The Oxford Blues

Oxford.

Snow up to my knees.

My daughter is taking me to have dinner a la Harry Potter in the Gothic dining room of Keble where she currently immerses herself in apocalyptic texts in the School of Divinity. Yes, laugh if you like, but I have a daughter who is going to be a Doctor of Divinity - though just at the moment she's flogging children's books at Waterstones to the navy blue of Oxford.

We're having tea in the newly refurbished Ashmoleum. Outside there's a foot of snow covering the terrace on which a lone classical figure hunches, his shoulders burdened with two white icicled epaulettes. He makes me feel cold just looking at him though the museum is toasty warm and redolent of the smell of damp felt and mothy wool.

A waiter approaches. Professionally French with a comma of black fringe over one eye, he shrugs, leans on one hip and pouts.

'Do you have a menu?' I ask.

'We 'ave tea, coffee, and some cakes,' He says.

'What kind of tea?' (Look I'm pedantic but 'tea' is a generic term.)

Another pout. 'English Breakfast, Peppermint, Camomile...'

I wait.

'...Earl Grey.'

He waits.

'Okay, Earl Grey then. With lemon.'

'What about the cake?' Asks my, she-isn't-on-a-diet, daughter.

'Oh I fink we have carrot and chocolate and somefing...' He says airily and wafts his hand in the general direction of the bar where no cakes seem to be on display. It's odd to think we're in a restaurant as the food seems almost incidental, not to say inconvenient.

She settles for a hot chocolate as does my friend from days of yore who has joined us, and we all pass on the mystery cake.

My friend used to share a house with me. Back then he was a member of the Socialist Workers Party, but perfectly normal beforehand when his hair was not unlike the French waiter's but with a few flecks of grey, and his face, cherubic and cheeky. It's all gone now. But actually it had gone even then since he shaved it off to stubble and got a few earrings when he joined the party. I think that was the entrance fee. We had been great friends back in the bedsit days, but didn't have much in common once he started selling Socialist Worker outside Boots. However divorce is a great reuniter of old friends just as time is a great healer of relationships, as well as a smoother of previous political convictions. His have gone the same way as the stubble. Now he's clean and shiny, with a polished head and a polished face and scant sign of piercings in his ear though you can still see the dimples if you look closely. My specs are so strong I can see craters on the moon. We have no secrets... He even has rosy cheeks which he tries to pass off as a consequence of the cold but I think it's a symptom of middle England myself. He has kids at prep school, and like me, a partner who made him redundant. She was also a Socialist Worker in the late seventies. Now she's in the City.

I stir my tea with its treasure of three slices of lemon smiling up from the bottom of the cup - I wonder if the waiter thinks I'm sour - and look around the room. Eldest daughter is looking at a squirming three year old at the next table with some distaste.

'You know, when I was your age and lived here on Banbury Road, I used to go out with your father on a Sunday and we'd do exactly this - go to a museum, or a film, or to a concert in one of the colleges, and I'd look at all these navy blue people with their cut glass accents and messy, scrunchied hair, in their sensible shoes and with their grubby children called Jeremy and Jemima and want it all with a passion. I wanted to be them. I didn't want to live in a freezing bedsit in North Oxford with a two bar electric fire that was one more than I could afford to run on my pathetic salary, seeing my boyfriend once a week when he managed to drag himself away from London, trailing round the Botanical Gardens and looking through other people's windows in Park Town where there was always a fire burning in the grate and book-lined rooms where someone played the violin. I wanted the violin. I wanted the kids on the back of the bicycle going to the Squirrel School and the chintz skirt and the upholstery to match. I wanted to be conventional and middle class.'

I say this waiting for Rob to shoot me down in flames, but people in combustible houses don't throw napalm.

'And I got it.' I add.

My daughter doesn't react. Her childhood is all she knows. She grew up in violin-land, though in fact we had drums, piano, guitar and recorders but never the violin. We had, and have, the shabby, book-lined rooms that now I'd be delighted to get rid of but the ex refuses to pack his books up and take them to his new flat. We had the tow-headed, grubby children and despite my Scottish speech impediment, I even got some cut glass accents and a notch up the class ladder for me, and a few down for the ex, at ten grand a year London day schools.

Nevertheless, we are still not the most conventional of families. I mean I don't think mummy and daddy Navy-Blue take Jemima and Jeremy to see a Burlesque Striptease for their Christmas treat.

Indeed, my friend took his kids to the Messiah.

