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Freecycling our lives, but not my butt.

SarahAlderson

December 22, 2009

This is what I am staring at…

– A Christmas tree, which if it was a person would be the drunk at the office party, unconscious, covered in puke, dribbling whilst leaning heavily against the wall flashing obscenely.

– A sofa which is going tomorrow on freecycle and which I must remember to excavate the remotes from.

– Speakers which used to belong to the Royal Albert Hall and which John has eviscerated, removing the drivers from them, which Lula has since been using as the bases for her ginormous imaginary jam tarts.

– A table, still to be disassembled, once I’ve had the energy to clear up the ink stamp sets, glitter, glue and carved up Christmas cards that Lula has done an Emin on (or an Amin).

Oh, and one drooping plant which was supposed to be picked up 59 minutes ago. I had 2 dozen offers on that pot plant – you’d think they’d be punctual when it’s FREE. Maybe they thought it was a different kind of pot plant.

We have approximately 3.5 days left to deal with the crap surrounding us. Our house is like the magic porridge pot of crap. No matter how much we scoop up and pour into the loft more keeps appearing. I wish I could freecycle John’s records. But he’d divorce me if I did.

The chosen woman (I like freecycle – it sort of makes you feel like God or Simon Cowell, hand picking people to receive your bounty based on the quality of their supplication), anyway the woman who just picked up some old doors and a wardrobe, angled to get her hands on John’s records too. I hesitated before I prised them from her fingers and told them they weren’t available. She then tried to steal off with our 8ft x 8ft canvas – the one featuring my naked butt. It’s still in the house because strangely the Tate never got back to me.

Hey this is not a bootsale I felt like yelling as she peeled the plastic cover off it.

‘Wow, fabulous,’ she said.

‘Yeah, we made it,’ I said trying to distract her from the canvas before she figured out that particular splat she was admiring was not my butt. ‘So this is the plinth. Do you want that too?’

‘Plinth?’ She says looking at me weirdly.

‘Yes. On the phone, you said you wanted the plinth.’

‘No, think I’ll leave that. Is this the print you mentioned? Can I have it?’ She asked turning back to the canvas.

‘Plinth! I said plinth.’

Now back away from the canvas, get out of my garage and be on your way.

Today I was brave as a lion

SarahAlderson

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December 18, 2009

‘Where’s daddy going?’

‘To work.’

Lula looks long and hard at Clock House station.

‘There?’

‘Well he gets the train from there. Like I do… Did.’ Ha.

‘What do you do at work?’

‘Er. Well…’ I have to think hard, the memories are already fuzzy, ‘Have meetings. Write things.’

And that’s about it. I can’t think of anything else that I do…DID… at work.

‘It sounds boring.’

Yeah. It is. I can’t tell her this though as I want her to develop a strong Protestant work ethic. Heaven forbid she grows up thinking that it’s fine to just drop out of school or work and go bum around the world.

‘What are we doing today then?’ She asks expectantly, now she’s got her head around the work issue.

Party, I think, ‘There’s a huge party.’ Focus on the party. ‘Then we’re going to the doctor,’ I mumble.

She doesn’t focus on the party. ‘Why are we going to the doctor?’

‘Er. Well…’ I mumble something unintelligible.

‘What mummy?’

‘Well, I need you to hold my hand…’ Whilst I grasp at straws.

She doesn’t ask any more questions. She is too distracted by the snow and the complexity involved in putting on her fingerless gloves.

We get to the doctor’s and wait to be called.

‘Who’s first then?’ The nurse says raising her eyebrows at me. For a moment I think of shoving Lula in front of me but some latent mothering instinct kicks in.

‘Guess that should be me.’

The problem with this is that it means I have to utterly not show fear or pain. Not even a whisper of panic. I have to smile as she produces the four needles and act nonchalant. This is not an easy thing for me. I fear needles and mostly I fear pain. Lula is speechless which is rare. Like how birds go quiet before an earthquake.

