Then too soon it is Monday afternoon and I am at City Lit in Covent Garden squirming under the eagle eye of Steve Bradfield who can spot a switch of Point of View before we even take our work out of our bags.   If, as one writer dared, you feebly put up your hand to ask a question or attempt to add to the discussion he says “No you cannot, just listen”.  We do not eat mandarins.

“He’s really good this term,” said a fellow writer as I was making a hasty exit after the first session.

“Really?”  I said sidling past, my eye on the door.

“Oh yes, he was shouting a lot last term.”

I’m already petrified and am unusually quiet for me, head down, concentrating.  Each of us in turn read out the pieces that we work on at home.  For some reason, and I thank whoever it is in heaven who is looking out for me, he passes me by.  Other writers have read at least twice.  Each week I hurry home for another week of frantic editing.

This is a little piece I wrote for last week’s class – How My Parents Met - which I am happy to share with you but for god’s sake don’t  let Steve Bradfield see it.

My mother wore glasses as a teenager but not when she went out dancing.  She stayed close to the wall and her girlfriends informed her, in whispers, whenever they noticed boys looking her way.  She would smile hesitantly across a blurred dance floor that separated the boys from the girls.  My father walked the length of the room in his new suit and Winklepickers to ask her to dance.  Her eyes may have been weak but she knew how to move to the ‘50s rock rhythm and so did my father.

When the band stopped playing, he enquired whether she would like a drink.  She knew it was sophisticated to ask for a gin and tonic but she asked instead for a bitter lemon.

“Bitter lemon?” he replied incredulously.

He pronounced the word “bitter” without sharp sounding “t”s  but she liked a man who could dance, even if he was a cockney.  He took her hand as he led her away from the dance floor and she wondered if  this was a man who wouldn’t mind about her glasses.

Years and two children later, they still rocked together at parties or in the kitchen when one of “their” songs came on the radio.  My father would lead my mother by the hand, all the time watching her face, confidently turning her and reeling her in and out to the beat.

Turkey.

My cousin Christine’s daughter is cooking the turkey for their whole family this year and already Christine is in a panic worried that Katie will not get the food on the table all at the same time.  Although it is not hard to place a large fowl in the oven,  getting five veggies, pigs in blankets, stuffing, cranberry sauce, bread sauce, and roast potatoes perfectly cooked, piping hot and ready at the same time is bloody hard work.

That’s my family, Christmas is all about food.

How  many times has Madre asked me if I have ordered the turkey?  Seven.

I have been lying.   Since end October.  I only actually ordered it last week.  I called up Norbert our local butcher in Genolier and was given a salient lesson on Swiss charm.  My phone here in London has been playing up.  This obviously infuriated him and he yelled at me for making him pick up the phone three times.  I presumed he thought I was a child – this happens sometimes with my voice – and calmly told him who I was, implying that we have been customers for years and hoping that soon the penny would drop.  But no, Norbert was having a funny.  I then placed my massive Christmas order, as I do every year and he gruffly repeated everything back to me.

Here in London,where the economy is not doing as well as Switzerland, customers are made to feel, if not special, then at least that their custom is appreciated.

Ah bon. He’s probably still annoyed with me after that year he sent Mr. J. home with two small turkeys instead of one large one and I called him threatening to send Madre over to sort him out, and gave him a sob-story about how my whole Christmas would be ruined if I opened the oven and presented two chicken-sized turkeys at the table.  I’m not kidding.  I don’t know whose turkey I got in the end and who got the two small birds, well actually I do, and strangely enough we are no longer on speaking terms.  That’s how far I will go because that is how much pressure I AM UNDER!!!  (English people understand this).

Last year it was Madre’s turn to go to my sister’s for Christmas and just as well as I got the timing of the turkey wrong.  I’m blaming it on the oven but in hindsight it possibly had something to do with the hour required to bring it to room temperature which I sort of forgot about.  I texted the chef in the family , my brother-in-law, who sent back the following:

“I’ve researched it and it appears that European turkeys take longer in the oven than standard UK turkeys”.

I fell for that one.

“Oh my gosh Mum,”  she says arriving home still pink in the cheeks from an excruciating hour of male and female reproductive organs.  ”It’s too early”, she wails. “It’s not birds and the bees it’s more like hawks and…and…locusts.”

Now that’s funny out of the mouth of an 11 year old.  I think she may be right about the timing as Lexi and her peers are not even into training bras but perhaps the lowering of the age of puberty over the last few years has prompted radical action by the schools.  I am informed that I will be receiving an email about doing THE HOMEWORK together with BOTH parents.

“There’s no way I’m doing it with Dad,” she says emphatically practically hyperventilating.  The email arrives in all its earnestness encouraging us parents to sit down in a calm manner and go through the sheets.  Every attempt by me to do so this week has prompted a shriek of disgust.

Until today, coming back from her birthday party in North London with four wannabe teenagers in the car the conversation – riding on by the sugar high of the afternoon- turns to THE HOMEWORK which is due tomorrow.

There are times when I realise that I am not alone on this planet trying to walk that fine line of being a cool parent but still managing to raise a decent child and  I laughed inwardly at the other parents’ attempts to get their offspring to write Scrotum and Fallopian Tube on a piece of paper.

Child G remarks “My mother suggested we do it at cocktail time.  As it was the only time the whole family would be together!!!!!!”

This is received with gasps and OMGs from the three others wedged together in the back.

