©Julia Welstead June 2012
Thursday 30th August 2012
I suppose it’s indicative of the state of play with regards to my life and my writing, that I wrote the title to this in June, and this, the first entry, in August. What can I say? Children, summer holidays…………… anyone in the know will fill in the rest. So here I am on day three since the boys went back to school (hurrah!). On day one I traditionally rush out on my own and shop for some little personal indulgence: usually a bookshop browse, but sometimes a running or outdoor shop to try on some footwear (boots, clogs, runners, I’m as addicted as the next woman, only in my case it doesn’t include high-heeled frippery), or even a drift round Waitrose (us being Lidl stalwarts for all family food, the Waitrose promise of properly ripe avocados and still-with-their-leaves-and-some-mud beetroots becomes the indulgence). Perhaps I’ll get a haircut and buy some in-house, ‘professional’ hair products. Once I tried an eyebrow wax, thinking it might aid my attempts to develop a more urbane, sophisticated image, but I came out looking like a cartoonish, startled giraffe, or Joey from Friends when he did the same. Best to stick to the wild and woolly.
On day two of the boys being at school, and the house being eerily empty and deliciously peaceful, I usually have a mad whirl around of washing, tidying, sorting and chucking, such that the house somehow becomes my domain again, with boy-kit put firmly back in its place. Boys’ shoes are marched back to the entrance stairwell and lined up, two by two. Boy socks are whisked out from under beds and behind cupboards, washed, paired up and put in their place in the communal sock basket in the under-the-stairs cupboard. Boy books, computers, discs and other gizmos are returned to their respective bedrooms and lined up on bookshelves and dresser tops.
In the afternoon I’ll turn my attention to boy clothes: anything outgrown by boy one can filter down through boys two and three and a small pile of things too small for boy three end up in a bag at the door. Yesterday I did this so efficiently that I was at Asda loading clothes and shoes into the clothing bank early in the day. Later I realised my error: in my enthusiasm I had also chucked a pair of borrowed boots. Is it possible to ask for donated items back, I wondered, as a run of sweat ran down my spine? An image of me loitering next to the clothing bank for days on end until someone came to empty it was quickly dismissed and instead I wrote a massively grovelly email to the owner of the boots, offering replacement or money. ‘No matter’ he responded kindly, ‘they were old and perhaps someone else will find them useful.’ Thank goodness for kind people.
On day three I traditionally run out of steam and slink guiltily under a blanket on the sofa for a daytime snooze. If I’m ever asked to describe my guilty pleasure then it will have to be this, although it sounds so banal and innocuous (I’m guessing that for most people the term ‘guilty pleasure’ conjures images of chocolate or sex or both). Today will be no exception. I’m currently cross-legged on our magically comfy old sofa, oft worn blanket at the ready for when I run out of writing thoughts and slip into slumber. My girls are with me: Hairy MacLary (a scruffy mutley) languishing in her ancient Parker-Knoll armchair, and Schnitzel von Krumm (a neat and glossy mini-dachshund) – curled up on finest alpaca in the window seat, pretending to be a cat. Both have traces of mud about their persons, specifically on the bridges of their noses, and I’m amused to realise that this is the only bit they haven’t managed to lick clean since this morning’s dawn rabbiting adventures on the hill.
The hill is where we go after dropping the boys off for morning swim training. Five mornings a week we rise at 4.50am for a 5.25am drop-off. In late August at this time of the morning the hill looks forbiddingly dark from the car, but as soon as one is out the sky looks brighter and the sheer glory of the beginnings of the day is upon us. The girls and I jog and scamper across the road, over the roundabout and up the first grassy slopes. I let them off their leads and they bound and gallop ahead of me, exuberant in their release. I like to take on the steep rock-steps that zigzag up to a high plateau looking across to Arthur’s Seat. It’s a huff and a puff but I like the way it awakens my muscles and limbers up my back, which is always stiff-as-a-board when I first wake, and I love the short-sharp-shock of steep ascents that get you to the top in no-time-flat.