I roll up my sleeves.

‘Ok are you ready? I’m going to do the first one,’ the nurse says.

‘Don’t tell me!’ I shriek.’ Just do it.’ I close my eyes and thrust my arm in her direction.

La la la la la la la

Owwwwwwwww – I manage not to scream. I hum Abba instead. I imagine poor Katie Holmes staying silent during labour and this gives me strength.

‘There that’s two – one more.’

Jesus.

Now it’s Lula’s turn. She is wide eyed in the face of my Joker grimace.

‘So you’re going travelling then?’ The nurse asks.

I wince at her – shhhh. I don’t want any connection in Lula’s mind with needles, pain and travelling. Like those rats that get electric shocks until they learn to take food from a certain bowl – I don’t want her brain wiring so that she hears the word travelling and thinks of needles. Durrr I want to say to the nurse but she is busy filling a syringe. I can’t look so focus on pulling down Lula’s jeans (her arms being too skinny for needles they go with the haunch every time).

Lula starts to squirm like a lamb in the slaughterhouse.

She screams as she is stuck with the needle and I feel the guilt that only a mother can feel.

The nurse gives her a sticker that says ‘Today at the doctor’s I was as brave as a lion.’

I stop myself from asking for my three.

How the liver got lost in translation

SarahAlderson

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December 16, 2009

Fois, fois, fois… hmmmm I know that. I know that one… No. It’s gone.

Agneau… I know this one.

‘That’s lamb…’ I say with the confidence of someone who got an A* for GCSE French back in 1994.

‘Ok,great, great,’ the American says, peeling his menu out of my hands, ‘I’ll go with the lamb.’

I sit back in my seat. There is only about 3 mm between our table and the American’s table so I hold my menu up over my face and whisper to John,

‘Dude,’ I say, ‘You’re the one who was born in France…you couldn’t have helped me out a little?’

‘You’re just too damn fast, I was about to and then you were half way through the menu.’

He takes a sip of wine then leans forward so he can really whisper, ‘You did tell him that fois is liver right?’

‘Errr …’ I look at him in horror then at the menu. Fois. As in Fois Gras. I knew I knew it. Shit.

I look at the American guy who is now sitting there expectantly waiting for lamb chops, or a nice, juicy rack of ribs and who’s about to be served offal. 3mm seems suddenly very close quarters. I wonder whether I should offer to swop him my steak. But I don’t want liver.

‘You have to tell him,’ John says.

My eyes grow wide like saucers. ‘I’m not telling him. You tell him.’

John shakes his head at me. I sip my wine and look at the floor whilst John turns to the American.

‘Um, excuse me,’ he says, ‘I’m not sure if you realise but the lamb is actually lamb’s liver.’

I want to die. I think of offering to get him some chianti and fava beans to have with it. I sip my wine some more and keep studying the tiles on the floor.

‘Oh right,’ the guy says.

He is very congenial but then he switches into Japanese to talk to his boyfriend and I think I can guess what they’re saying. But, I want to say, it’s not like I made you order blow fish and anyway you can’t even speak French. You can’t even say s’il vous plait. So really it’s your own fault. Offal is your punishment for thinking that American is the only language in the world.

He talks some more fluent Japanese to his boyfriend.

When the liver arrives I watch out the corner of my eye as he dices it and steers it around his plate like he’s trying to find somewhere to park it. He reverses some under his side salad. And he slips some onto his boyfriend’s plate when he isn’t looking. I can’t enjoy my steak I feel so bad. Plus, in the Karmic way of the universe my request for ‘rare’ has been translated as ‘still moo-ing.’ My steak is so raw it’s cold and I can’t eat it.

I lean over, ‘The mousse au chocolat is really good…That’s chocolate mousse by the way.’ (A* French).

He orders that too just to be polite. I don’t think he trusted me to translate the rest of the dessert menu.

When we get back to the hotel I make a note to download some iphone translation apps and some dictionaries.