But Oxford, where I grew up, got married (twice), fell in love (four times) and lived from the age of 17 to 25 always makes me maudlin. It's like being a ghost and haunting yourself. You meet friends, like the ex Socialist Worker, who is now wearing a cashmere sweater and a blazer (and it's not even red, but powder blue) - or Mimo, who owns Ash-Shami, the Lebanese Restaurant. I saw him in St Giles and stopped and talked to him as though he was still my husband's landlord in Walton Well Road and I was going to see him later in the basement kitchen while I made a salad with newly discovered iceberg restaurant, that twenty-eight years later I wouldn't even consider a vegetable. I see my younger self walking along the Corn Market in a succession of fashion mistakes, with long red hair instead of bottle blonde, carrying half my body weight but heavy with anxieties. And the nostalgia, the regret, the sense of loss for what was falls upon me like the snow that's swirling through the black afternoon and traps me.

I look at the table beyond us. There's a man with silver hair and a matching woman, slim and petite in the ubiquitous navy blue uniform. Another couple in their late middle age sit next to them and there are two daughters, one of whom has a child. I try to work out if the two older women are sisters - they both have the same frame and grey, page-boy styled hair, but I can't be sure. The two men, however, are definitely their well-worn, long-accustomed husbands, and one of them is the father of the girls though I don't know which woman he's married to until she stands up and he helps her on with her coat.

'So, I used to look at the young couples and want their life, but now I look at the older couples, and think - I want that too.' I say, gesturing at the people who are now gathering up their belongings and slotting the baby into a stroller, preparing to leave. 'I want to be sitting here on the weekend with my husband of many years, having just had tea with my grown up children and our friends, or our in laws.'

My daughter looks uncomfortable, as though I'm saying that she, on her own, isn't enough of a pleasure, but it isn't that - it's that I'm longing for a fantasy of the life I thought I had already bought into, and paid all the instalments on, and only had to cash in. And you never compromise in fantasies. I mean, you don't dream of going to bed with someone who looks like George Clooney but shorter and a bit fat round the middle - you dream about George Ruddy Clooney!

My friend looks as glum as I feel. 'I know what you mean. That's what I wanted, what I still want...' He says and looks so sad that I immediately feel I have to dust myself down and get rid of all these chilly reminiscences - we can't both be sitting here, miserable about what was lost. But then, I remember when he wanted Revolution and brown rice and thought that all property was theft. Sometimes, thank goodness, you don't get what you want. And it's no bad thing.

I drain the last of my tea, button up my pink cardie to keep the cold off my cleavage, I tuck my bottle blonde hair into my vintage Dior coat that once belonged to the ex-husband's aunt, and which the daughter and I share (though she wears it as a cross over, and I button it straight), shuffle my feet across the floor until I find my totally unsuitable-for-snow-shoes which I've kicked off, throw round the fake fur stole and pull on the gloves lined with orange fur that is not fake. I check my lipstick and add a dab more red, pick up the zebra patterned pony-skin handbag, link arms with my agnostic Dr of Divinity daughter, and my ex Socialist Worker friend who muffles himself into a sleek black overcoat, and the three of us set off for the slush like The Scarecrow, the Lion and the Tin Man.

Actually, all things considered, it's probably a huge blessing in disguise that I didn't turn out to be navy blue.

Le Clique

I waved the tickets under the noses of the assembled offspring feeling like Mother of The Year. 'I've got us tickets to Le Clique at the Roundhouse, how great is that?'



Stunned silence and foot shuffling ensued.  It was like watching calves being rounded up for the abattoir.



'How great is that?'  I repeated, eagerly.



Apparently, not that great.



'Ma, it's an erotic circus.  I'm not going to an erotic circus with my mother.' said younger son.



'It's not erotic.  It's Burlesque.'



'What does Burlesque mean?' asked the teenager.



'Erm, sort of risqué ...'



'What does riskay mean?'



'Erotic,' jumped in younger son.



'Not really.'



'Yes it does, one of my friends went with his wife and he said it was an erotic circus and that one woman does a striptease and pulls a hankie out of.. '



'Don't give it away!'



But it was too late.  The teenager's eyes widened with revulsion and refused to go, as did younger son. 'What's wrong with the ruddy Nutcracker or a Carol Concert, like a normal mum?' He retorted.  Eldest son was working, he told me with some relief, which left only the eldest and me, and three spare tickets.



