The Coming of Age. June. Part 1.

1st June. I see Eric from across the road mowing his verge and hurry over to ask him about his safari holiday. I am dying to hear all about the elephants and lions.

'It was awful,' he said. 'They live in huts and have hardly any furniture. I've never seen anything like it. It was filthy.'

I realise he is not talking about the animals. He hasn't yet recovered from the shock of seeing a third-world country where no-one mows the verges.

they were supposed to be conveyed to their hotel from the airport in a coach and what turned up was an ancient Land Rover. They climbed in and realised that their luggage was being tied on the outside of a battered Citroen which drove off at top speed. Eric's wife Nora shouted out 'They are taking our luggage', and leapt out of the Land Rover and ran down the road after it and immediately fell into a pothole, spraining her ankle. Eric was very shocked by the state of the road, which was just 'sand, rocks and holes'.

'She is still laid up,' Eric tells me. The Citroen belonged to the hotel after all.

'I couldn't believe they all drove such terrible old cars.' he added.

'What about the Game Lodge,' I ask, 'and the elephants and things.'

'Oh that was all right,' he siad, 'but Nora couldn't sleep because of the lions roaring.'

4th June. Today I have to pack as there are yet more travels in prospect. Mine this time. Sarah and Harriet are taking me to Dublin for the weekend as a birthday present. I’ve done more travelling since Martin left me than ever before. He didn’t believe in travel unless you went to live with tribal peoples. Otherwise you were meant to see the whole world in a grain of sand. Or visit his mother.

Anyway I chose Dublin for my birthday weekend because of the Irishmen I met ski-ing who made me laugh a lot. I like Guinness too. We are going to be a large party, with Sarah, Roland, Alice and Letitia, Nanny, Harriet and Russell, Alex and Alex’s best mate, Jools. Alice and Letitia have already been abroad several times in their short lives. Best mate Jools, never.

5th June. As we all muster at Stansted, I worry about the group dynamics. Jools whispers to me that Nanny is very interested in Alex, he can tell. Sarah and Roland are devout foodies. Harriet is a vegetarian. Jools has never knowingly allowed a vegetable to pass his lips (unless it is a potato in the form of a chip). Later that day while we sample the best of Irish in a seriously good restaurant, Jools slopes off to eat Chicken McNuggets at Macdonalds. He slopes off several times a day to replenish the McNuggets in his digestive system.

6th June. Sarah is very worried about him. How can he possibly stand upright without extra virgin olive oil, free range eggs, organic carrots and wholemeal brown bread made without genetically modified ingredients? All her cherished beliefs are threatened. Mind you, he does look rather pale but I think that is because he and Alex spent last night on the town where they gatecrashed someone’s stag night which involved a lap dancer and Guinness drinking competition.

Apparently Dublin is the stag and hen night capital of Europe. I know this because Harriet and I were in the pub earlier in the evening and someone told us. We were also given a graphic and rather too detailed description of what the lap dancer had been paid to do to the bridegroom-to-be. I learnt quite a lot. I spent the night before my wedding with my cousin sedately eating a Chinese take away with my hair in pin curls.

Jools is without a girl friend at the moment and this is why he has been asked to join us. He has been having mysterious troubles with his penis and has recently had to be circumcised. This was rather painful and he held many long conversations about his ‘old man’ on the phone with Alex.

We do the Joyce tour of Dublin and drink lots of Guinness. In the evening we find a pub with Irish dancing and folk music and drink lots of Guinness. The young girls dance wearing positively nun-like costumes and with very still, erect bodies. Their feet move like the clappers. It must be Irish Catholicism.

All the men in the pub roar and bang their beer mugs on the tables. A small elderly man sidles up to me, grabs my hand and kisses it, while gazing up into my eyes.

‘Now couldn’t I get you a drink?’ he asks.

Alex grins at Jools then says ‘Go for it Mum.’

‘You’re in there,’ Jools adds, smirking.
I’m not sure that my children treat me with proper respect because just as I am about to politely refuse, Alex gives me a matey jab in the ribs with his elbow and I topple towards the man, putting out my hand on to his shoulder to save myself.

Sarah says ‘Mum, behave yourself.’

She has changed a lot since she was a teenager.