The morning after…

SarahAlderson

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December 12, 2009

There’s a smile splitting my face in two at 7.30 in the morning despite my epic hangover. Let’s analyse why.

I don’t have to get up for work.

Don’t look for number 2. There is no 2.

I don’t have to get up for work EVER again. Shhhhh don’t interrupt my joy with questions like ‘Forever? Or just for the next year?’ In this world, In this pre-lit dawn, I’m going with forever.

I lie there contemplating this astonishing truth. I was poised for terror, panic, crippling paralysing fear of the kind only the girl with the long hair in Ring can normally inspire in me. It takes me a few seconds to scan my mindspace, like a person who’s just been shot trying to figure out what parts of their body are still functioning. Then it comes to me. That strange, startling, blinding feeling is euphoria. I am, I realise, more intensely happy than I’ve been in ooooh a pretty damn long time. Let’s go with the forever word again. Birth of first child? Wedding day? Errrr. Maybe this happy.

I lie there coccooned in a mountain of giant pillows that Lula has piled over me to keep the monsters at bay pondering this alien feeling. Then I throw off the monster barriers and without really thinking about what I’m doing I walk to my wardrobe and start ripping through it, yanking all the clothes that I class as work clothes from hangers and flinging them onto the bed. I stand and stare at the pile and then stuff the lot into a bag and go back to bed.

My biggest fear was about a loss of identity. But I don’t feel it. The word that pops into my head is unfettered. Someone suggested I could do a Mr. Ben and choose a new identity and job title every day. But I don’t want one. Unless I can be a pirate. Maybe I’m still drunk I realise as I stagger slightly back to bed. I did have a unique blend of spirits last night followed by a bacon double cheeseburger.

Another thing astonishes me. For the last 6 months I’ve been stressed. Imagine my brain as the mosh pit of the Brixton Academy during a White Zombie performance and you’d be about there. But this morning, I wander downstairs. The doors are hanging off their hinges like wobbly teeth, a man is chainsawing away in the garage, two dozen boxes lie scattered like an obstacle course for the Running Man in the living room and there is a list as long as a banker’s bonus of things to do taped to the fridge door but I’m so not stressed. I even smile at the mess left in the kitchen. Even the crap that has lodged in the plug hole of the sink because John refuses to use the strainer doesn’t get a rise out of me.

I am still happy when we leave the house to do some things on the high street.

‘I need coffee,’ I say.

‘Sure you can afford that now?’ John asks.

Ok, so I knew at some point something was going to take the edge off my euphoria.

Poverty and bursting a big pink bubble

SarahAlderson

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December 9, 2009

‘I want a magazine!’ She demands as soon as we swish through the doors of Sainsburys. I push on past the cbeebies magazines with their cellophaned child magnet landfill toys.

‘I want a lemon,’ she says next pointing at the melons.

‘I want moreganix!,’ she says whilst trying to grab six pink packets of Organix in her arms as we wheel past.

‘I want buttons.’

‘Yeah, well I want to win the lottery and have a nanny and an ocado delivery every day – sometimes life just doesn’t work out the way we want it to,’ I say wearily.

‘It’s not fair.’

‘Well life’s not fair my sweet.’

But I WANT buttons.’

‘I want a child who doesn’t say I WANT all the time and who actually bothers to say please. And if you stand up once more in the trolley we’re going to walk out of this supermarket with nothing, we’ll put the moreganix right back. In fact we’ll put everything back. And you’ll never eat another chocolate button ever again, ever.’

‘NOOOOOOOOOo’

When we’re in the car and Lula is eating her moreganix contentedly I say to her, ‘You know, you’ve really got to stop asking for things all the time. This incessant ‘I want, I want’ it’s just so spoilt.’

‘No, it’s not.’

‘Er, actually, yes it is.’

It’s pantomime season in the car, ‘Oh no it isn’t.’

I hate panto. ‘You know, really you’re a very lucky girl.’

