Ding Dong the scab has gone

Posted on December 28, 2025 by theharridan

It really is a Christmas miracle. I woke up on Boxing Day with a top lip that looked a bit blistered and ever so slightly coldsore-y, but I soldiered on through the Selfridges sale ignoring the swelling and avoiding my reflection in the overstimulating mirrors as I tried on various polka-dotted flamenco dresses and stiletto heels and then yesterday, discovered that it was, in fact, a case of herpes simplex which had decided to RUIN MY CHRISTMAS LOOK. (This Christmas Look included a new violette_fr glossy lip stain which was obviously terrible timing). Anyway, not to be deterred from my relentless Christmas social gatherings though ashamed of my lip which was by then quite fat and germy, I went to our first Cleveland Square Christmas BBQ and hoped for the darkness to descend, ruefully expecting the full blistering scab to be revealed in the morning.

Note the sad eyes and hidden sore:

Reader, it has healed. The scab has (mostly) gone. Was it the cold? Was it the cremant? The cheese pie overload? Who knows, but I have never been gifted such a bodily miracle as this. Even chatgpt was convinced it would be another ten days of unsightly infectious rupture. So I am entering this end of year reflective, only slightly scarred, and ready for many more outings where I can prance around in dresses and not feel too awkward about my swollen scabby germy herpes face – touch wood, etc etc.

Which brings me neatly to a roundup of all the happenings since last time. I went to New Zealand – no small thing, quite the trip – to check in on mum and dad, and ended up helping them rehome a kitten. That turned out to be the greatest thing for them, probably second only to their children coming back to live in the same country as they do which is never gonna happen, so a cat it has to be.

Here’s me and Cath after the flight (that flight!I would much rather go through 24 hours of labour). Note the tired eyes and fragile self:

So Cath picked me up from the airport and took me into town and we had lunch in a lovely place and discussed all of the serious things we must discuss and then she took me back to the airport so I could catch a flight back up north. Thank you Cath, for being a jolly good pal.

Then it was ten days of spending time with my parents, and sorting out the wifi and the accounts that dad had paid too much money into, and power of attorney stuff and bank stuff and doctor stuff and a bit of surreptitious fridge clearing (I tried, Reader, I tried), and even one day of sunbathing resulting in under-the-boob blisters.

A photo essay, if you will

Me and dad, back seat of the car. He’s never gonna drive again which is very frustrating for him but erm, probably a good idea for the general public:

A walk around the back of the library which brought back memories for them of when the river was dammed and there were public swimming pools and changing sheds there. No trace of them now, just some concrete foundations.

A tamarillo. I missed the feijoa season so had to make do with daily feijoa and apple juices. And daily pies:

Pohutakawa, New Zealand’s Christmas tree:

The Falls, just a quick walk from my old house and my old high school. Never took any notice of them except for the carpark being useful for making out:

Goldie, the 9 month old rescue cat. She has kept my parents animated, excited, exasperated, active, and bewitched. A cat might not be just for Christmas but seems very good for lonely elderly parents with no kids or grandchildren who ever visit:

My mum’s paintings from a bunch on the walls. A mere selection – my mother has been a prolific painter of things she finds beautiful:

And at the end, a wonderful day spent with Amber who picked me up from the airport, took me home, talked about all the important things we need to discuss, fed and watered me, and then dropped me off for my huge flight back home. Thank you Amber, for being my precious friend.

So I got back and it was a messy catchup at work until things got even more messy and pre-Christmassy and unravelling. I kind of think you sleep when you are dead and so try to say yes to everything, which meant a day trip there and back to Manchester for a conference a few days after I returned (delirium is the word here), and big nights out and endless parties and lots of work until, I guess, a cold sore arrived.

Here’s our annual Muppets Christmas Carol sing-a-long outing where for the first time the kids won the best dressed prize for their hand sewn jumpers:

A Monday night gig (!?! who even am I ?) – Brixton Academy for The Last Dinner Party with Chris:

And finally, a really brilliant time was had by all at a Harvey Nicks shopping thing where I am sampling (and now own) a Wales Bonner wool suit which is something I have wanted since the Ally McBeal “should I go to law school so I can wear a suit?” days. Mission accomplished, fellas. Mission accomplished. I plan to be all very brilliant and bossy at work this year as I strut the Canary Wharf corridors in my corporate gear, saying a lot of stuff about ROI.

And some Christmas stuff:

Merry Christmas to you. Here’s to more frequent updating (that’ll never happen), and strong immune systems for us all.

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Location House Wanker

Posted on November 1, 2025 by theharridan

Tuesday: The dog and I have been sitting in a functions room at The Torch pub, at the top of the road where it breaks away from the Wembley Park new housing complex/stadium/London Outlet Designer Outlet nonsense and instead rises all the way to that murderous (IYKYK), foragey-rich apple and plum haven of Fryent Park. We’ve been here since 7:30am when we were contracted to leave the house for a shoot – our first shoot – from then until at least 8pm. Unfortunately it is also half term so the poor children have been sent out in inadequate hoodies and a clutch of banknotes to go find something to do for 12 hours.

That is less of an easy task than you’d think, particularly considering it is autumn and the clocks turned back and everything has the whiff of a killer chill about it. And where do you go? The movies only last a few hours, and 10 quid each at the Lego store will take about 7 minutes to blow, and lunch will only get eaten and the park might be windy and six year old boys will probably get whiny and big teenagers who are obsessed by the gym will have to go fit in a session leaving the two little ones to aimlessly push each other on the swings behind the Waitrose in the old hood and wonder when they might be allowed back into the house.

So. The dog and I have been pretty ok, stationed in the makeshift production office/function room at The Torch which is a bar within a bar separated from the main pub by saloon doors and a clear case of ‘let’s not bother with renovating because people will need a function room regardless of whether it has been tarted up’ – complete with damp bits on the ceiling and peeling paint and toilets that are beyond scrubbing and carpets that do indeed have that undeniably cartoony sticky dampness of a suburban non-gastro pub. I had never gone to The Torch before because it is on a main road surrounded by tarmac and a few sad looking squares of overgrown grass and sunken plastic tumblers and hosts millions of football fans on event days, the kind of which you picture in your head when you imagine ‘football hooligans’. If we haven’t established this yet, I am too fancy for such places. I am, in fact, too fancy for Wembley. But for todays it’s ok – and the dog seems to like it.