From the top there’s a wealth of winding paths leading hither and yon, downhill, uphill and round the contours. For Edinburgh’s tourists Arthur’s Seat is a climb, a look at the 365 view, a few snapshots, a relieved descent and a ticked box on their itinerary. For locals it’s so much more. In the middle of this already fabulous little city, we have a wild hill of rural escape proportions. For runners, cyclists, hikers and dog-walkers, this is a fabulous chunk of land. For me it is also a sanity saver: island girl into city doesn’t go unless there’s somewhere to let off steam.
We run, gallop, yelp and give chase for about an hour before a reluctant return to our urban life below. By seven we have to be home to wake up boy three (who hasn’t bought into this madness of swim-training like his elders have) for school.
But something’s different this term. I can no longer call them boys one, two and three, because now there’s a fourth, but he doesn’t fit as ‘boy four’ because he’s older than boy three. I shall have to re-think my labelling system. Perhaps they should be like M in the Bond films. So we have an M (20, at uni), a D (16, in sixth year), a C (15, in fifth year) and an F (15 in fourth year). And my hand-them-down clothing system is beginning to fail now as well, as F is taller than C and rapidly taking on D. M is still a head clear, but will F whizz past him by next year? It’s like watching a 1500 track event when the guy at the back finally gets into gear on the final lap and cruises on past all the others to win gold. Meanwhile I’m beginning to feel like a little old Mother Hubbard with too many boys to fit into my shoe. Another image often in my head is of eagles and their eyrie of chicks. When the chicks reach a certain size the adults no longer dare to land in the nest, for fear of being eaten themselves by their massive and hungry progeny, so they drop the food in from above instead. Sharks circling is another simile that springs to mind as I manoeuvre my way round an ever smaller boy-free area of kitchen, preparing a meal to increasing cries of, ‘when’ and ‘what’.
OK so the fourth boy, C, where’s he popped up from? At a phenomenal fifty, starkly single and sporting the scars of hysterectomy I can hardly have whistled him up myself. Indeed no, he belongs to my brother and sister-in-law in France and has come to Edinburgh to further his swimming career and undertake the IB (International Bacc – oh I wish I hadn’t started trying to spell that – alaureate) which is offered at George Watson’s College (and nowhere else in Scotland, I think). This, plus the presence of his sister, H, in our house for a couple of weeks while she finds herself a flat, would explain why the post this morning consists of excitingly bookish parcels for D Welstead, M Welstead, C Welstead and H Welstead and some boring buff envelopes for J Welstead. I line them all up on the kitchen table and wish I could open theirs instead of mine.
Friday 31st August 2012
A friend phoned this morning to wish me a ‘happy blue moon’ day and we agreed that this should be a day when we do something different from the normal humdrum. For him, any thoughts of flying to the moon (or whatever) were quickly scuppered by the reality of a morning ‘power meeting’ (good Lord, what’s that? It reminds me of another friend whose department used to hold Friday ‘thrust’ meetings, which we always had a good, smirky giggle about – I was young at the time) at his office. What shall it be for me, then? I’m not hawden doon by an office job. Between the hours of 8.30am and 3.30pm I’m free of my housekeeping/boy-raising (hair-raising?) job and can do pretty much what I like, the limitations being finance and energy levels. I am supposed to be writing of course, or studying for my post-grad psychotherapy diploma, or working on my actual job at the moment, which is transcribing and editing a 40 year set of diaries for someone. There are always household chores to fulfil as well – of the washing, hoovering, tidying variety (yawn). But what would I like to do today?
Ride a horse across mountains
Lie on a warm beach with the sea lapping at my toes
Acquire a funky little campervan and set off into the blue
Miraculously appear next to a friend, who I know is in deep trouble, and help her out
Sleep (why do I always want to sleep? It’s so boring!)
