A new term.

There was a commotion on the doorstep as I left for work this morning.  Mr and Mrs Posh-Posh moved in last year and I expected to see their children given that it was their posh dog who was barking but instead it was a woman who I assume is Mrs Posh-Posh's sister, her Scottish husband (Posh Scot obviously) who looked at me as though I were the one standing on 'his' path, rather than the other way around, and three sprogs in too large blazers with fake badges on the pockets.  You know what I mean, the badges for schools that have twee names and were begun in 1993 to cater for the over-entitled classes who are afraid to send their over-priviledged kid to the local state.  The Unicorn, or   - in the case of my own kid - The Harrodian.  Not that I was afraid, no rather it was the other way round.  I don't think the local kids were ready for my martinet of a daughter and feared she might incite a coup.  At The Horrodian (sic) she fit right in.   First thing I did, as with all the other kids, was teach her how to fake my signature.  The next six years passed with only minor events, and one or two visits to the headmaster (smoking, truant, no hard drugs).

But it made me choke, seeing the kids in their square shouldered blazers and summer print dresses, and long shorts.  It's going to be a scorcher of a day, but there was condensation on the windscreen this morning, and I needed to pull the quilt over me in the night.  At seven thirty there was that open fridge door chill, albeit with the promise of sun to come - a slight autumn haze in the sky, and there were these little things obviously going off for their first day of school and nursery.  A new term.  The start of the new year, I always and still think.

Almost thirty years ago, that was me, holding a baby in my arms, with two more bedraggled and beribboned with new clothes and hats on elastic to grow into.  They were my children, off to Bassett House, and Glendower, and Pembridge Hall, carrying lunch boxes and sports bags and apples with stickers on them.  And now I'm the mad old bat next door.  I heard one parent jaw to the other that 'Baudelaire was going to Bassett House' where my children all went.  (Okay not Baudelaire, but Bo which is just as ruddy pretentious)' so I guess he'll be in his blue blazer with the intertwining initials and the cap doing the walk I did myself thousands of times.'  When I moved into our house, we were the aspiring middle classes, gentry-fying the neighbourhood, grabbing it from the Gladyses and the Ernies who skipped happily off to a distant suburb where they could buy a small mansion for the price we paid for their terrace.  But now, it's the upper-classes who can afford it.  The ones with family portraits in oil and furniture 'inherited' along with the money from their upper class parents, who "might as well' go off to India for a month when Mr Posh-posh gets made redunsant, and who  see 'Mummy and Daddy' every weekend in the 'cuntry' after spending millions to do up the house to their standards - mostly plate glass floor to ceiling windows that they hide behind with shutters and curtains and steel grids, which they're rarely there to enjoy.  But you can bet that Daddy doesn't wash their car, cut their grass, or live in a semi-detached in Abingdon, as mine did.  We're the new Gladyses and Ernies.  The Posh-Poshes will eventually push us and our pink staircases out and turn the whole street into Mouse Ear Grey and glass.

I like my life, but oh I miss the old one.  I miss being a young mother with a waist.  I miss my little children even though my big children are great.  I miss being the new girl.