Over in London this past week for two days with Mr. Jules. We are looking for a place to live. THE BIG NEWS IS that as from next September we are transferring over to the UK for a couple of years. I KNOW! I’m excited.
As you faithful readers of this blog already know, Ollie, my eldest, is in the UK, studying binge drinking and rugby at Loffbro Uni and his departure changed the whole family dynamic and my “raison d’être.” I wasn’t the only one. Early in 2009 Sophie-G. started her offensive with the winning sentence:
“I can’t stand the idea of studying Maths and a science until I’m eighteen and I know I will have to give up my dancing in the final year of my Bac if I am to get anywhere near a pass.”
She was preaching to the choir having hopeless failed my maths O level with a U grade. The A level system was starting to look a better option for her and when we found a school with a dance and theatre programme just outside London it all started to make sense. It was time to move on.
I realised that I too had to think about growing up along with the kids and so I’m looking at an MA programme in Creative Writing at London Uni which is my old stomping ground and so the circle is complete. Plus Mr. J. rather likes the idea of going out with a student.
The trip over last week was great – Mr. J. proudly drew his Oyster card from his wallet as we got off the plane whilst I had inexplicably lost mine – saw lots of friends, drank too much and viewed many, many apartments which you can imagine is not easy with a Swiss property developer in tow. What the public school boy/estate agents call “charming” i.e., windows that no longer fit in their frames, dodgy pipes and drafts that could knock an infant flat, Mr. J. calls dégueulasse, dangereux and gonflé. But what was really nice and genuinely “charming” were the manners of these chappies who showed us around like glorified butlers managing large estates. We went to see an abandoned project in Basil Street on the market for a king’s ransom and it was an oscar winning sales performance given by Harry as he avoided the bags of cement, bricks and old pipes strewn around the floor. Mr. J. needed a sit down and a double decaf to recover from that one.
Delightful Edward got very excited about a property he wanted to show us. “It’s very quiet, all you can see are views of the park.” I had a hard time convincing him that I essentially live in a park in Switzerland and what I want is to hear the rumble of traffic with the wiff of a London bus in my nostrils as I skip along to the wine bar and M&S Simply Food on the corner.
You will still get updates from the riveting life of a Swiss village because we will be here in the school holidays so if it this that you are thirsting after (and not the neurotic musings of a writer/mother/wife trying to make sense of the world) it will be here alongside London life in the shoes of a more-Swiss-than-she-thinks returnee. Sort of Heidi goes to London review. For once Mr. J will be the foreigner with the dodgy accent. In a sense I will also be a bit of a foreigner in my own country having last resided there in 1982 and never as a tax paying adult.
I hope you will continue to enjoy reading the new blog, with a London slant, as I monitor my progress in one of the world’s most exciting capitals.
This morning I received another email from my sister and this is where things start to get worrying. Yesterday she had to call The Gas Man out in an emergency and as she was already at work she had to direct him to the house. She told him to look for the spare set of keys under the rabbits. Ten minutes later she receives an exacerbated phone call from The Gas Man who can’t find the hutch and must be at the wrong house.
“Is it the house with the blue car outside?”
“No. I don’t know anyone with a blue car,” she says emphatically.
She redirects him and then the penny drops.
“The rabbits are made of stone,” she says coldly stopping herself from inferring “bleeding obvious” as, of course, it isn’t to him.
Back goes The Gas Man to look for Peter Rabbit and Benjy Bunny by the back door.
“Whose blue car is that then in your drive?” enquires The Friendly Gas Man.
”No idea. It is quite worrying,” says Sally thinking she will have to go home to check in her lunch hour.
Later that morning Sally gets a phone call from her partner, Mike.
“Can you pick me up tonight? I left my car at home this morning.”
That would be the blue one he has owned for the past four years, parked in the drive.
I’m seriously worried about the origins of my gene pool.
I’ve had a flurry of email exchanges this week with my sister regarding my UK family. Firstly she gets a call early in the week from Madre to say that AJ (Madre’s sister and Aunty Joan to you and I) can’t get through to her on her mobile and wanted Sally to tell her why?! After a series of phone calls from Sally in her office in Shaftsbury elbow deep in calculating staff salaries and really not in need of distraction, she surmises that the two of them are sitting in Madre’s car outside AJ’s house. She decides to forego the desire to enquire as to the logic of the whole situation and with a heavy sigh turns to the job at hand and sure enough it is soon revealed that AJ can’t get through on speed dial because the phone she is using does not belong to her.