Find the plot for my novel (I know it’s in here somewhere)
Read, understand and have perfect recall of all the books on my diploma required reading list
Fly to an island
Win the lottery and buy an island
Make pots in the Leach pottery in St Ives, Cornwall
Work alongside Carlos Tabernaberri and his horses in Australia
OK this is getting a little silly. I don’t even do the lottery, I no longer own a horse, am nowhere near a warm beach and can’t possibly read twenty books in a day. Is this why I sleep so much, because I set myself impossible tasks and overload my head with unreachable dreams? And it seems quite hard to instantly think of a different yet feasible thing to do for a day. This blue moon challenge is tough.
Meanwhile the dogs are directing their most winning smiles at me and it seems that the first course of action is to head for the hills………..
…..and there we have it, the reason why my writing is constantly being shoved to one side. I come back from the hills with a head full of words and am met by an email from M requesting that urgent attention be given to filling out an income declaration form so that he can get his full grant/loan for his third year at university. The form doesn’t look too onerous, and gawd knows my earnings are meagre enough to qualify, but then it turns out I have to produce various bits of evidence: of earnings (fair enough), of the lack of another parent (a copy of their father’s death certificate should do the trick), of my other dependent children (I sigh deeply and scan and print birth certificates – but why do they want this?) and of my ‘single status’. What? Hilarious! How does one prove singleness? The tears in my eyes? A dirty plate count each evening? A test of the bedsprings? I ponder sending a copy of my Council Tax bill, which gives me a single person discount, but surely this is a circular argument: how did I prove to the council that I’m single? I can’t remember, but now is definitely not the time to challenge that, so I seal up the bulging envelope and send it on its way.
3.30p.m. and now it’s time to get some food out on the table for the returning hungry hoards. Once they have eaten and changed and galumphed, late, down the stairs to catch their bus to swimming, I heave a sigh of relief and decide to run a bath. I’m shivery and sneezing and getting ill is not an option. Plug in, tap on, ginger and lemon tea brewing, phone rings. Dale. They’ve missed their bus. Drat and darn it all to Hell. Tap off, shoes on, an aggressive six-point turn of the car (we live in a very narrow dead-end street) and I scoop two hang-dog lads up at the corner. Sorry mum, sorry Aunty Jules. Harrumph. A fight through 5pm Friday traffic (with an wry nod to Michael MacIntyre’s ‘Friday traffic’ sketch) and all the time assuming I’ll have lost my parking spot by the time I get home (parking is a massive source of stress to urban humankind – or to this urban human anyway).
A line from a Larkin poem lurks in my mind like a bad smell of, ‘I told you so’. It goes something like, ‘women being pushed to the side of their own lives’ and boy, have I got a case of that right now.
Home by 6pm and the miracle of a free space awaits me. All that angst for nothing: I really must try to relax. Big deep breath and into the house, bathe, cook, write. I don’t think I like blue moon days.
2nd September 2012
It’s about 2 in the morning and I’m woken by a deep sigh from beneath. I’ve really been woken by my bladder, but I lie still as a gravestone for a few moments, hyper-alert to the little breathing, snuffling and shuffling sounds from below, until my half-dream-state concern resolves itself and I realise the chipolata (the mini-dachshund) must be sleeping on the spare mattress under my bed. I hop up to the loo and am back in the warm cocoon of downie within a minute. If I could just drop off to sleep again that would be great, but the monster-under-the-bed incident has done a thorough job of waking me up, so after a few tosses and turns I cat-stretch and flick the light on, reach across for my notebook and specs. Sneezes come, one, two, and three’s the big one. I have these Olbas oil impregnated tissues, which are a great idea except that I end up with irritated eyes and skin where I’ve habitually rubbed my face.