Set the scene, I hear you screech. Well, there’s a catering deposit in black polysterene boxes of bacon rolls and sausage wraps and croissants and bowls for chia seed puddings and custardy desserts. Coffee and tea in canisters, napkins and wooden utensils and a huge barrel of water that dribbles out after each extraction all over the floor and onto the carpet which is probably a good thing. Lunch was a fresh catering dump of vegan curries and salads and cheesecakes and a chocolate tart which got everyone back from my house and filled up the room and got Magic moving. He was on a long lead and kept getting tied up in chair legs and overexcited by the attention so I had to walk him outside about seven times and ended up buying all the rawhide chew toys that Asda had to keep him from barking which kind of worked but made him fart which I think was annoying the poor production people. I hope they didn’t think it was me.

Later in the day I got a call from the producer who said I could come and see what they were doing at the house. It looked like this – hi vis guy, art department supplies, more snacks:

People in my bedroom doing looking and sitting:

People on the landing doing looking and standing:

People in the TV room and various other rooms doing more of the same:

And a woman and a lot of pasta in our bath:

So my big big house that fits all eight of us plus dog was suddenly this swarm of 30 people and lighting and cables and cameras and makeup and art department and security and people all doing very specific but hard to define jobs. It was the most fun I have had in Wembley ever. I miss people. I miss camera crews in the neighbourhood. I miss people who have media jobs.

One thing I couldn’t help but notice was that the house felt very full – not just with people but also with our stuff. Like, ‘oh no we have filled up another house in a hoarding-type fashion’ which the producer confirmed was a bit true. He said we had missed out on a lot of other jobs because people need to believe a house won’t take a lot of work to get the sightlines clear and with ours, all that glass and artwork and stuff, it was a bit of a pain. And my heart sank, while simultaneously making plans to go charity shopping for interesting things on the weekend. You cannot stop a lifetime hoarder, I think. And I like our stuff, but I also like location shoots where they give you the equivalent of half the month’s mortgage payment in a day, soooooo…….one to ponder.

The first job we missed out on was in June – not for hoarding reasons though PHEW. It was a Friday, I was in Paris (wanky but true), and I got a call to see if we could exit the house on the next day for 12 hours for an artist doing a Vogue shoot. I was soon ignoring my cafe au lait and frantically calling Mark to demand he says yes and figure out something for him and the kids to do for the whole day without me there to project manage, screaming ‘I DONT CARE WHAT YOU DO BUT IT IS VOGUE SO SAY YES’. We ended up losing that job because someone knew someone else with an alternative house. But look at who the shoot was for – British Vogue November 2025:

I literally cannot cope. And our house is better, too many glass vases or not.

So, we also went to Estonia to say hi to Barnaby who is there learning Russian until December and to celebrate my 48th birthday because I just keep steadily moving towards 50, regardless of how many botox injections I have.

I bought that fur jacket while there, in the brisk Estonian autumn. Also note my new fringe:

On the way to Estonia, I saw this man on the shuttle at Luton and I did a mid life freak out and took his photo. Super creepy. That’s who I am now. I can only apologise (and keep gazing at him):

IN OTHER NEWS

I will be in New Zealand Nov 10-22 so if anyone is around to witness new fringe and hear me talk about insufferable things like location shoots at my house, please HMU. You know where to find me.

(Whangarei). Ahem. Hoping to find a kete or two.

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Puglia: a photo essay

Posted on August 25, 2025 by theharridan

So we just got back from two weeks in Italy which of course sounds unbelievably fancy to a girl from Tikipunga. And it was so fancy. Here’s the ingredients to Fancy Vacation Pie:

  1. You need to research a country that everyone likes/wants to go to.
  2. Work out exactly who ‘everyone’ is. In our case it was a core group of two large families with kids around the same age who really like each other. Me and the other mum is my friend (critical) and cutely, the dads are friends who like each other very obviously but who shrug it all off and don’t make any kind of fuss over it. Jabbering about all sorts of stuff but playing it cool, like, ‘what? nothing to see here, just me and my man talkin’ shop right now’ general blathering, joshing about, making dad jokes and drinking beer. Then we had another smaller family join for a week and my darling Neradah come for a few days. At peak people, we had 18 of us.
  3. Find somewhere to fit you all. We decided Puglia would be good to go back to because last time it was brilliant and the memory of the flea markets made our eyes go all misty and then our chests tight with regret because of the Murano chandeliers that we didn’t buy. So we spent a long time trying to find two villas side by side but found instead a giant three storied 200 year old summer villa that still belongs to the same family, with pool and tennis court. Each floor had a sitting room and nine bedrooms in total, all with dressing rooms and ensuites and perfect, perfect furniture and paint jobs in faded shades of Wes Anderson. It had a huge lit area outside where we ate every night, plus a huge working kitchen, store room, sitting rooms, and SURPRISE! a chapel. It looked like this:

4. Do your maths, but loosely. Very importantly, this villa was a bargain. I don’t know why – probably because Puglia is still a bit of a poor cousin to the fancier bits of Italy – and maybe because the villa was near a slightly boring hill town. Maybe because the villa was a unmodernised and flaking dusty plaster and the wiring was screwy and the plumbing a little odd and the sheets still the same that people have been using since 1830. No matter – it was perfect and accidentally cool and when you throw 18 people into the mix, it was cheaper than some sort of horrendous all-inclusive resort place with tiny balconied rooms overlooking a communal pool.

5. We shared the food costs, hired a few cars/van, made a rough itinerary (thanks ChatGPT) and drank a whole lot of Campari. The sun was magnificent, the pizza plentiful, the religious icons numerous, the flea market finds glorious, the slippery marbled streets gleaming, the light a yellowy orangey dream. I found a ceramic 50s mirror for 40 euro and smashed my lip carrying it back to the others, then stuffed it into my extra hold bag (yes, that should have been point no. 6 – think ahead and bring too much luggage just in case) and hoped that it wouldn’t break. It did crack but not so much that superglue couldn’t fix it. Here it is, already on the wall:

Other notable stuff I managed to fit into the extra bag:

A little Murano pomodoro as an essential accompaniment for the Murano aubergine found in Paris a few months ago. Snigger.

The flea market which causes my heart to beat faster:

Highlights, we had a few. Taranto was a seedy, sexy little port town which felt very Naples-y. Like, perhaps someone might conduct dirty Camorra business down any one of the cat-piss alleyways, and if they did, and you saw them, you might die but equally there could be some good pizzeria to be had so you’d take the risk.

It looked like this:

Eating together was much more fun than it usually is at home with the usual thankless crew because we had a huge delightful kitchen and a big fat kitty to buy cheeses and straciatella to drizzle on peaches with honey and thyme and lime, and huge platters of cured pork permutations and bruschetta to be fancifully plating up, together. We all grabbed a drink and the kids put music on and we chopped and sang and made beautiful, beautiful things. Cooking for 18 people is a much better chore if shared, I tell you. Which is perhaps a mantra for life.

