I'm telling Eva the whole story in the same cafe after Louisa leaves to drive back to Essex. This is my life. I sit around in coffee shops pretending I write in the afternoon, dispensing advice that I don't take myself. Eva also has a Scandinavian boyfriend with whom she has recently been reunited and is annoyingly smug and happy. No sharing lemon tarts for her. She's lost her appetite.
Damn her.
I can't eat if she isn't - it's the tyranny of the sisterhood. We're talking about our kids who have all recently returned from university. Mine is planning to spent the week protesting the G20 Summit, while hers is about to have a house party that she, as yet, doesn't know about. Mine spent the weekend playing me Palestinian freedom songs. I'm getting old. I actually said: 'That sounds just like shouting,' when he played me Protest Rap.
'Listen to the words,' he said.
'I don't want to. I like melodies - give me a protest song that sounds like Michael Buble and I'll sing along. Mums like Michael Buble...'
He turned his attention to his laptop, clicked a few buttons and sure enough, a ballad ensued from his tinny speakers at maybe a decibel short of Wembley Station volume.
'and the tanks came... and my mother cried... la la la la la...' sang (ahem) the (ahem ahem) singer. I nodded appreciatively. 'lovely darling - I do like a nice tune...' and hastily excused myself before he asked me to give him a lift to the tube station so he can go and picket the Bank of England...
You can see why I would rather sit in a bourgeois cafe and sip overpriced, but delicious, coffee with a succession of women.
We're just finishing our decaf skinny double shot frappalatte soya frothy nonsenses when an impossibly tall, slim, glamorous redhead comes into the cafe pushing a baby stroller and pulling a toddler who appears to be on springs.
'So sweet,' says Eva. 'Do you remember when our kids were small.' Her eyes grow all misty. The toddler bounces across the floor like an unsteady ball.
'I know. Everything seemed so much simpler then.' I agree as the mother unzips and decants the chubby, edible baby into a high chair and squeezes the springy toddler out of an anorak and slots him into a corner banquette where he slides and ricochets across the slippery pleather.
'I often worry that I worked too much and wish I had spent a bit more time at home,' she sighs. 'Now they're all grown up and just want me to go out so they can have their friends round. They used to love coming to Wales, now I have to go alone...'
'I often worry that I didn't work enough and that maybe I should have spent less time at home, I sigh. 'Now they've all left (well that's the fiction, anyway) and I'm a bit lost.'
We look at each other sadly.
The mother has coils and coils of French Lieutenant's Woman hair pinned up in that artless, dishevelled way that I have spent hours of my life trying to perfect and never managing more than a bird's nest. She unpacks the child kit-bag with the efficiency of a soldier on a forced march. The baby's bottle is placed on the table. A muslin cloth is set down next to it. A selection of small, chewable toys is unearthed from the bottom of the bag. It occurs to me that this is exactly what I need - something to gnaw on that contains no calories. Quilted coats balloon on a nearby chair and eventually the mother sits down and looks at the menu.
Eva and I are watching her enviously.
I was never that calm.
Another group of young mothers are seated around a communal table, barricaded in by strollers the size of small jeeps, each nursing a baby with a bottle stuck in its mouth. Definitely no breast feeding in Notting Hill Gate ladies. God forbid you display your chest in public unless it's in a low cut slip dress from Joseph. The contented sound of money throbs from the glossy mothers as one chats about her upcoming Easter ski-ing holiday when nanny, currently offstage, will be staying home taking care of the infant, thus the need for a bottle fed babe.
I was never that rich.
Eva and I are watching them like puppies in a pet shop window, when ...
SMASH
...three wine glasses hit the floor, falling off the edge of the table like lemmings and splintering dramatically into a thousand jagged pieces, while behind them the springy toddler looks alarmed despite having pushed them.
Pretty mother jumps. 'That's why I tell you not to play with things!' she screeches, her voice threatening to shatter the one remaining glass on the table.
A waitress bends to survey the damage giving us a lovely view of her thong. A waiter rushes off to get a dustpan and brush as the toddler goes for a full house and starts fingering the last wine glass, seconds before the mother sweeps it out of reach along with all the cutlery on to another, table. He does, however, continue to bounce. This time along the banquette where he reaches to the floor for a particularly tempting spike of broken glass that nestles invitingly inches from his bobbing foot.
'NO!' three voices yell in unison - mine, Eva's and his mother's. We all lock eyes as Eva and I smile apologetically. Old habits die hard.
Springy toddler is dispatched to yet another table that has hastily been cleared of all glassware where he sits with a deer-in-the-headlights, blank expression on his face and proceeds to knock over the salt dispenser, spreading an avalanche of crystals all over the surface. He's just about to begin opening sugar packets when the mother snaps.
'I don't know why I thought this was a good idea,' she wails operatically, yanking the toddler out of the chair and into his anorak in one movement as he begins to whine.
'I'm hungry,' he moans.
'Stand there, don't move,' she says, jamming toys and bottles back into her bag.
The baby, meantime, smiles beatifically and gurgles then tips her head to one side and waves at us.
We wave back as pretty mother jams her into her pushchair and carries the toddler out the door, dangling by one arm like he's been hung carelessly on a hook, his feet in their cute little red boots, barely skimming the floor.
'Poor woman,' says Eva. 'My boys were a lot worse than that.'
'My kids were always fighting. I wouldn't dared to have brought them in here, they would have been on the floor, rolling around like dogs, gibbering.'
'Mine were awful. I couldn't take them anywhere. It was so stressful.'
'I know just how she feels. I was overwrought the whole time.'
'I was glad to get to work to get a rest, to be honest.'
'I couldn't get out of the house because nobody would look after mine.'
Nostalgia banished momentarily, we paid our bill and left the cafe. The pretty redhead was standing at the bus stop staring into space, her face a picture of gaunt tragedy - exactly like Meryl Streep at the end of Lyme Regis harbour, but in a green wool coat instead of a hooded cape.
On an impulse I walked up to her and smiled. 'I hope you don't feel that you shouldn't sit down and have a cup of coffee - nobody minds about a bit of broken glass. That sort of thing happens all the time. We've all been there and it passes and it does get easier,' I said.
Her face crumpled, tears instantly running down her cheeks. 'I just never get any sleep,' she sobbed. 'If only I could just get one night's sleep. I'm so tired.'
'I know, I know,,' I murmured soothingly, 'It's hell but it's over in the blink of an eye. My friend and I were sitting in there almost crying because our kids are all grown up and we feel redundant, and I had four kids - so I know just how hard it is.'
'I don't know how you coped.' she said, drying her tears on a Carluccio's napkin that I found in the bottom of my handbag.
'It gets easier. I promise,' and after another ten minutes of my best attempt at kindly chat during which I valiantly did not cry myself, I patted her arm and walked off.
It does get easier. They don't break glasses in restaurants and throw tantrums on the floor. No, they go backpacking across Asia, or take a dodgy minicab home from a party at 2am on a Saturday night, or drive back from university in their friend's car who just passed his test the week before. They have parties when you go away for the weekend and let people sleep, or worse, in your bed. They sit down outside the Bank of England with the other anarchists (from Notting Hill Gate) and call you on the phone and ask you to check on the Guardian website and see why everyone's throwing broken bottles. And on mother's day, instead of a school craft assignment card with cardboard daffodils stuck wonkily on the front, though you've hinted that what you would really like is a cup of tea and a chat at the end of your bed, you wait until 11.30 before you realise it isn't coming and go downstairs, trip over the trainers, and do the washing up in an empty house.
It does get easier. And so very much harder.