First stop was new man.  Total disinterest.   He was visiting his brother in trendy Macclesfield, that Mecca of frivolity and jewel of whichever part of the North it happens to be in, without a mobile signal or email, and didn't seem keen to cut his three day visit short to frolic with naked women in Camden, or anywhere else in the Greater London vicinity.  He's also been reading my book since Christmas and has only got to page 170 by now and so I think the words 'not' and 'bothered' can safely be married together without even the glue of a 'that'.



'Are you sure?  I haven't seen you for more than a week and it should be fun - it's an erotic circus (oh to hell with it, call a spade a spade, Marion),'  I wheedled.



'Nah, it's been a while since I've seen my brother...'



Alas, I think I have bigger problems than the size of my backside.



Nevertheless eventually I rounded up a few friends and packed into the trunk of Fran's Jag, off we went to the circus.  However - erotic?  Not really.  In fact, except for the woman pulling the hankie out of an unusual place that I would never have thought of, even if I had lost the option of stuffing it up my sleeve having taken off my jacket and tossed it across a stage, it was all pretty tame, old fashioned stuff like acrobatics and juggling served up with innuendo.  There was even a woman with hula hoops and another old guy doing tricks on roller skates - I mean it was hardly Dita von Teese.  I've had more smut on my reading glasses.



It was terrific fun though, especially when Chocolate Gateau, an obese black man with a beard dressed in leopard skin spandex and feathers chose my friend Fran as his target and straddled him in mid-song, then proceeded to rub his face between his large prosthetic breasts (having first handed me his specs).  He took it all in good spirits, though I hesitate to think how either of my sons would have reacted if a cross-dressing baritone had attempted a bit of bump and grind with them in public, not to mention new man.  Ha, if he thinks I'm big!  But at least I don't have facial hair baby.

crotchety

ding


Hurrah - a text!

just checking to see if your phone is actually on silent, Nico

Go on, shame me in front of the whole office.

Stockholm Syndrome

And then the youngest and I went to Florence.  Four days  in a hotel by the Ponte Vecchio doing a mother and daughter bonding break.

You've probably all been to Florence so I won't wax lyrically about standing in the rain under an inadequate umbrella in the long, snaking queue outside the Uffizi, after you've stood for half an hour in another long, snaking queue to pick up tickets that you paid for on the internet (including a (9E booking fee each) so that you wouldn't have to join the other queue for people who didn't prebook which was, admittedly, longer.  But not much.  Neither do I have to tell you that David has hands like spades and looks like he's been taking a lot of steroids judging by his not so dangly bits because you can see him in plaster in the V&A and in replica outside in a piazza for free.  There was also a Maplethorpe exhibition on at the Accademia which since it was called something about 'perfection in beauty' - the subject of youngest's latest art project, she really wanted to see.  I approached it with trepidation wondering if it was going to be a series of explicit photographs of rippled male torsos which it was, but only one contained anything explicit enough that it would frighten the horses, or indeed was in any way reminiscent of a horse and that would leave an impressionable seventeen year old doomed thereafter to be sorely disappointed by all the real life Davids.

So, we did the galleries and the churches and the shops and the restaurants and then came the really fun part:  How long is it since you've been under hotel arrest, sharing a bedroom with a teenager who doesn't particularly like you, held hostage by a boxed set of DVDs that she thoughtfully gave you for Christmas with the ominous title:  Supernatural?  I wouldn't be giving anything away if I told you that the whole premise of the series starring two wet, slightly dim boys hunting demons and ghosts is that their mother was glued to the ceiling of her bedroom and burnt alive by a devil.   Hmm.  Getting the idea, are you?

In episode one, the hot pouting girlfriend of one of the main characters goes the same way (that would be what we call in the business - a spoiler - for those of you who were going to run out and get the whole series) and this is rapidly followed by every single nightmare you've ever had being replayed in 50 minute parts.  Walking scarecrows with hooks for hands, blood drinking psychopaths, Bloody Mary scratching teenage girls' eyes out, Lunatic ghosts in the asylum - you name it, they're all here and all the action always happens at night.  One after the other.  All 11 episodes of the first season.  Hurrah!  Hook me up for a telly marathon!

I was scared stiff.

Daughter, however, relishing every minute of it - calmly playing solitaire with her creepy Tim Burton deck of cards like a knitter at a guillotine matinee, hoping to cram in four slots of gore, haunting and terror, every single night, while I cowered in my bed and thought pretty thoughts, terrified to put the lights out after the DVD.