Monopoli. A day trip to this little port town was magical. Look at the rocks and the sea! It was perfect clear clean water, with manageable rocks to jump off for boys needing to flex a little:

My H&M leopard print one piece was outstanding though the tan lines were not optimal:

The kids were brilliant – mostly not too lazy, very funny, mostly getting along together, kind of ‘yes’ people rather than too much moaning. Heatstroke hovered nearby a few times but no one vomited. No one ended up at a hospital either which is a newish feeling. Many beers were drunk and there was a fair bit of competitive eating sessions between the teenage boys along with nightly tennis matches and opportunistic arm wrestling. Backgammon, Poker, and Hide and Go Seek in the dark pine forest were played. Cats were embraced. Milk disappeared regularly. Tans were worked on, Clash Royale was collectively played. Everyone made fun of my desire to constantly listen to Chappell Roan and Lola Young, and were scathing of my chatGPT usage. No one slept very well. We found a snake. The wasps and cat sometimes turned feral. I escaped the air con room of sub-zero temperatures to my own room with no one snoring and then this guy turned up:

It was magnificent and now we have 51 more weeks until we get to go somewhere again.

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This thing that happened at the hardware store

Posted on June 22, 2025 by theharridan

The third mortgage payment is looming up next week which I guess signals our third month living in a new world where, far from the cosy environs of comfortable and very fancy W2, strangers kiss you in the hardware shop, slug pellets and the destruction of ant hills becomes a whole thing, shawarmas and haircuts reveal themselves to be alarmingly cheap, and it transpires that not as many people visit you as you might have hoped. This is what loneliness in zone four looks like. Or is it zone five? Whatever it is, it is costing quite the eye-watering amount in transport costs back into the warm embrace of Old Home.

So, to the kissing situation. It was about four weeks ago that I went down to the little strip of shops at the end of our road to go investigate the replacement glass/framing situation at the hardware store. I had been delighted to discover a crowded, messy, old school shop just a minute from the new house, with brooms and plastic dustpans and faded 80s gilt frames in the window and a sign outside promising glass repair while you wait. In Bayswater there’s really no such useful thing – in fact, a good, hopefully cheap framer is extremely hard to find anywhere. They do get spoken about reverentially from time to time – apparently there’s someone in the Harrow Road who is quite good, and someone I know sends her work to a framer in Macclesfield, and there’s talk of a place in Shropshire, but that’s about it. And so over time you buy prints and photographs and save the odd good kid collage and stick them in a big folder and just…wait. You wait to have the framing/glass situation resolved by magic, and it seemed that this time, it might be.

So I wander down with my arms full of stuff and walk through the door which of course has a bell, and I wait while the man behind the counter serves a few other men buying paint and screws and masking tape. He then asks me to go down to the back of the store to his workshop – a big table with bits of wood and old frames and various sized sheets of glass – and he looks through what I have brought with me. He’s nice and kind, and we get along, chatting about me just moving in and what I was wanting – which kind of wood do you like? – and puzzling over a tricky frame and hmmming a bit. He throws a price at me which seems entirely reasonable and I think I have found The Place. I get excited and say thank you so much and actually, I will tell all of my friends about him and his wonderful prices and also that I might drop a few more prints down tomorrow to him. He says sure, that would be great, see you tomorrow.

I was working from home the next morning, as was Mark, so I went to see my framer guy at lunch time. Same deal as before – I wait while he serves his customers, and then he asks me to head down to the workshop to take a look at the work he has started. I am a little underwhelmed at some wonky wood and odd design choices but think, ah well, it is cheaper here than anywhere else and I could at least get them all up and out of the folder and on the wall. He comes over and tells me he likes my dress, and I say thanks, and we get into the next lot of work to do.

As we finish up, I start back towards the door, and he is super chatty and opens his arms for a hug. I think that is weird, but have had many weird hugs in my life and so just go with it. He then turns his head and gives me a dryish kiss on the lips which takes me by surprise – and then he goes in for a fully forceful kiss that is sexual and pushy and utterly without hestiancy or question. Just in there, fat and squashed and gross and shocking. I push him away hard with my hands on his chest and he lets me go and immediately resumes his former tone – chatty, friendly, happy – and tells me I need to drop cash off in the morning.

I’m reeling and awkward and embarrassed and grossed out and there’s a part of my brain which is telling me I did something to make him do that – I was too friendly/I was encouraging/I was not clear enough/I didn’t stop the hug/I was wearing that dress – and I didn’t know how to fix it and couldn’t work out if it was even a big deal so I just stammered something about my husband YES MY HUSBAND would come to give him some cash. I walked out through the dinging bell door, furiously blushing, my lips on fire, my mouth pulled into a wide grimace of distaste, puckered and ugly and sickened. I wasn’t sure exactly what to feel – furious? angry? I was embarrassed and grossed out, mostly. I decided not to say anything to Mark because it wasn’t a big deal really – just something kind of small, and gross, and Mark might make something of it, and that guy was nice until he decided to pash me and maybe I caused it somehow.

Of course though I got in and immediately ran to find Mark to tell him – I even acted it out for him to show him what had just happened, because I wasn’t sure about anything. He was calm. He just put his shoes on and I said ‘where are you going?’ and he said ‘I’m going to go talk to that guy’. I felt relieved.

The confrontation went like this:

Framer man says “Hello sir. How can I help you?”

Mark says: “What the *fig pudding* were you doing kissing my wife?”

Denial: “Oh no, I didn’t. I might have given her a hug but I do that with all my customers. Here, I’ll show you” going in for demo.

Mark says “*Fig pudding* off”

Then a bit of angry talk.

Framer guy took his glasses off and asked Mark to punch him.

Mark says “No, I’ll call the cops instead.”

Reader, he did indeed call the cops and they arrested the framer guy.

So then we spent the afternoon getting DNA swabbed and taking statements and being reassured by a very nice ex-PwC female cop that this was the right thing to do. I wasn’t sure. Framer guy didn’t get out until the next afternoon. The cops brought back the artwork but we had to drop off the frames which caused a whole other thing with the man’s son telling our son that his dad was a holy man and I was a liar. That we owed him money for the labour. That we would be arrested if we went into the hardware shop ever again.

It was all very tabloid headline with my brain running a tickertape along the lines of: “New white lady resident very mildly sexually assaulted by long-term reasonably-priced hardware shop owner. Shop shut for the first time in 40 years. The hardware store owner and his family involved in a police matter for the first time ever. New resident white lady must be protected.” Something like that. Argh – it was all so weird and sort of sad. Was he just feeling randy? How many times have I been kissed in that way which felt unwanted and gross? Did he know what he was doing? Should I have stopped it? Could I have stopped it? In that moment, was he calculated or just dumb? What part did I play in it? What part did I play? What part did I play?

