard to mildly illegal parking.  A convertible was always one of the fleet so that the children could enjoy fresh-ish air and commune with Mother Nature without Mother Kingston having to drag round Richmond Park with a buggy and flat shoes.  I continue to afford them those simple pleasures, mostly because they have failed to master the art of walking anywhere. So, do the maths people.  That is a minimum, minimum, of three cars.

Being green was also why my husband’s favourite car at any time (Number 4) tended to remain in the garage.  This would always be an extremely powerful sports car that he was incapable of driving and therefore had so much lead in the bodywork from constant repairs that it was a bio-hazard for any child to be within fifty paces, even if they didn’t risk a quick lick.  For a clever man he was extremely slow to realise that such cars are the vehicular equivalent to leather trousers and a medallion. One son did remark that Porsches hadn’t made it into the ‘Top Ten Cars chosen by Footballers’ (It had sunk to number eleven, even with them) and he actually thought that made it an acceptable choice. Doh!  So Number 5 would be something he could manage on a daily basis.  Like a Robin Reliant.

As to my latest vehicle it’s red, since you ask and for the boys, yes, it does have some sort of engine.  I must admit to the truth of a story that on being asked by a mechanic about my tyre pressure I shot him a withering look and replied haughtily ‘How would I know?  Cars like this come ready inflated’.

Happy motoring

I once spent a morning discussing Hinduism with the man who came to service the boiler, a habit that started when my son was studying theology and I felt a duty to keep up, and I venture that his (Mr Boilerman) knowledge of the world’s leading belief systems who have put the average vicar to shame.

Are you aware, for example, that there is a museum in India with every one of their Gods represented? Over 21,000 of them and for all I know rising?  Presumably there is a constant need for new ones to cover technical advances- God of the iPad, God of the iPhone and so on and on.

This week a tearful Muslim mother confided in me that, far worse than her son heading off to Syria, her daughter was dating a Hindu.  She would, she added, even prefer her to be dating a white boy.  “Even one of my sons?” I couldn’t resist asking, always my acid test of real tolerance.  I wonder what her reaction would have been if the roles had been reversed and I expressed a preference for Catholic over Jew, or black over white for their girlfriends.

On Saturday I went to the West London synagogue where I saw a remarkably self-possessed 13 year old become bar mitzvah.  Another learning curve when I discovered that there were guards at the entrance, a precaution we haven’t needed in English churches since the Reformation, what with them  attracting hardly any attention,  not even from their parishioners, and certainly not from people inclined to throw bombs into them.

After the service my friends having taken off their prayer shawls and yarmulkes, and not skipping a beat, we went across the street to a Lebanese coffee house for coffee and baklava.  Non kosher.

On nearby Oxford Street there was a group with banners urging me to boycott Marks and Spencer because they support Zionist oppression of Palestine.  What and cook from scratch?  I’d have to launch my own protest movement against that.  I am genuinely moved by the plight of the Palestinians which makes me anti-Israeli government policy, not anti Jewish. The same reasoning would apply if Donald Trump were ruling America.  Also outside the store was a man selling books and CDs about Islamic beliefs, including one called ‘The Message’  which was on my lengthy list of  Ways to Improve Yourself, lovingly prepared by my son.

“How much is it?” I asked the stall holder.

“Are you Muslim or non-Muslim?” He asked with a grin, clearly having spotted my lack of a burka.

“Which would be cheaper?” I replied.

Other outings this week included a trip to a Chinese restaurant and watching a Japanese film – “Our Little Sister” – charming and beautiful.  See it.

Having grown up in a village where the most exotic person spiritually was a far-from-home Welsh Methodist it never ceases to amaze me that you can meet such a cross section of the world every day of your life, provided you leave the village for cosmopolitan London I should add, and have something in common with all of them, even a shared sense of humour.

There is  an old story from the Irish troubles about a man being stopped by gun toting men wearing balaclavas.  “Don’t shoot me” he pleaded “I’m Jewish”.  The gang leader thought for a moment.  “Would that be Catholic Jewish or Protestant Jewish?”

I like to think that here we are, first and foremost, Londoners.  And there won’t be a cartoon to illustrate it.

 

 

 

I may, may have berated television commissioners from time to time for the never ending stream of ‘100 Best …’ programmes but in response to popular demand I have decided to give you ‘The 100 worst nights of my life’.  Series One.