This grannies-on-their-mobiles situation followed on from last weekend when my sister found herself driving up from deepest, darkest Dorset (we always refer to Sally’s choice of abode as deepest, darkest Dorset I think it may have something to do with the fact that none of us have ever forgiven her for leaving Hertfordshire although I can talk) to do her filial duty in the TV department of John Lewis. Madre’s telly had died after 14 years – older than the family dog Snowy who was coaxed through his final years with a cup of tea and asprin every morning. Being Madre (a war baby) she had to wait for the sales and so had sat through all of last December looking at Strictly, Eastenders and Antiques Roadshow through a three inch band which only stops its flickering after twenty minutes.
It apparently took three rounds of the TV department and three breaks – two for the loo and one for a lengthy lunch after just twenty minutes of arriving , before she finally made her choice and her massive television is due to arrive this Thursday. Cousin Christine’s lovely hubby Christopher who gets called out on a regular basis - and who secured his place beyond the pearly gates years ago – will be going along to Madre’s to install the behemoth.
The time spent in the TV department of John Lewis with Madre, has now, I assured my sister, secured her a permanent place next to Archangel Christopher, and we laughed along with Madre who admitted that she went all dithery in the face of the technological wonders in the television department. She sent me a thank you email for her JL vouchers “I am lucky to have such lovely, generous girls as you and Sally but that DVD you got me for Christmas was only o.k.” – in Madre speak this means UTTER RUBBISH!!!
“Don’t you remember? It was just after my mother died and you said, get on the next plane and I came out with James who was around three and we were decorating the tree , oh and that was the time you introduced me to balsamic vinegar -
That’s what old friends do; they interject bits, speak in shorthand, because they know that we get it. We have been through marriages, divorces, falling outs , near death experiences (mine when we were snorkelling in Egypt and I got into trouble and she swam back to save me) and deaths of loved ones. I know the exact period when her mother died so young and how it hit her like a piece of volcanic rock straight through to her core which left her faithless and reeling and raw. And she knows how hard it was for me at my father’s funeral distraught and pregnant with Lexi, because she was there.
- and we came up here to ski for the day and we sat on a chair lift and I turned to you and said..”
Here I interject,
“I feel closer to my mother up here.”
And if I die first or if she dies first we know that we can count on each other.
Well let’s start the new year blog posting with a bang. I had a little look at some of the other bloggers in my sphere for inspiration and god are they boring. One wrote a posting about changing her name to Zelda (after Zelda Fitzgerald no less) a requirement of being put back into a will or something – as if it were a daily occurence to the likes of you and me darling – and another let her daughter write and by that I mean actually get hold of the keyboard and type - spelling mistakes and all. Now you, dear reader, get the odd posting from my daughter Alexia-Rose but YOU ALL KNOW THAT IT IS REALLY ME taking the piss out of myself and my family. Postings from authentic nine year olds are NOT interesting, the syntax is crap and the spelling not even cute. Please take note all bloggers who feel the urge to exploit the under tens. Much better to write à la Sue Townsend in the mind of Adrien Mole. Now that’s funny. Thine own therapist, bring it on.
I may be high on oxygen just having returned from the mountains or Lexi’s headlice shampoo – yes again – but I pledge not to write any pretentious bull this year and if I do you can complain. In fact I should put a bullshite-o-meter icon on the front page for you to buzz me with. If anything I hope you see me as an honest warts-and-all writer providing a glimpse into a normal female’s life (one without pretentious claims to the name Zelda) trying to be more than a mother and sometimes dutiful, although to be quite honest not always, wifelet to Mr. J.
Life is hard, life is beautiful and I won’t try to tell it any other way.
PS Thoughts in my head these days: Why are there so many unhappy women in their fifties? It’s healthy in fact its essential, to have a really big argument with your partner once a year, preferably between Xmas and New Year; Is physical pain coming from our conscious mind i.e., my lower back problems and Mr. J’s neck injury? see www.martinbrofman.ch. Why did I eat so much and sabotage the two kilos lost from flu just before Xmas? Should I invent the headlice pillow a potentially lethal murder weapon but huge money spinner?