In other news

Last night we went to a wonderful party but before we turned up Mark and I had a fight over sausage rolls and by the end of the night I was silently crying because he made a joke about me being hard work and after quite a few glasses of fizzy wine and with the sausage roll emotional bruise, that felt rather devastating.

Look how adorable we all looked before the tipping point! I seem so happy (though a little manic):

And here’s me with Casper as he shows me the quickest way to impressive biceps:

And the end of an era – Barnaby leaves his second year university flat that housed some excellent mates:

And finally, a weekend in Kent with some brilliant new Kentish friends for a wine thing which went really well until Mark got poisoned by a cod and vomited repeatedly in front of about 500 people:

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New old everything

Posted on April 19, 2025 by theharridan

We moved in almost a calendar month ago, into a house – detached – with four bedrooms and a very fought-over office, with two reception rooms, a garden, parking space, three loos, a massive loft, a staircase, and a house-worth of stuff leftover from the previous owners. From that stuff we have discovered we would have very much liked the previous owners because they were clever, liked a drink, liked a first edition book or two, liked a mink coat, bought good furniture and invested in good carpets and handmade blinds. They read and spoke various languages and entertained with cut crystal flutes and perfectly-sized martini glasses. They also had the good sense to leave a couple of little touches from the more religious Jewish couple before them, so we have a sukkah room out the back and mezuzahs on most of the internal door frames.

The house has good juju, so sayeth my friend Fiona, and she is right. It is an almost perfectly preserved 193os house but renovated in the 70s or 80s or bits here and there from the 60s – who knows, but the mid century stamp is clear. I was a bit worried that the stuff we had would look a bit mental here, but it turns out the old bird can handle it. And it turns out that this old bird (me) can also handle it.

We kind of rushed into the moving in, leaving our old place the afternoon of completion date, and then just arriving here and assembling beds and trying to find things and all just feeling a bit weirded out and stressed by it all. There was a steady stream of boxes and furniture and previously hoarded and unseen for years stuff coming in daily, so every time we (or a bunch of beautiful friends who kept turning up to help with wine and crackers and cheese and cards and fun gifts and muscles and cleaning products) cleared a space, it got filled again.

Reader, we are both more hoarder-y than I knew, and Mark even more so, and it is pathological and emotional and triggering and associated with all sorts of things, namely living here but thinking we didn’t, or not REALLY, and that we could just leave at any time and go back ‘home’ and saving up for what that might look like and how we envisioned it and the selves we thought we would become and the lives we thought we would lead, and the lives we wanted to lead, but not really because then we would have led them but we kept them there as a ‘maybe’ and when you see what you have amassed in a drawer or a storage facility it just takes your breath away. And then you have to make decisions, and the decisions are too hard. It isn’t just a yes or a no or a sparking joy thing – it is a ‘what is it, do we have one or need one, should we bin it or thrift-shop it or give it away or sell it?’ Then husband, he of grand pronouncements without the wherewithall or skills or desire or time to do anything about things, will jst state loudly that

‘That’ll be worth something. Let’s put it on eBay.’

And I’m like ‘Who should put it on eBay?’

And he’s like ‘Well, you have an eBay account so probably you.’

And then walks away after giving what feels increasingly like an executive order of the most Trumpian kind, leaving the world/me wrecked and reeling and furious and screwed. AND tasked with another bloody job.

We have also had and continue to have exhausting fights over

  1. the office space
  2. his brass antiques
  3. net curtains
  4. sofas and chairs
  5. doorknobs and fingerplates
  6. the white French armoir thing
  7. where his sailboats will go
  8. beer tankards
  9. my Victorian room divider
  10. the plastic lawn chairs
  11. a kitten
  12. trampoline
  13. oversized artwork
  14. house keys

The office thing is a huge huge potential divorce issue. He wants the office, but he is only there one or two afternoons a week. I am there in the office every day except for the one day a week when I go into Canary Wharf to the KPMG HQ. He has taken over 4/5th of the office, building in a huge desk and wall unit, taking the good chair, taking the corner cubbyhole, insisting on the industrial-sized printer that I think he uses about six times a year. He says that I can have a desk though I must exit the room when I have calls. It is so infuriating that I have kind of left the whole thing alone and obviously plan to colonise it back from him slowly, one scented candle and cute family photograph/pen arrangement/neat pile of notebooks at a time. You have to pick your battles and as you can see from the list above, I have enough to go on.

Wembley itself is a bit of a disappointment. There’s a huge 24 hour Asda a few minutes from the house but as I had to note in my Instagram stories a few weeks ago, all of the garlic is Chinese garlic which is Bad Garlic so the cheapness and the open-all-hours-ness doesn’t really cut through. There’s one fancy bakery, a Bread Ahead, with excellent focaccia and donuts and hot cross buns, but there’s nothing much else for a lady very used to W2 and all of its chic £££ness. Also, the dog keeps running away and the local neighbourhood app has turned on me in a very feral way because they think he escapes because he is starving (not true) and because I am a careless mother (middlingly true).

The good stuff about the new hood, if I am pressed, include:

a Post Office two minutes from the house which made me want to dance with joy in the street when I found it and was told the postmistress has been there for 28 years

an excellent cheap barber who cut Ned’s hair in a marvellous and perfectly constructed mullet

a glazier, hardware and framing store which looks like it has been there since 1952 (in the best possible sense)

a very nearby Timpson shop for shoe fixes

a pharmacy within Asda for the HRT refills

the tube with two great lines only five minutes from the house

a massive country park with ponds and paddocks and an acnicent woodland

a compost in the garden.

These things are indeed wonderful, though the pharmacy is super slow and kind of closed quite a bit, and the park is a bit tricky for running as it is full of big and little hills and dried muddy dips which look likely to trip me over. It is also quite famous for a recent double homicide of two women so…that feels disconcerting.

So it’s just a huge learning curve. I have closed a chapter and have to start a new one. It hurt, more in an anticipatory way, and now I have farewelled my friends and Remi’s school and the Waitrose and felt sad and odd when I went back to our old communal garden last weekend for an Easter Egg hunt because I was suddenly like a guest in my old, familiar home. Which is now an ex-home. Against my wishes. And I still am in love with it. And it doesn’t notice – it just takes the new wave of young enthusiasts who chat on the whatsapp group about the wonderful community they’ve been so lucky to find and I want to scream at them and tell them to piss off because we have only been gone two minutes and the bed/flat/my usual table in the garden is STILL WARM FROM ME AND MY FAMILY. But everything just moves on, doesn’t it? So I better move on too.