There could be voting with a premium rate number for you to ring repeatedly to ensure the victory of your choice.  Untold riches lie in wait.  I might even be able to afford therapy at last.

An old chum, owed many favours, asked me to lend her moral support while she made a presentation to some group or other.  First mistake was not paying more, any, attention to the details. Oh, novice error.  It turned out to be an evening listening to a hard sell that would have made a Scientologist blush by some self-help group which in return for several hundred pounds promised a life of perfect happiness.

How many times did my mother warn me to note the location of the fire exits in case of a need for a rapid getaway?  Novice mistake number two. I eventually found myself in a small room with three young people and two ‘counsellors’ whose fixed grins and glassy eyes would have made them shoo-ins for leading roles in ‘Captain Scarlett and the Mysterons’.  They may even have had strings.

We were required to fill in a short questionnaire: What works in your life?  I’m there filling in the boxes.  ‘Me, almost non-stop’. What doesn’t work? My idle sons.  Top of the class, me.  Please miss, can I be milk monitor?

There was group sharing of our issues. A youngster in my group couldn’t decide whether to move house or not.  Doh! There are only the two options – you do or you don’t.  Toss a coin. That’ll be fifty quid.

A young woman complaimed that although she was following a rigorous diet and exercise programme, she wasn’t making any progress towards her fitness goals.  ‘Are you a professional athlete?’ I enquired in a tone she mistook for caring.  ‘No’ she replied ‘I’m a receptionist’.  Possibly not going to hold you back in your giddy career path then?

Next problem. ‘I am forty, married to a man with a low paid job and I want to give up work and have a baby’. Do you think this course could help me to achieve that?’ How exactly? By waving a magic wand?  The correct answer is that you can’t have the happy housewife fantasy, like most people.  Don’t hand over that cheque to the Mysterons, I’ll take cash.

This ninnyist inability to face and deal with reality is what comes of all this political correctness.  You can’t have it all and no course in the world is going to come up with an answer to that, however much it costs.

We have somehow created a nation of people who can’t blow their own noses.  No wonder they don’t vote – that would involve making a decision.  And I’m sure you’ll join me in sending them free of charge the six short words that will really change their lives.

Grow up and get a life.

 

 

Do not, dear Reader, be deterred by the title.  My son once told me that whatever essay title he was set for his homework he would dismiss it in the first sentence and then write 2000 crisp words on whatever was occupying his fevered teenage brain that week.  How Sir must have looked forward to marking time.

I have just been on holiday and very nice it was except for the 50 minutes that we queued to get through passport control on returning to Heathrow.  One hates to pull rank but really.  Surely someone somewhere has the intelligence to think ‘Hmmmm.  A mother and two sons returning to their country of birth after a brief absence from an extremely sedate destination with British passports.  I expect we could shorten this intolerable wait by employing the airport version of a Triage Nurse and giving such people an express ticket” or is that beyond the wit of a civil servant?  Answer, sadly, yes.

I shall therefore in a spirit of compassion and understanding for the less able give you a few tips accrued over many, many years to make your own trips more bearable.

It is a FACT not even worthy of further discussion that no holiday requires you to take nine pairs of shoes and certainly not in my suitcase.

There is a happy medium between arriving four hours early for the flight and having to be carried across the tarmac  at a run by two security officials.  Been there, done that. Not impressed.

Your travelling companions should be carefully pre-vetted for irritating habits.  Observe nose picking, hair twiddling, nail chewing (Continued on page 94) for long enough and you will snap ‘n’ slap. Never attempt a road trip with someone you already mildly dislike.  Days of such close confinement can only end in murder, first degree.  Other motoring hints: driving with the white line under the middle of your vehicle may enrage other road users.  If there is frost on the inside of the windows the air conditioning needs reviewing.  If your passenger screams you need to slow down, put both hands on the wheel and pay some attention.

It is worth checking before travel that your driver does not suffer from elective deafness in the ear nearest to the navigator. Do they know left from right and can they follow a simple instruction to turn in one of those directions?

A weak bowel or bladder is not conducive to happy travelling.  Administer drugs, covertly if necessary, rectally  if desperate.