‘Why?’

Why? Because you’ve got me as a mother I think.

‘Because you have a pink bedroom and a mummy who buys you organix and rents you sleeping beauty on demand and a daddy who reads you bedtime stories and puts up with you jumping on his nuts every morning (I don’t say that last bit) and there are a lot of children out there who don’t even have enough to eat let alone free reign in blockbuster. Some don’t even have mummies and daddies.’

Have I gone too far? As soon as I say the words I regret it.

‘Why don’t they have mummies and daddies?’ She asks in wonderment.

I think about HIV and Aids and Malaria and the fact that almost 99% of maternal deaths happen in developing countries and think perhaps that’s all a bit much for a three year old to comprehend. We haven’t done death yet.

How do you explain why some people are born rich and some are born poor? Why some are born in countries that give you decent healthcare and to households with three televisions and the same number of computers whilst other children are born and live in slums and are given no opportunities to do anything – let alone choose which overpriced organic corn snacks they want.

I can’t even explain to her why daddy doesn’t have boobies or why she can’t open every window of her advent calendar at once. These are BIG topics. About capitalism, inequality, corrupt pharmaceutical companies and governments, injustice, sexism and death. I struggle to understand the lack of fairness in the world myself.

I figure that I can’t tell her about all these things because how could she possibly understand a world where every child doesn’t get a princess story at bedtime or have a fairy called Happy looking out for them.

‘Well, because like I said, life isn’t fair,’ I begin, reversing out of my parking space, ‘when we’re in India and Asia you’ll see that.’

Sometimes I think we’ve bitten off more than we can chew.

But if it comes down to staying and reinforcing her world view that food grows magically in Sainsbury’s, and is paid for by a piece of plastic that mummy happens to keep in her wallet or vagabonding the world and showing her a less pink view of it, I think we’re doing the right thing. I want to burst that big pink bubble.

Gently mind.

Burrowing through shit (as Tucker says)…

SarahAlderson

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December 7, 2009

Opposite me are six men in suits. They are grey and weary and joyless. Having said that, I am pretty joyless right now too. I wish they would stop holding these conferences on high floors. It’s just tempting fate. Either I’m going to jump or I’m going to push someone. Though, as it’s a voluntary sector conference I’d have to navigate around way too many soapboxes to make it to the window and I’m lazy.

After the first three syllables spoken by the keynote my brain of its own accord switches off like when they stick a knife in the cerebral cortex of a Terminator T800 model to stop it rampaging. I know that my work husband is bored too because out the corner of my eye I can see he is mauling his pen like a hungry cocker spaniel chewing on a bone. This is a dead giveaway that he is either thinking or bored. In this case I opt for bored because there’s nothing to be thinking about other than how to make it to the windows and he has just reached for his stash of Rennie and popped one which means he is bored and frustrated. Join the club. I wish he had something stronger I could pop. I gaze out the window and see the tower of the Truman brewery and sigh audibly.

Four days suddenly seems like a very, very long way away. As in, about as far away as the paleozoic era looking backwards. It feels like we’ll have colonized the moons of Jupiter before I get to hand over my security pass.

In truth I am feeling very ambivalent about four days’ time, because in four days’ time life as I know it ends. Maybe I’m institutionalised – like the guy from the Shawshank Redemption who gets paroled and finds freedom all too much so hangs himself. At least I’ll have a soapbox to stand on. I’m reminded all of a sudden of a Malcom Tucker line – It’s like the Shawshank Redemption, though we’re burrowing through more fucking shit and there’s no fucking redemption. He could have been describing this conference.

I wasn’t this freaked out before childbirth. I was so ready for that. So ready in fact that at 8 months I was sharpening the knife and preparing to give myself a c-section I was so done with waiting. This however, this stepping into the realms of the unemployed and possibly insane, this I’m not ready for at all. I have no idea how I’m going to feel on Friday when I wake and realise that I don’t have to go to work. The place that after home is where I’ve spent most of my time in the past 8 years and which has occupied way too much of my brain space. Mostly I’m scared about who on Friday I’ll be.