Photos of my new home with my stuff in it (including my friends):

And, lastly, a ChatGPT generated image of Magic the dog as a human running away from home:

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House hunting going pretty well, actually

Posted on January 26, 2025 by theharridan

We did it! (we think we did, anyway). You know there was a house that stole my heart and you know we didn’t get it, and it was back to the drawing board with less money than we had hoped for owing to exchange rates and tricky mortgage conditions and stamp duty (poke me in my heart with a sharp stick while I am bleeding out, why doncha) and everything was all about bitter compromise and developer-grey ugliness with a side of bad transport connections and too little floorspace?

Well, then that husband of mine sent me a message one Saturday about two months ago telling me to click on a link because he had found “the coolest 70s house”, and, Dear Reader, he had. So we visited the next day, only to find a whole detached 1930s house in a conservation area that had been done up in the 70s and EVERYTHING WAS STILL THERE – smoked glass cabinets, teak panelling, Heals furniture, paisley curtains, bronze textured wallpaper, cork lino, LEMON YELLOW TOILET AND BASIN, and pendant sputnik lights. There’s five bedrooms and a garden, with a garage, a sukkah room for Jewish festivities, a loft that would swell the place from 2200 square foot to a whole lot more. And it’s five minutes from the tube, with two lines – two stops to Baker Street or 20 minutes to Bond Street, and there’s an outstanding primary school five minutes from the front door (with Remi on the waiting list of three). We put in an offer two days later and tomorrow we do the exchanging of contracts which seems to be kind of sealing the deal (the system here is weird and slow and confusing).

It’s in Wembley which will take a bit to get used to, because, you know, 20 something years larging it up in Bayswater does funny things to one’s perspective and sense of normal. Like, Portobello Road Saturday morning strolls and Hyde Park being just over there, and Paddington Station two streets from the flat and Bradley Cooper/Woody Allen/Naomi Watts/Anthony Hopkins/Emma Thompson in our garden. The community, oh the community – the people everywhere who say hello on the way to get your Sunday morning paper, the friends who you met when dropping your kids off at nursery who are now parents of university students, the people you met through the dog. The neighbourhood which keeps changing shape, the restaurants that come and go, but you and your family are the constant. The hospital next to the station where all your babies were born; the doctor, the dentist, the schools. Our communal garden, that dear, precious, strange, beautiful, charmed ecosystem which gave us rest, play, lost afternoons, evenings where the band played and the fireworks took off, where we danced and drank and ate cake and cheese and drank tea and read the paper and kissed and survived the lockdowns. All part of our world – the children have never known anything else – which looks set to blow itself up.

There’s mixed feelings. It feels right, but underwhelming. Scary. And I was hoping for some Victorian tiles and a staircase and hidden fireplaces with original tiled surrounds. I wanted to be closer to our friends and our (old?) life so it didn’t have to feel so different. I wanted a Georgian wreck. I feel like I’m going to reenter suburbia and the interiors I grew up with.

Anyway. Wish us luck, I guess?

My phone made a slightly awkward video complete with sentimental music from the photos I took last time:

Here’s me with Charlotte, the wise Charlotte, with the best taste in interiors so she has to come along on all potential house visits:

The backyard (complete with adorable teens) which could for sure be turned into a Slim Aarons setup (note the sukkah room to the right):

The sobering bad news is that the mortgage is twice the rent, so, erm, no idea how to cover the extra. Spending less seems to be a solution but the thought of a budget brings me out in hives. Less childcare, no Waitrose, get a lodger? There’ll be more costs in transport but presumably we will be so happy with all the extra space we won’t ever go out again? Heating costs will probably suck. And will I get all DIY-ish and strip paint/rip up carpets? Time will tell. This is when everyone says to me

‘But just look at who you married – a real life builder-type-person!’

and I say

‘You know what they say about the cobbler’s children’…and the crowd goes silent.

Time will tell.

What else? Christmas was a lovely Devon-shaped week off, with that extra mysterious week afterwards where we threw parties and ate the leftover ham plus all the extra ham we could get from the reduced section. There was swimming and pulled pork and sleep-ins (Christmas morning didn’t kick off until 9am which signals the end of something quite big) and a trip to the tiny church to swell the congregation to double the usual numbers:

A little Woollacombe beach dune action:

An adorable teen shot from our Portobello Road excursion yesterday:

And this week it’s been all about Remi, darling Remi, who turned six on Thursday with a Friday night party complete with water balloons, pass the parcel, McDonalds, a whole roasted lamb leg, two cakes, and of course cheese:

Mark and I reached our 27th wedding anniversary and went out to The Park for dinner, only to get a bit argumentative when we started to discuss packing up the flat. It’s a sore point which delves into accusations of hoarding. But the rest of the evening was v nice, thanks. Here we are before we had three storage facilities, an overcrowded flat we are being forced to leave, and six children:

Big news, eh? Big house-y news. There will be plenty more of this, once the deal is certain. I expect I will get quite into kitchen plans (currently lusting after a larder and a bar) and Mark will be itching to convert the loft. For the first time ever we can have people to stay with us.

You’ll come all the way out to Wembley, right?

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How’s the house hunting going?

Posted on December 15, 2024 by theharridan

Well, not great. Unfortunately things got off to a bad start – expectations were raised to an unholy level – when we fell in love with Georgian wreck. Oh, what a wreck! And what a weird location, tucked away as it was at the bottom of your garden-variety London map, down by places we knew (Kew) but also, truthfully, along a bit too much near places like Hounslow and Isleworth that we had never heard of and/or definitely never visited. But it was a proper beauty, an architectural Miss Havisham, all faded and decaying but with beautiful bones. Osteoporosis bones, but beautiful all the same. So we visited and spent way too long poring over printed plans, and researched the history and found out about schools and bus routes and spoke to the mortgage broker and visited again with the kids and Charlotte (wise house-buying-advisor) and mentally moved in. We offered, then offered again, and one more time, and then finally put in a terrifying offer which made us both feel panicky and sick but giddy and excited. As our final gambit on our last visit, Charlotte grabbed the agent’s face in her manicured hands and told him ‘Let these nice people have this house or I shall haunt you in your dreams’ or something close to that, which he apparently took on board.

So it was all going so well, until the mortgage lenders said NO WAY JOSE THAT PROPERTY IS FALLING DOWN and wouldn’t lend on it. And we were like ‘but come on – Mark is a builder! We will do it up! It’ll be worth a whole lot more and we can camp out on the third floor and all pitch in and the kids can help and we will host Tidy Up The Garden With Us parties and there’ll be music and pizza and we could slowly do it up and live in there forever and love it and the kids could return there with their own families and we could have the biggest Christmas tree in there and just imagine the cocktail parties!’ but they said no.