Finally do not take directions from the doorman who you have tipped with loose change amounting to under a dollar.  It may well satisfy their sense of justice to picture you driving through parts of their city previously unknown to armed police, never mind witless tourists,   but it is unlikely to endear you to your passengers.

Happy holidays!

Another biblical upside of Easter is that without schools the roads of London open before you like the Red Sea.  Journeys which normally take days can be completed in minutes. I went to a meeting yesterday where every single person was there up to an hour early and wearing a look of post-Apocalypse shock at the ease of their journey.

Road chaos is not the only blight that schools cause.  I am reminded of one of the low points of parenting – and we are talking stiff competition here – parents’ evening.  Even Baby Jesus couldn’t raise this event from the dead.  A draughty sports hall where eighty odd, and I use the word advisedly, teachers seated alphabetically await their two and a half minutes in which to tell me what they most dislike about my son.

On one occasion I was tempted to seek out the German master who wrote in a report ‘Recently the veil of feckless incomprehension appeared to have lifted, briefly’.  Who says they have no sense of humour?

‘He lacks motivation’  they whine, teacher-speak for bone idle. ‘Then motivate him’ I say, locking eyes, that most dangerous of Mothers, the one that answers back.  ‘He’s an anarchist’ one complained, ‘and you encourage him’.  I blushed with becoming and hopefully unnerving modesty.  ‘His work is untidy’. His room is untidy – do I telephone  you and expect results? Do I ask you to tackle his constant demands for money, his ‘taste’ in clothes or his inability to floss? I do not, dear reader, because I imagine that they have better things to do, as do I.

One wretched teacher, and a woman at that, had the temerity to ring me in a SHOE SHOP in order to tell me that the boy had fallen asleep in an exam.  Wake him up then madam and can I try these in the navy blue?

What far off planet have these people come from that they imagine any teenager listens to his mother?  ‘Son, your works untidy’. ‘Message received Ma, I’ll sort that out immediately. Sorry you had to mention it’.  I don’t think so.  They have access to the child for eight hours a day without achieving any discernible improvement yet they sincerely believe that a swift word in my shell-like and all will fall miraculously into place.  Are none of them parents, or even residents in Real Life?

My revenge, never actually implemented, would have been a Teachers’ Evening. This would have been a twice yearly event requiring them to leave work early, struggle through rush hour traffic and sit on a small, hard chair in a dusty corridor in order to listen to a litany of complaints.

I would have served spectacularly bad coffee and Pound Shop custard creams and whilst waiting for their moment with Mother in charge of Personal Hygiene they could run their eyes over my collection of takeaway menus or inspect my pristine gym kit.

I could even have left my holiday snaps displayed on the wall and offer a short tour of the utility room with an option of rummaging through the lost proper basket.  The happiest days of my life? Could do better.

I was asked to talk to some schoolchildren recently (Can’t imagine what they must have done that I was presented as an alternative to a thrashing) and I related a story from my childhood, the harshness of which would have had it cut from ‘Angela’s Ashes’.

My numerous sisters and I had waist length hair which was washed weekly, probably in a character forming combination of cold water and carbolic soap and combed through without the benefit of either conditioner or compassion.  Any sign of protest was met with the traditional swift, sharp shock – usually a thwack with the back of a hairbrush and a reminder that one must suffer to be beautiful.

the amount of suffering that we collectively endured to that end makes it a national scandal that at least one of us didn’t go on to be crowned Miss World.

My older and very lovely sister had clearly taken this message to heart which she demonstrated during her teenage years by wearing plastic bags inside a pair of blonde, thigh-length suede boots so that they would not be stained by the blood from the blisters that they caused.  Beat that, Opus Dei.

Leaving A for agony brings me to b for burka and thence to the c-word, an expletive which never crossed my mother’s lips – C for comfort.  And for Childline to which, had it existed in those far off days, we would doubtless have been whining when we walked a mile barefoot across field every morning because she sincerely believed that it improved the complexion, especially if you didn’t die young of pneumonia.

The upside of the burkha  is that it enables you to drive your children to school wearing your pyjamas underneath without attracting the attention of the traffic police who seem to find nightwear behind the wheel hugely amusing when they stop you but that dear readers is a story for another time.