I will be me of course, but I’ll be a different me. I will not have a title for one thing. I am starting to understand why Princess Di fought to keep her title in the divorce. One grows very fond of such things. If I’m not Head of Projects what will I be? I try to list all the other things I am known as to make myself feel less of a nobody – mummy mo (to the bean), sugarplum (to a select few), Lardarse (to my brother – this doesn’t make me feel better strangely), Blossom (to my dad). Once I was called a MILF by a random stranger…that does make me feel better.

Where am I going with this? I know this is classic psychotherapy material. I must rid myself of ego and all that but one thing at a time. I need to rid myself of my security pass first and that’s going to be a big enough challenge.

Then I wonder what other things might change come Friday other than my bank balance, my alarm setting and my freedom from conferences that make me want to commit suicide. I wonder whether certain character traits I possess might disappear along with my business cards. For example what will happen to my perennial impatience, intolerance of stupidity, cynicism, sarcasm, brusqueness and flaring nostrils? Will they vanish too?

Yeah. Not likely. I hear you.

I’ll keep you posted.

I feel the need, the need for speed! Actually no I don’t.

SarahAlderson

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December 3, 2009

I am, according to the man whose penis I grabbed, ‘immensely enlightening’. He wasn’t referring to my genital grabbing technique, though perhaps he was, in secret code that I failed to pick up on at the time. Perhaps he found Nirvana in those few seconds I honked his bits whilst trying to break my fall.

In seriousness, I think it was just a polite way of saying that my stupidity was eye opening. But it got me thinking again about enlightenment and my failure to meditate myself into a calmer, slower mental space. When I try to do this my mind cranks up a notch becoming a hotbed of tangential thoughts and random synapse firing, usually about underage or Swedish hotness.

The problem is speed. I feel the need, the need for speed, as the GMD once said in Topgun. Sometimes I think that if I actually did a line of speed it would have the opposite physiological response – slowing me down till I was dribbling and standing static in a stairwell staring at a wall or something. Speed is my natural state – although I don’t do running or fast movements or any kind, not even if there’s a bus coming at me and I’m facing a future as road kill. I don’t perform any fast movements involving limbs because my mind is using all the calories – and yes, well probably I should be using all that speed to discover the answer to Dark Matter or how Lloyd stayed in so long but that requires IQ too and I’m not laying claim to IQ points, just to speedy ability to process thoughts.

A friend of mine has just got back from this shamanistic slash meditation slash drink peyote in the desert whilst communing with nature retreat type thing in Mexico. It sounded cool. At least the peyote drinking sounded cool. And he said that when walking in the desert even there it was impossible to switch off. So what hope is there for me?

Probably none but to give it its best shot, and to see whether we can switch off from the relentless speed and pace of London before tramping the world proper we’ve decided to rework our route and spend longer in India. In fact we’re going to find an idyllic Keralan beach house and rent it for a month or longer. And there we will work on beating our speed addiction and I will work on my meditation so that the next person I speak to will say that I’m immensely enlightened.

Cholera, Rabies, Thinness, Buffness

SarahAlderson

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December 1, 2009

I am crossing Hungerford Bridge with my best friend Nichola. We are intellectually critiquing a film we have just seen.

‘He is seriously buff.’

‘Yes seriously. I think though it might be illegal in some parts of America for us to fancy him.’

We are locked into a discussion on the finer details of Jacob’s twelve pack in New Moon and his delightful penchant for running around half naked for most of the film.

‘But the other members of the pack – what was going on there? I paid £11 for that ticket – for £11 I don’t want to be staring at flabbiness and beer bellies – I want buffness. From anyone who has it in their contract to be topless.’

‘Too right.’

‘I mean you’d think with a multi-million dollar budget and all they’d be able to afford a personal trainer to stand over them with a cattle prod and get them into shape between takes.’

