It’s a magical time. In the old days, of course, this uninterrupted six weeks of quality time with my offspring would be enhanced by sending him to his grandparents for a few days at a time, to be coddled and coddled rather than growled at for interfering with deadlines. But Covid and shielding – those are both still things, by the way! – have invested in it. We’ve occasionally sent him to “fun” day classes and things, but now that he’s old enough to refuse, he’s refused. He hates sports and people. I don’t know where he gets it from. So now it’s Audible (“Read a book! Read a BOOK!” “My EARS are reading!”), Joe Wicks – that’s one more thing, at least for the inactive, introverted kid who still has to force his heart rate up. at least once a day – day trips when it’s not too hot outside, board games when it is, and roughly five meals and 17 substantial snacks a day, every day. A. Magical. Year.
Tuesday
“Help me to the sofa,” I gasped, pale, sweaty and spent, completely spent. “What’s up?” said my husband, as he gently laid me down on the two-seater, which isn’t very comfortable, but you can’t find 19th-century lovers these days. “I’ve… bid on eBay,” I said faintly. Under normal circumstances, I’m strictly a buy-it-now player. I don’t even bid – the stress is incapacitating. But every now and then, the normal rules have to be set aside and a rare discontinued Ikea armchair cover has made its way, only to be auctioned. So I had participated. I don’t know how people do this regularly. I’ve only been sitting there for the last 10 minutes and within two I’m literally shaking with nerves. Within four I’m in a bucket of nerves. I’m making my one and only bid in the final moments before I completely lose control of my abilities and have to go to bed for 48 hours to recover. And – here’s the thing – it’s worse if, as I did here, I win. I feel guilty about depriving someone else of the item, or not paying what someone else would have paid if the seller had listed at a different time, or, or, or… Sometimes I think modern life is not for me.
Wednesday
There’s a beautiful video doing the rounds on social media of a young eight or nine-year-old girl dancing and blowing air in celebration of the Lionesses winning their match against Sweden 4-0 and advancing to the Euro 22 final. Someone added the caption saying they haven’t known a time when women didn’t play football, which is – obviously – great, but you really don’t need more than the sight of it. Truly pleased, completely glorified in the moment, her pleasure unalloyed and throwing herself completely freely and unconsciously, is a rare thing. At this age, I realize that as I watch her, the girls are usually already careful. Careful with their bodies, careful how much space they take up, careful how much real emotion they expose to the world – quite reasonable, given how hostile it often has been to them and how clearly it will become more so as they get older. It’s one of the many things Derry Girls, for example, gets right – the fierce exuberance of the girls when they’re all together, and the slight quietness that hides them when they’re apart. We need more Lioness moments.
Thursday
Now, I’m no finance expert – I still don’t understand how it is that we … print money? Do we literally make the money we earn and spend? It all seems wrong to me. It’s supposed to come out of some kind of divinely touched gold that we all worship every day or something, right? And don’t go sending any clever-clever jokes or explanations about how in many ways this is because I don’t even know enough to take them. Sorry, where was I? Oh yes. Not a finance expert, BUT. When news hits us on the same day that the price of a McDonald’s cheeseburger is going up for the first time in 14 years and Asia’s richest woman has lost half her $24 billion fortune in China’s property crisis, I start storing beans and no one maybe convince me otherwise. My cabin is back to post-Brexit, pre-lockdown replenishment levels. Coffee, pasta, rice, beans, pasta, soup, flour, pasta, salt, coffee, pasta, coffee. All the basics are here. What I once spent on trim and fur (Lingbo seat covers notwithstanding), I now spend on caffeine and long-life carbs. It is still cheaper than proper treatment, which is of course the role it actually has. These nutritious fragments have propped me up against my mental destruction.
Friday
I’m going to the GP to have a mole removed (not dangerous – it’s just painful and looks like a second head growing out of my back). She, as she always does as part of the consultation process, asks how I would feel if I were to consider stopping my antidepressants. “Depressed,” I say. She insists. hate. “Have you seen – I say, gesture broadly, in a way that’s meant to take everything from roadworks out, to Brexit, Ukraine – ‘all this?’ She insists. I decide to distract her by bringing up some other health issues that I wasn’t going to bring up because I didn’t think there was anything she could do about them. “There’s X and Y,” I say. “Hmm,” she says. “Well, we often recommend that your antidepressants get the benefit of X, and there’s some evidence that they also help Y.” “Really?” I say, excited that the seemingly failed parts of my sad little body seem to be working in some kind of deeper concert. “True,” he says. So, love, ladies and gentlemen. Occasionally, just occasionally, middle age can actually work for you. I’m what? A teddy bear? So I’m going to grow up big and wild? Like, an apex predator? Oops, what? A panda bear, you say? Oh.’ Photo: VCG/Getty Images