C is also for cruel, as was the remark that my son addressed to me the other day.  I later sent him a text informing him that I had gone to live in Syria where women were treated more kindly, even by Isis.  And he was C for contrite when I collected him from the station that night swathed in my makeshift burkha.

Next week

I once tried to explain to someone ( A Polish builder with minimal English which didn’t help) why in this country we have to eat pancakes, give up stuff for Lent, although obviously not alcohol as we did that in January or tried to, consume thirty hot cross buns each and buy ourselves industrial quantities of Easter eggs not withstanding the fact that only a minute percentage of us still believe in Baby Jesus.  Someone had to swear an oath in front of me this week and looked like an Easter bunny caught in the headlights when asked if he had a religion. He thought for a moment and then said ‘Christian’.  It would have been cruel to ask for something a little more specific – Evangelical? Catholic?- and in the interest of getting home before dark I resisted.

The church’s barrel has finally been scrapped when even, even the Archbishop of Canterbury thinks it would be more convenient if we just settled on a date and stopped basing it on Passover and new moons.  Has all this chopping and changing being upsetting your routine vicar?  Why not have Christmas permanently moved to Sunday while your at it? Would that ease your workload pet?

In confessional mood I must admit to hating Easter with a vengeance.  Even the names are stupid.  Good Friday?  Not for the main players it wasn’t. Nor as it happens for people enjoying our island climate.  In my lifetime there have been more snowy Easters than White Christmases.  A fact.  You probably can’t get a bet on it being warm and/or dry.  For the greater part of my childhood it meant four days out of the school holidays which were even duller than being in class.  Nothing was open, nothing happened.  You couldn’t even have thrown yourself under a train because there weren’t any.  A mountain size pile of chocolate only started to address the balance. Just.  And it was a mountain because my parents could remember rationing and it gave them the most enormous pleasure to be able to bury us in a landslide of confectionery.  That’s what we were fighting for!  Let’s hope that it wasn’t something else imported by Prince Albert…

 

 

Dry your eyes gentle readers and cease with the rending of the garments.  I know you have been adrift on an ocean on anxiety since Saturday but the delay is due only to an especially demanding week, both socially and professionally and by Saturday morning I couldn’t have written a shopping list, much less a few hundreds words to amuse you.

As you should know by now there are no lengths to which I will not go to excite your (and more importantly my) world weary palate. Step forward my account of a two day lock-in, unfortunately not of the licensed premises variety with which we are all too familiar but with policemen in a car, gilding the lilies that are my driving skills.  A terrifying prospect?  Only for them.

Fortunately the car had darkened windows, the better apparently  to deter stalkers which lowered the risk of me being seen by anyone I knew, primarily other traffic police.  It must be said at the outset that the instructors were sweet – kind, patient and gentle – although with hindsight they may well have been utilising their hostage handling skills as the days wore on.

it quickly became obvious that they needed to spend more time with people other than the criminal classes. By any criteria you care to name a gulf the size of Wales separated us.  When they asked what car I normally drove I replied”Whichever one I won’t have to reverse out of the drive” and they thought I was joking.  It began to dawn on them that this was going to be a long voyage of discovery when they opened the bonnet.  My delight to discover previously overlooked carrier bag space was clearly not the expected response.  Their disappointment in my mechanical prowess was matched by my own when I found that the car’s make-up mirror wasn’t illuminated although I was impressed by the cunning way it could be tilted so that you could observe the car behind.  I may adapt my own vehicles.

Bless them, they thought it was magical that anyone could navigate solely by reference to shops and restaurants- they seemed to find they way round Central London using police stations and pubs, or vice versa.

They were literally staggered when I pulled in at the Savoy just to use the loo.  Like they have good hand cream at MacDonalds now?  As we swung past Harvey Nicks for the third time – not lost, officer, just trying to clock all the window displays – they asked me where one could park nearby?  Doh!  On those handy yellow parking guidelines obviously.

Their iron self control only came near to cracking as we drove past the Priory, the lunatic asylum to the stars. “Ever been there?” asked PC Jolly nervously, clearly expecting the answer to be in the affirmative. “Dozens of times” I replied before adding in a rare moment of compassion “But only visiting friends”.

We popped into Scotland Yard, probably so that they could collect tranquilliser darts but I wouldn’t recommend a visit.  There’s not even a gift shop.