Child A retorts.  ”Sacha said that her Dad knew more about the female anatomy than her mum.”

I tried not to think too much about that statement as we will soon be having drinks with Sacha’s parents and I do not want to be in the position of blushing over the olives.

We get home and there is no avoiding sitting down and getting on with it.

Mr. J. is banished from the Living Room.

We are flummoxed by the drawings.

“It looks like an alien, or a mouse’s head,” Lexi remarks.

I turn the paper 180 degrees and we begin.

My Great-Grandmother's Sister's Grandson.

I’m struggling to gain footage in reality after a rocking yoga weekend culminating in an afternoon of tantric meditation.  I’m “away with the fairies” as my sister would say.  So I go to a book shop to find myself.  Book shops were a major argument for coming back to England.  And I would be quite happy to die in Daunt’s Books on the Fulham Road.  I need some light reading so pile ‘em high and wander over to the cash desk where Adonis has descended to earth for the afternoon and I watch my chances of being considered evenly remotely interesting in a Mrs. Robinsonish way as he zaps: Nora Ephron’s “I remember nothing” (obviously has age issues – possibly Alzheimers?); Jonathan Safran Foer’s  Eating Animals (yawn…another veggie give me a woman who eats); Sloane Crosley’s I Was Told There’d Be Cake (a nutter); Natascha McElhone’s After You (over-sentimental); and Dale Carnegie’s How to make friends and influence people (snigger).  So I’m a mad, friendless,over-sentimental ageing woman flirting with becoming a vegetarian and suffering from Alzheimers.  I stagger home wishing I had a least picked up the latest Monica Ali, and collapse onto the bed.

My pride and joy is here from Uni and he cooks me a fab Mother’s Day Meal with the DNA thread left to him by Malachi my Irish grandfather,the best cook I have ever known.  The day after in Cecconi’s where I take him for lunch, he announces, much to my chagrin, that he knows he is a disapointment to me as he didn’t turn out to be a gay ballet dancer.  He is a 6ft rugby player.  On my suggestion we go next door to Abercrombie and Fitch’s flag ship store to buy him jeans as the H&M ones are not cutting it.  He is amazed at the girly boy shop assistants standing around watching themselves in the mirrors.  ”I can’t believe they do this.” We grab our over-priced jeans and make a speedy exit.

Madre comes to stay for Lexi’s birthday dinner and when the conversation turns to the late Liz Taylor and Richard Burton she announces.

“We’re related,  you know.  My grandmother and his grandmother were sisters.  He was a Jenkins in real life not a Burton.”

My welsh ancestry never ceases to amaze me and I am delighted as Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? was a seminal experience for me.

I am monosyllabic, speechless, lost for words.  So out of character.  My word synapses are sizzled with over-firing.  I’ve spent the past week with Madre.   The weather was beautiful so we stayed put and sat in the garden. We had people over for  lunch in fact we took all our meals in the garden watching the bees flitting around the lavender inbetween breaths. 

One of the very good things that happened to my father – along with the years he spent in the navy – was meeting my mother.  Such a taciturn character (a gene that none of the women in the family inherited) and a sweet, kind man (ditto for me at least) they balanced each other perfectly.  I know sometimes his taciturnity drove my mother mad and probably her loquacity drove him mad, but until he was cruelly taken from her, their’s was a very happy marriage as neither looked for perfection in the other or made the other responsible for their own happiness.  That’s why I will be with Mr. J. until one of us kicks the bucket or he kicks me out.

*****

The boy is back from Luffbra via Newquay sporting a yellow head.

 ”It was a prank for charity.  Five of us did it.  We went to the pound shop.  Funny.  It turned out a different colour on each of us.”  The same five will shortly be visiting us here in Switzerland so if you see five sporty looking lads with orange/yellow/white heads having a larf, you know it’s Ollie’s crew.

“It’s better than a tattoo,” said Madre wisely.

*****

And yesterday Alexia’s top secret farewell party organised by the very forward thinking Ellen and her mum Sarah which took place in our garden.  The whole school year was invited to celebrate the end of their junior school years and to wish Alexia luck in London.  Twenty-one kids swam, ate and boomed away the late afternoon.  Sarah had made a photo album for Alexia and asked each child to write a message which will be perfect in London as a reminder of her friends back home.  It is Rabbit Boy’s turn to write.  He with the Rooney ears, rough edges and parents who breed rabbits for the table and eye us expats suspiciously.  His name is Mikael and as Sarah hands him the book to annotate, the whole year huddle around him.

“Bravo Mikael.  Well done Mikael, look how well you did that A.  Bien fait, tu t’es très bien concentré.”  Squeezing the letters out of this sweet country boy is a team effort and no-one gets left behind.

At the end of the summer Mikael will go down to Nyon to a special learning school.

“Did you like Mikael mummy?” asked Alexia as she drifted off to sleep.

“Very much so.  I think we should invite him again. I don’t think he gets to swim in a pool very often.” 

At the end of their junior school years here most will go up to the big secondary school in the next village over.  Some will go onto smaller private schools and some will go to schools for those with learning disabilities.  Alexia going off to her school in London is more privileged than Mikael there is no doubt, but only on a material level.    They have lived 25 metres apart,  breathed the same air, played on the same football pitch and attended the same village school.  In Switzerland everyone gets the same start and no one can say whose life will be better.  Let us hope they will both have beautiful lives but most importantly let us hope that Mikael and Alexia will always be friends.