So it’s been massively downhill from there. We’ve put offers on about five houses since (all of them looking mean and small with so many period details ironed out). Why do people take sash windows out and replace with aluminium? Why are floorboards replaced, walls painted in greys, tiles all beige like a hotel room, overhead lights pockmarking smooth, lowered ceilings and making everyone look harsh? If there’s a fireplace still left intact it’ll be no longer in use. Doors are cheap, backyards are astro-turfed. It is so depressing.

So now we are scrapping over the Plan B (or C, D, or E, depending on whether you count all of the other offers we have had rejected over the last month – all of the new bus routes planned, schools researched, tube options dissected, floorpans squinted over, calls to the broker to ask for new mortgage plans, budgets revised, stamp duty calculated, real estate agents called and met, site visits to new postcodes, hours and hours on Rightmove, etc etc).

It seems we all want something a little different. The kids want to be near their friends and school, Mark wants something big and roomy and easy, I want an interesting house in a jazzy location close to the tube. My heart belongs to the Georgian wreck though and everything looks like a spotty ugly weakling cousin compared to it. My first love, Miss Havisham. She’s been sold to a developer. She’s been stolen from me and it still hurts. I check every day to see if the listing is there and it still is, with the painful words “SOLD STC” cruelly stamped at the top as if that isn’t the most upsetting tiny phrase in the whole world. And Mark tells me to move on. Move. Moving. Moving somewhere, but where?

Apparently we have until the summer before we will be kicked out of here, and I KNOW the sensible thing to do is to stop looking and wait until the new year but that’s like telling an alcoholic not to drink all of the free champagne. I can’t stop looking and nor can Mark, and we send each other ridiculous houses (I really believed we could make a go of the glorious rickety 10-bedroomed rectory in Shepperton but Mark said an hour and a half commute every morning would probably break us all) and so we snarl and mutter under our breath as we dismiss the other’s choices and go cross-eyed trying to find something that doesn’t make us both cry.

So how’s the house-hunting going?

Not very well.

In other news, my meme game remains strong. When I am not on Rightmove, I send a lot of HILARIOUS memes to my children, and to their credit, they usually send an emoji back so as not to seem like they are ignoring me. They say the memes I send are a bit Karen-like and already quite old, but they are kind and gentle to me about it, so it’s a win.

Photographs to shift the mood:

Pizza-gate. I have started being brilliant on Fridays by roasting a yoghurt and garlic-marinated whole lamb shoulder in the afternoon, or by tray baking chicken thighs, chorizo, red cabbage and Bold Bean Co chickpeas so that by Friday at 5, when everyone is hungry and I am half a bottle of cremant down, there is food ready for the hungry hordes and I don’t have to get horribly expensive takeaways. But this Friday, on the back of an impossibly busy December, I relented and got pizza delivered. But the bastards only delivered four, not five, and they refused to give me a refund. So I got all het up about it and posted about it on Instagram (such a fighter) and called them and left messages and generally spent way too much of my emotional energy on it, and then yesterday I got an email from Deliveroo asking for photographic evidence of the problem. Which, translated, means a photograph demonstrating the LACK OF A PIZZA. The absence of a pizza. The pizza-shaped hole where a pizza should have been. So I photographed the four boxes and pointed out in a very pass-ag fashion that photographing the absence of a thing was difficult to do and so my recycling pile would have to suffice.

No response yet. Note the hungry and sad-looking Casper in the background, wasting away from the lack of paid-for pizza slices:

Handsome sons. Not much to say except these are fine specimens and they would like the world to know they are not only single, but also ready to mingle:

My school photograph dug out for a work thing. Hand knitted mum jumper (thanks Jude) and really quite impressively ratty and mullety hair:

Remi decorating the tree very well indeed:

My handmade wreath (which only looks good because of the double bow and lots of help from the teacher):

Bookclub shot from last night. Amazing book by Percival Everett (My name is Not Sidney Poitier), wonderful food, too much fizzy wine, beautiful clever friends and me in a wedding dress because WHY NOT? I have nowhere to live quite soon so let’s party like it’s 1988 and I’m Madonna!

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So many surprises

Posted on November 3, 2024 by theharridan

Usually I feel the urge to write once every four weeks – the thoughts and memories and stories that line my head build up until there’s a pressing need to spill it all, in long sentences with stupid typos and always some sort of half hour technical fail as I try to post photos extremely badly.

But this October, my birthday month, usually filled with dinners out and perhaps a little European long weekend thrown in, crisp early Autumnal air and the clocks going back, has been quite the exhausting thing, centred around a very quick trip back to New Zealand to see my parents, sister, and brother in law for just over a week. It has sent everything very off-kilter.

The first surprise

A few days before flying the 33 hour trip there, we decided to bring Noah along as a surprise for my parents. He couldn’t get onto the same flight as me – London to Doha, Doha to Auckland – instead having to add hours and airports onto his trip by flying London to Munich, Munich to LAX, LAX to Auckland, where we would meet up with my sister and make our way to my parents. But LAX! Oh, the stories I have heard – the drama, the scariness, the mean US immigration people, the huge airport and the confusing transfers and the not knowing where to go…it was the worst thing sending off my recently-only-just 18 year old sweet second born. I was so annoyed I didn’t work harder to find a way we would travel together but the cost of that was just so high, and so it was LAX or not come along at all.

Panicky but resigned, on my actual birthday I was up at 4am to set Noah off on his first long haul flight on his own, hoping that the transfer at LAX wouldn’t be the undoing of him. My phone rang an hour later from the check in desk where Noah was a bit spooked, having been asked to fill out NZ destination forms and not really knowing them and understanding very clearly that he should have had his NZ passport with him. He was all 5am-and-alone stressed and so was I, but photos of his NZ passport seemed to keep the desk people happy and I went back to sleep knowing it would be my turn in in the afternoon. But first, a 7am packing session, a little birthday brunch with Vicki, and then off to the airport for my first leg to Doha.

Halfway through brunch I get a phone call from my airline telling me that my flight through Doha was full, and the only option left was that I fly the other direction through LAX. And I needed to get to the airport an hour earlier – did I accept?

LAX though – cha ching! Woop! I said YES I WILL ACCEPT THIS SURPRISINGLY FORTUITOUS YET RIDICULOUS PROPOSITION WHICH PROBABLY SUITS NO ONE ON THAT FLIGHT BUT ME and ran all the way home to have a bit of a panic attack about it all, running out of time which was exacerbated by the last minute need to register for an ESTA visa which of course was a bit tricky to actually do in the few minutes I had while also freaking out and finishing the packing situation.