‘Yeah,like ‘Get to the gym now!’

As Nichola shouts this out with accompanying hand movements, like a staff sargeant training army recruits, a homeless women we happen to be passing grabs her blanket and starts running ahead of us calling out ‘sorry,’ over her shoulder. She is in abject terror at the Irish girl yelling at her to get fit. We frantically try to convince the woman that it wasn’t her we were talking to but she has already bolted to Fitness First.

The irony is that I’m not one to talk about flabbiness or pot bellies and have never been to a gym in my life. Gyms are just concepts to me. Like the space time continuum. I don’t understand either and don’t really want to. So rather than getting a gym membership I bought a round the world ticket. I’ve deluded myself that I’m going to eat fruit all day, do yoga on the beach for four hours every day, swim in the sea and voila, I’m thin and beautiful and eighteen again in just three days.

A deep, inner part of me knows that this isn’t going to happen. Mainly because I hate yoga and I can’t swim in the sea because I panic if I can’t see to the bottom and think a shark is going to eat me. I’m not going to be jogging down the beach because I’m going to be lying on it recovering from a hangover and keeping one eye out for rabid monkeys. I intend to eat fruit yes, but also to eat everything else (except meat in India). Eating is probably the single greatest thing about travelling other than the not working. Also and this is the main point, I have no incentive – I’m not about to have my arse displayed on a screen the size of a football pitch and am not being paid millions by the producers of Charlie’s Angels to change up a la Demi Moore.

Given all this, I’ve had to come up with another plan.

I tell Nichola that I’m thinking of not taking the cholera vaccine you can get which gives some protection against stomach bugs.

‘Why?’ She asks.

‘Because then I might get thin.’

‘Remember that when you’re sitting on a loo dying.’

I think back to an email I got yesterday from a friend in India who has spent the last ten days ‘shitting water.’ Maybe she is right. But then again…

As for Lula, she’s definitely taking the cholera vaccine but we are still debating the rabies shot – it’s three injections. Plus the three others she needs for typhoid etc. That’s a lot of Barbies.

‘But,’ I say to John, ‘what if she gets licked by a monkey and doesn’t tell us. It doesn’t need to be a bite. What if, we aren’t there, a monkey comes up and licks her and she forgets to tell us and then the next thing we know she’s showing symptoms? Because you know, when the symptoms show that’s when it’s too late to do anything. It’s fatal.’

That night I have a serious conversation with Lula whilst I’m brushing her hair. ‘So when we’re travelling you mustn’t go near any animals ever. Unless mummy or daddy tell you it’s ok. And if an animal touches you when we’re not there then you must absolutely tell us straight away.’

Lula looks at me and says, ‘But mummy why wouldn’t you be there? Where are you going to be?’

She is a genius. She’s absolutely right. One of us will always be with her, mainly because we can’t afford an au pair, thus we’ll know if she gets licked by a monkey and will have 24 hours to get her to medical assistance.

Phew.

But then I realise I might not be with her because I’m stuck on a toilet. Ok. We’ll both get the shots.

Anything pour moi…except the records maybe.

SarahAlderson

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November 26, 2009

I am going to be drawing some parallels now between myself and Diane Kruger because I look just like her. So get ready.

We just watched this film called ‘Anything for her’ (spoiler alert!). In it Diane is accused of killing her boss and sentenced to 20 years in a prison where the hallogen strip lighting makes even her, and lets not forget she played Helen of Troy, look ugly. But her husband, who you don’t believe for a nanosecond she would look twice at in real life and which therefore put my belief suspending ability really to the test in ways that even New Moon didn’t, is convinced she’s innocent (and actually she is innocent despite me yelling ‘she so did it’ for the first half of the film).

So the husband spends ages drawing scale plans of the prison on his bedroom walls, robs a drug dealer accidentally murdering him in the process, sells everything they own, says a permenant adios to all his family and then breaks the ill-lit Diane out of the prison so they can leg it to San Salvador with bambino in tow.