Writing this is helping to keep my other night habit at bay, which is good. Normally, once woken, my mind begins to turn stuff over. It starts with a flick of a thought, like the corner of a floor-rug just runkling up briefly when caught by the breeze from an opened door. Then it lifts again, then flaps up and folds over and at this stage all my little anxieties and worries that were neatly tidied away are exposed to my attention. Sometimes I manage to wham the rug back down and roll over into sleep, but more often the endless and pointless ritual of examination and rumination over every dust-pile of worry, every hair-ball of anxiety, takes me over like a bad habit. That’s what it is, a habit, an addiction just like smoking or chewing finger nails, and like all addictions it is hard to kick.
Now I’m hungry and may need to go downstairs for a banana.
One over-riding worry tonight is that D and C have gone to a party, a sleep-over on a farm about half an hour out of Edinburgh. Sleep-overs are the one type of party which are less worrying the younger the kids are, because up to a certain age you can be pretty sure that all that’s happening is a lot of eating, giggling and movie watching and the great scary-naughty thing of staying up beyond midnight. Teenage sleep-overs have a whole different aura to them.
I’m not going to give my other worries page-space tonight, they don’t deserve it and I’m trying to kick the habit: like most addictions, it’s not good for my health.
Time for that banana, and a cup of tea.
Back with banana and glass of almond milk. Was too cold (naked) to wait while kettle boiled.
I bought almond milk on my Waitrose indulgence trip the other day and I think it’s OK but maybe a bit sweet. I’ve been using rice milk for a few years – many years now I come to think of it, since M had baby eczema and we ran Islay Wholefoods, and could order in all sorts of goodies from Green City. That’s twenty years ago, wow.
[This Olbas oil situation is mildly interesting, as I can now work out where I habitually rub myself, and it turns out to be my eyebrows. Could have been worse I suppose.]
Yesterday I did a naughty thing and went to ‘Run and Become’ my favourite running shop. Naughty because I’m chronically broke and should not be spending money on non-essentials. I came out happy and guilty – a powerfully heady emotion-combo – with a pair of barefoot trail shoes (what marketing brilliance, to make us all pay for going barefoot!) and a book by Steve Fallon called ‘Classic Hill Runs and Races in Scotland’. I won’t deny that I’d rather be on a horse, but I just don’t have the resources (horse, green field) and running comes a close second in the endorphin producing stakes. The book is divided geographically: Southern Uplands, Southern Highlands, Central Highlands, Cairngorms and the North-East. If I’m going to explore all these I’d like to do it with someone: perhaps I should join the Scottish Hill Runners.
At four I switched off the notebook and light and curled myself into a tight ball, arms entwined with legs, downie all around, over and under. Sleep came fast then, but I drifted off with two key words in my head. I couldn’t bear to unfold myself to write them down, and sank from consciousness repeating them over and over, utterly confident that I couldn’t possibly forget them: only two words, and so vital to my thoughts.
At seven I unfurl from my nest, dress and head straight out with the dogs. We go to The Hermitage of Braids – a lovely hilly woodland, complete with river running through and, of course, adjacent golf course. Even at this early hour on a Sunday our walk is accompanied by the unique clink of club on ball. Golf is an Edinburgh religion.
The words! I had two words to remember. One was dark, like a raven, but the descriptive of a human emotion. The other? Pph I don’t have a clue. Now I’m really annoyed with myself: those were key words.
The boys are back! Only 9am: the party can’t have been too debauched. D says he slept in a Clio with five others. He’s six foot five and not very foldable, the mind boggles.
Sometimes Sundays are lovely fossicky, pottery days, and sometimes they’re bitty and angsty. Today was pottering along nicely until I remembered that I had a swimming club meeting to attend. These are OK, but it means I have to focus a bit, get all the documents ready (I’m the secretary) and put on some half decent clothes. At 3pm I’m cooking up a chicken curry for the boys to eat while I’m out, and by four I’ve dropped in on Mum on my way to the meeting venue.
Julia Welstead 