‘It wasn’t my fault’ I say and then find myself saying to the man. ‘Yes, I would love a drink. Thank you.’ Luckily I really love Guinness because there I am sitting at a table in the corner with a pint in front of me. I have already had two halves. I look defiantly across the bar which is heaving with people crowded paunch to behind all laughing and talking loudly, at Sarah and Roland. It is my birthday weekend treat after all.

I am having a lovely time, laughing perhaps a little too freely at some wonderful Irish stories when I notice Sarah and Alex talking intently to each other. Roland is looking at his watch. There is no sign of Harriet and Russell.

Alex fights his way over to me, interrupting a long and lively story of trees, peacocks and wallabies in Phoenix Park. I wish I could remember it. I tried to recount it to Alex later but forgot all the funny bits.

Alex speaks softly into my ear. Sarah and Roland have to go back to Nanny and the children. Harriet and Russell have already gone. He and Jools will rescue me whenever I need to be rescued or escort me home whenever I want to be escorted.

‘That’s my son,’ I say proudly to my new friend.

‘He can’t be. You look far too young to have a son that old. You must have been a child bride.’
I smile smugly. Several other regulars join my new friend at the table and flirt with me. I have a wonderful evening and am, a little unsteady, taken home safely by Jools and Alex. I think Alex was so overcome by the responsibility for his aged mother that he forgot to drink.

We all have a good time. Harriet and Russell are very pleased with themselves. Sarah and Roland give them lots of advice about being parents. None of the things I worried about beforehand, like falling into the Liffey, Sarah quarrelling with Harriet, losing Alice and Letitia to the white slave trade, Harriet having a miscarriage, being taken hostage by the IRA or strangling myself on the escalator at the airport, happened.

I was given this lovely new scarf by Sarah. It is very long and I toss it round my neck in what I hope is an insouciant way, but I keep being reminded of Isadora Duncan.

7th June. I catch up on the local news when I return home. The Reverend Mr Scuffling’s notion of a pageant plus Piers Hackett’s rebuttal of the story, has brought forth all sorts of local legends. The Chairman of the History Society has asked for volunteers to go and record these. The devil seems to have been much in evidence, dropping hills from the sky or carrying off adulteresses. It is a good job he isn’t around at the moment, in spite of all the stories about Satanism that arise whenever anything happens in this town, he’d have his work cut out. Another story given much prominence is the tale of a fairy that appeared in a yew tree in the churchyard and told two sextons who were digging a grave that there was gold buried there.

8th June. I have a terrible shock. I am drying my hair and holding up hair dryer when I look in the mirror and notice curved layer of flesh hanging down beneath my right arm, like a shaped pelmet. Where has this come from? I lift up my other arm and it is exactly the same. This has happened overnight. What should I do? I could take up a course of exercise but decide instead to throw away all short sleeved T-shirts and blouses.

Go through wardrobe and chest of drawers and make a pile of now useless garments. There is nothing left to wear on top in the summer except a linen jacket and a navy blazer. Put everything back in drawers, wardrobe etc.

I have to do some food shopping so set out to walk into the town. Half way there I realise I haven’t got my glasses so cannot see to buy anything. I return briskly back home to collect glasses, and shopping list also left behind. Then I scuttle back down the garden path only to stop dead as I see Tripletmother and Phil Mitchell unpacking their shopping from their car. I duck and pretend to weed the flower bed, hoping they haven’t seen me. I used to be part of a couple once. Did I seem so complacent I wonder, so bubble-wrapped? Suddenly loneliness envelops me like a sea mist. Why do I stay here? I could go and live in Dublin where men kiss my hands in pubs.

They take some time to complete the unloading and I do a useful amount of weeding. Only later when paying for my shopping, do I realise that my fingernails are full of mud.

I am just coming out of the bank when I see the nice man who helped me with the rubbish at the tip. I look towards him and smile shyly. He looks at me blankly.

I do nothing for the rest of the day except eat a whole packet of liquorice allsorts and re-read a Rex Stout novel where enormously fat Nero Wolfe sits all day solving crimes, cooking gourmet meals and tending to his orchids. Nero Wolfe does not suffer from guilt about this self-indulgent lifestyle. He just does what he enjoys doing and refuses to do anything else. I resolve to do likewise in future but hopefully without becoming enormously fat.