Since returning home I've had to put the DVD case into a sealed box.  There's still the second series to go.

I'm thinking of leaving the box next to the fridge at home as it's one way to ensure I don't open the door.

The terror diet.

But it worked.  We bonded.  I was so frightened I hardly left her side.

Seasonal Greeting

I can't come to you for Christmas, said Eva, whose husband was having his turn with the kids this year, meaning she was left on her tod - the divorced woman's worst nightmare, and the married woman's idea of heaven.

Why not?

Because you will all be together and I'll have nobody and I just don't want to be reminded that everyone else has a family.

Erm, well we're hardly the ruddy Waltons, I protested, but she was determined to exclude herself.

However, it was true that the ex had forsworn the charms of his scrawny girlfriend to stay in the house with me for the first time since he left - without telling her, of course (sorry Natasha - but do read on for further suprises) - but in the two days running up to the International Festival of Consumption, I managed to argue with all three of my children and none of them were speaking to me so that most of the previous conversation with Eva was conducted in tears.

After staggering home in the snow with a temperature of 103 (the day before the Christmas party I was knocking back shots of Beecham's Cold Relief like Tequila), one of the little darlings announced that I could do my own washing up because it wasn't as if I had been doing anything all day 'sitting on my backside in an office for a couple of hours' (as opposed to sitting on your backside on holiday from college at home all day). Another joined in and queried the fact that I paid any of the bills when I wondered if the lights may, occasionally, be switched off rather than left on all night since Santa didn't actually need to find his way until the eve of the 24th. 'Are you sure you pay the bills, mother - isn't it dad who pays the bills?' And then the third went for the hat trick by shouting at me when I asked him to wait for a second while I finished a conversation with the new man (who I had just discovered was happily surfing www.thinandavailable.com - from which I'm naturally and fattily excluded) after I had driven across town and waited in the car for ten minutes to facilitate the purchase of the father's Christmas present.

Joy to the world.

Please, please, do come and join our dysfunctional happy family, everybody-hates-me Christmas, but no - instead she volunteered at a homeless shelter for Crisis at Christmas and I stayed home in the bosum of mine and had my own crisis and I cooked and served the lunch. The ex washed up. I almost forgave him for absent mindedly picking up my hairbrush in my bedroom and using it though I was silently screaming PUT THE RUDDY HAIRBRUSH DOWN - YOU DON'T LIVE HERE ANY MORE.

But never let it be said I'm selfish and don't know how to share. I also gave him my cold just in time for his trip to Colorado and the fragrant girlfriend. Yes - pig flu - it's the gift that keeps on giving.

Unfortunately I also passed in on to the new man. And that was even before he told me I was fat.

I'm very, very generous.

Lords of the Rings

The other annoying fallout of the holiday season when you are eagerly awaiting the darling little knife on glass ping of the iphone telling you that you have a text message is that every other Pedant seems to have acquired one over Christmas. There's an iphone cluster around my desk. It used to just be Orlando and I who reached for our little bundles of wonderfulness every time a bell rang, but now there are seven of us twittering about Apps and e-readers and generally stroking our handsets like Gollum.

And we all seem to have the same ring tone.

I could pretend that mine was on silent, and annoyingly, it would never prove me a liar.

2010

The Christmas tree has been on the kerb since Boxing Day and the decorations returned to the attic for another year. The fridge is emptier than my bank account and the office party at which we threatened to bring the house down at 2, Brydges Place (literally - the assembled staff in a circle like firemen doing high kicks) is as distant a memory as my waistline.

The new man charmingly told me recently that it was taking him a while to get used to a 'larger woman' after his last relationship with a size 0 some seven years my junior which made me feel like a speciality fetish with my own pay per view web site. You can imagine my reply - even though the pithy repost inferred something I have absolutely no intention of ever actually doing again - along with eating, drinking, appearing in public without a one-size fits all burka, and even breathing if the air looks vaguely calorific.

Consequently, however, willpower has been dredged out of the place I wedged it somewhere around 2005 and I have been resolutely ignoring the siren song of the Tartan shortbread, French truffles, chocolate logs, Hobnobs, Quality Street and tamarind flakes (yes, that one is odd, admittedly, but Vanessa went to Burma for her Christmas break and this was all they had in the way of confectionery) that are reclining seductively on the tea trolley only an arm's-length from my desk.

Curves, they're called curves, Mr Kipling. But I'm still not taking the cake.