When the credits roll I turn to John,

‘Would you do that for me?’

He pauses an inordinately long time. I assume this is because he is weighing up whether he would say adios to his record collection for a life on the run with me. I don’t want to know the answer to that one so I hurry on…

‘Well I suppose it’s slightly different. Her husband was convinced of her innocence, whereas you’d probably be convinced of my guilt. For pretty good reason.’

John laughs but he doesn’t argue with me. Hmmmmmmm.

It sparks some debate in my head that night whilst I’m trying to sleep about the things that people will do for love, and all the things you wouldn’t be able to do without someone – metaphorically at least -breaking you out, getting you a fake passport and subbing your escape. I’d better start being nice to John. Never know when I might need him to make that call over the records or me.

However, it occurs to me that whilst John might have nagging doubts over my innocence if I ever got charged with murder, he has on the other hand shown himself to be a pretty cool conspirator in plotting my escape from the strip lighting of number 1 London Bridge. Without his reassurance I’d definitely still be imprisoned / employed. Witness…

‘Are you sure we can do this?’

‘Yes.’

‘Are you quite sure?’

‘Yes.’

‘Really, really sure?’

‘Yes.’

‘Will you keep me if it all goes wrong?’

I think he says yes to this. I block out the answer.

So, you see, Diane and I have a lot more in common than just looking the same and fancying Pacey from Dawson’s Creek.

Princess Pol Pot and the monkey forest

SarahAlderson

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November 23, 2009

Right that’s it. We can never come back. And not just because we’ve rented the house indefinitely and gone and resigned. Nor because the tories are about to come to power and I am standing on principle (because lets face it I don’t have many of those). No. We can’t come back because Lula in doing her best impression of Kevin from ‘We need to talk about Kevin’ has driven a small child and her mother from our home in floods of tears. I am so embarrassed I need to put several continents between myself and them as quickly as possible. If we could bring forward our leaving date I would be on my way to Heathrow right now and not writing this blog post.

The mother (who until about half an hour ago was a really good friend) was of course gracious and kind to my face after Lula had tried to force her daughter into her ‘pink fairy palace’ and told her daughter that she was ‘RUDE’ (in capital letters) when she wouldn’t go. She then added to this by telling her that her picture was ‘not cinderella it’s a scribble’ in much the same sneering tone that Malcolm Tucker employs when confronting the opposition. I wonder where she is learning that from.

I apologise profusely having failed to get Lula to do so.

‘It’s just that Lula is a natural leader. One day she’ll be Prime Minister or something,’ my friend says.

‘No I think Prime Minister would be impossible, that would require skills like consensus building and diplomacy…a Dictator maybe.’

‘Chairman Lula.’

‘And her little pink book.’

We laugh. But inside I’m dying. I am thinking I am the worst mother in the world. I’m worse than octomum. At one point I am on the floor rocking back and forth staring into blankness as the screams and wails of two toddlers rail down from above like hailstones. I wonder whether we should just park Lula with the monkeys in Bali’s sacred monkey forest and let them raise her – they’d clearly do a better job.

‘Do what I say!’ Lula yells.

‘NO!’ her friend yells back.

‘She won’t do what I say,’ Lula bawls to me.

‘Well that’s because we have free will and you can’t make people do stuff Lula.’

She looks at me like I’ve just told her pink is a crap colour. Like it’s an impossibility or I’m talking ewok or something. It is totally inconceivable to her that she is not God. That she cannot command and be obeyed. We really have messed up these last three years I realise.

‘She just wants to play. I feel sorry for her,’ my friend says.

‘Why? Would you feel sorry for Pol Pot?’ I reply.

And so they leave in a hurry. Alula refuses to budge from the sofa to say bye. She is busy strangling the cat. I say sorry and bye on her behalf then march back upstairs to tell her to start packing. She’s got a date with some monkeys.