Exciting though – with the main character energy I like to haul around with me, I figured I could land in LAX at about the same time, get through customs, walk into the correct transfer terminal, spot him at the McDonalds or something, and go and tap him on the shoulder and surprise him with his passport and my actual presence. An appropriate movie theme tune would totally be playing in my head. What larks! The brilliance of this plan kept me going through the 12 hours from Heathrow to Los Angeles.

So I landed and called Noah from the bit where you pick your luggage up from one carousel and stick it on another to ask him where he was in a kind of cute, cagey way. He sounded so panicked though, with clearly no time for my games…he told me that he was about to be sent off to a scary room because he didn’t have his New Zealand passport with him or a New Zealand visa, and his entire holiday money had been used up purchasing a digital visa for non-NZ citizens which would take up to 72 hours to process. He was very worried he wouldn’t be allowed to board his next flight. I was, just for a second, a bit put out that I had to blow my cover, thinking “Hmmmm, should I tell him I am here? With his passport? Or will that massively ruin my big moment when I find him?”But even this utterly self-absorbed mama knew that this was no time for am-dram theatrics.

“I’m here! I’m in LAX too! With your passport!”

The sweetest nine words I have ever screeched into my iPhone 6.

It was only one escalator down to find him, all dusty and rumpled from the trip and the flight and the stress, with a massive relieved grin on his face. This is a photo of our collective relieved faces:

And then we hugged and were so happy and we could show US Immigration that Noah was actually a New Zealand citizen and could we please have that money back and they said no but we were so relieved we didn’t even mind and so I bought him a massive sandwich and I got changed into a track suit and he said ‘that’s not a great tracksuit’ but we were so happy I didn’t mind.

It even turned out we were on the same flight home. I told the lady it was my birthday (because it still was, 30 hours later owing to international date lines) and could we please sit together and while she did not care one jot about my birthday she did indeed give us seats next to each other.

How about that?

The second surprise

There was ONE surprise left. We had been careful not to tell mum and dad that Noah was going for London with me so to give them a surprise (oh I do love these multiple surprises). After we landed, we had a day in Auckland with best friends and some pies and a beach trip, and we met up with my sister and brother-in-law who were flying in from Australia, and drove to Whangarei by way of an Orewa dinner stop and various trips to the dairy for lollies (IYKYK). We had a plan – to drop Noah off (by now delirious with no sleep and jet lag) five minutes from my parent’s house where he had only been once when he was 4 years old and direct him through the dark to where he could maybe/hopefully find their front door. We would go and meet with mum and dad first, and then Noah would knock at their door and give them the shock of their lives. It looked like this:

Was it all worth it? YES IT WAS! It was such a great, exhausting, fun, busy, stressful time – like three months compressed into seven days – and Noah was the most wonderful companion, son, nephew, second cousin, friend, and grandson. I love him even more now, and so do lots of New Zealanders who go to meet him.

Here are some pies:

Here’s a photo of my totally hot husband I rescued from our storage (most of them had to go to the dump)… (photos, not hot husbands):

Saying goodbye to my mum and my dad:

There’s so much more to say about October – but I’ll leave you with this. We have been told our flat is going to go on the market so we have to find somewhere else to live. We have now sold our New Zealand house and will be no-chain buyers in two weeks. We have found The House we want to buy. We have been pushed and pushed by the agent and have given them the highest offer we can manage. We will find out whether we get it tomorrow. Everything feels like it rests on this house. We can think of nothing else.

I shall report back.

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A little bruised

Posted on September 22, 2024 by theharridan

I fell over on Wednesday morning on my before work run, heading out into the greyish morning with stiff joints and feet that weren’t lifting quite as high as they needed to be. I jogged to the corner at the end of our road and nicked a paving stone and headed straight for the unforgiving concrete, soon to be ripped and torn and bruised and probably chipped of tooth. But I managed to right myself and throw all of the momentum and weight of my fall into a stationary car (actually the stationary car’s side mirror) which broke my fall. It also broke the side mirror. And now I have a bruise which is so colourful and beautiful that people are asking me about my tattoo. And then when they look closer and see it is just a massive bruise, they are me if I am alright and take a side glance at Mark.

This tiny accident is also about vulnerability and aging and a body that is on a downward slope. It’s my birthday in a few weeks and I’ll be 47, which is quite close to 50. It’s not just me who is getting older obviously – it’s also the kids who have all begun developing into not-kids, which is great and weird and sad and fun. I went to an 18th birthday party on Tuesday night for a darling friend’s darling daughter and it was full of these big not-kids who used to be one, and then three, and then eight, and who are now having gap years and sloping off to university and whose bodies are unblemished and completely beautiful and there are these flashes of braces in mouths and stick and poke tattoo drawings on inner arms and wrists and zits and round baby faces and no real hardness of jawline or muscle or structure underneath the soft unscarred skin. They are all a bit like beautiful cartoon characters, or jellyfish.

So. The old and the young combine. I feel it when I go into the office too – there are lots of people there who are just years and years – decades, actually – younger than me, and they don’t seem stricken by their own awkwardness or lack of experience and knowledge. I wander around the office trying to walk unstiffly, trying to seem at ease, and get up off of my chair after an hour’s meeting and try to smooth out the jerkiness of knee and hip joints that seize up whenever I stop moving. I also try to say the right things to the right people, but that doesn’t always work out either.

It’s the passing on of the baton, I guess. But before I got to that, I was hoping to hold the baton aloft for a bit first, feeling just for a little while that I had finally got there – the sweet plateau where the climbing was done and the view needed to be properly appreciated – before the descent. But I kind of missed that bit. I think I’m a bit jealous. How basic. How disappointing.

What might I want to pass on to the divine sea creatures if I could ever feel brave enough to? Here are ten things in the manner of a buzzfeed listicle:

  1. Read more. Not just on your stupid phone. Books! Second hand books!
  2. Don’t wait for things too long. I used to think I could become a red lipstick wearer when I got old enough, but I should have been experimenting and getting good at it when it was more fun and I was younger and this didn’t matter much. Not sure what I was waiting for, but it didn’t really ever arrive.
  3. Boys – don’t worry about not being tall enough. Tallness is just an arbitrary thing that doesn’t impact attractiveness. Attractiveness is about being a fun, good, kind man. If someone is concerned about height, swipe left. And be funny. Be fun.
  4. Don’t plan too pre or proscriptively. The world is unstable and characterised by change (twas actually ever thus). I was lucky to find the time, space and energy to have a big family and now have a serious job. I am doing both, imperfectly but very happily. It wasn’t planned and it was really unplannable.
  5. Understand that every job, interaction, challenge and mistake are all part of the building blocks which form you and make you eventually kind of great at something. Take the job, say yes to things, treat everything as a learning opportunity. Nothing really lasts for long anymore so reach for the weird in-between job and meet the person for coffee and try your hand at the pottery wheel and spend an afternoon rollerblading. Present the thing at the virtual town hall. Try it out. Don’t be scared – it’s mostly going to be fine and you can get better for next time.
  6. Be yourself but maybe work on being your better self. Work out the bits that need adjustment and learn appropriateness (eg I must stop swearing in meetings and also have given myself a serious talking to regarding that most boring thing of all – imposter syndrome – YAWN) but above all else, know that you bring something no one else does, and that thing, whatever it is, is precious and valuable.
  7. Moderate your drinking because it is bad for inflammation, weight gain and painful joints (see para. 3).
  8. Learn how to cook at least three things really well and invite people over. Hospitality and generosity are deeply rewarding ways of being. Always bring something to another person’s thing, and always do a little bit of clearing up.
  9. Cakes make people happy and they aren’t as difficult as you might think. Learn, again, three recipes (one gluten free one is a good idea – google ‘coconut and almond cake’ and shove fruits into the top and everyone will think you are gifted).
  10. Share compliments to people and give good feedback at work when it feels right. Pass on thanks for positive interactions and fun times. Always send a thank you after a party. Be gracious and people will remember you and ask you again next time. It costs nothing to be kind.

Right. Turkey. Photos.

All of us at the cafe above Cold Water Bay:

The entire Turkey crew:

Very warm nights:

Cooling off at Gemiler:

Me jumping off a cliff:

Casper jumping off a boat:

When we got back from holiday, Otis turned 11:

Casper started 6th form:

And I fell over and bruised my arm:

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Before we go

Posted on August 19, 2024 by theharridan

It’s 6am and I have been awake for an hour getting excited about flying off on a holiday today. By ‘getting excited’ I really mean anxious about the jobs left to do. There’s the dog, and the food compost bin to be emptied out, the food to eat up (venison hamburgers and leftover chicken thighs for breakfast, anyone?) and mess to clean, timesheets to fill in, a work password to change, a venue to hire, my last night wasp sting to put ice on/fret over, packing crises to work through, sick pills to take, low thyroid pills to order and pick up from Boots (will it open in time? what will happen if I don’t take my low thyroid pills?), contact lenses to track down (after Mark left three months’ supply in a bag somewhere in Queensway yesterday), the boys’ packing to check (you never know if they’ve decided to pack a knight’s helmet and aerosol cans in lieu of swimming togs and a pair of shoes), those last minute toiletries and earrings (for my various summer outfit plans) to shove into the hold luggage, hip flexor stretches to do, keys sorted, chargers found. That kind of thing.

So excited.

I finished work on Friday afternoon and expected to feel the rush of relief by the absence of my usual daily motherly workerly wifely obligations that sit always somewhere on my person, nagging and nibbling away and quite probably contributing to my constant psoriasis flareup, but that feeling is still there. Maybe even worse than usual. There’s a lot to do before you can get eight people (plus a girlfriend) from a small darkish overheated flat in London to a farmhouse on the Turkish coast. It’ll be a long day.

I used my summer Friday-finishing-at-1pm work perk to wander down to Portbello Road to buy saucisson and olives from the French stall, and visited the Golborne Road salon to get my usual pre-holiday treatments: an eyebrow and eyelash tint and a big old Brazilian wax. Why the full wax, I hear you ask? Surely just a tidyup of the downstairs quarters will do? And this is exactly the same thing I ask myself, every year, but as the lady says ‘what shall we do for you today?’ and I say ‘let’s have everything off – just take it all!’ I am overcome with a kind of bravado that is based purely on forgetting how painful it all is (and deeply deeply undignified) to lie, legs akimbo, hot wax spread all over these not-so-young-anymore bits, hip flexors screaming, with hair being pulled out in violent yanks. I am also a bit of an all-or-nothing person, plus I have an inflated idea of my pain threshold. I just tell myself, as she spreads the hot wax on again and again, and yanks big clumps of hair and then goes back for the stubborn strays, that childbirth was worse. And of course it was, but then you did end up with a darling little baby rather than a pale and shocked-looking pudenda that resembles the trussed chicken from the last episode of season three of The Bear. Without the complicated string perhaps, but you get my drift.

Anyway, with that done, eyes all very sultry, eyebrows threaded, I celebrated the beginning of the holiday in our garden with the neighbours with a very nice bottle of Nyetimber and a lot of cheesy snacks. And yesterday, completing the pre-holiday ritual, Mark and the kids got their hair cut at the barbers and then he and I got our heels razored. We look STUNNING now and our feet are lookin’ FINE.

Non-holiday-related updates

We looked at some houses on Saturday, because our house in New Zealand is about a week away from going onto the market. That’s a whole other story of bank loans and invoices and HMRC and more invoices, and now it is untenanted and ready for a buyer. Really, really, ready for a buyer because one cannot pay one’s overseas mortgage on positive thoughts alone. I will send a link when I get it, but just imagine a delightful, large, six bedroom villa close to the hospital and the Catholic school, with a garden and a tree and a swing and a terracotta terrace, with a small cottage onsite, and a watertank (yes…?), a greenhouse, and a porch.

What might one get if/when such a vision sells? Not a lot, once one pays the mortgage back and pays the bills and then loses half in bringing the money over through currency exchange. It has been grim, looking at what we might be able to afford, but the houses we saw on the weekend were actually pretty lovely and only about three and half miles away from where we live now. It won’t be ‘home’ but they are in the hood – we could still keep the big boys at their secondary school and only the littlest would have to move to a closer primary school. We could still get to Portobello Road on a Saturday to eat our Afghan wrap/Peruvina arepa/Korean chicken/baby margarita pizza/crepe food market spoils by the bins, as is our custom. We could still meet friends and get to the Selfridges sale and go see a movie at the Electric Cinema without rethinking things too fundamentally. It just might work.

The kids meanwhile have all grown to become very old – the eldest has been working as a runner at The Princess Royal and will soon go back to university to continue learning Russian and art history and socialising, the second eldest has finished his A levels perfectly well and will be finding a job in September, and the third gets his GCSE results while we are away (and finds out his future, kind of – either back to school for A levels or will start an apprenticeship). The other three are still sufficiently school-age for me not to worry too much about next steps. They are all very big though and I miss them from when they were small. I worry I have not taken enough photos or videos and that we will never remember their voices or the cute things they said or the way their bodies felt soft and warm and like they were mine.

Here is my lovely huge long-legged darling Casper not getting a mullet, but more a soft reshape of his glorious curly bonce:

And Ned, uncharacteristically obscuring his huge guns:

Barnaby taking his parents out to dinner:

Noah and his mum:

And our occasionally winning pub quiz team:

That’s it! I have to go do everything in paragraph one! See you on the flip side x

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