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Things I will miss and not miss

SarahAlderson

October 5, 2009

John called me as I waded my way across the cricket pitch to Lula’s preschool in torrential rain. I was feeling proud of myself for having managed to get lula, her two coats, protective rain gear (ladybird umbrella, wellie boots and mac), lunch bag and homework bag there on time, in one piece and without forgetting anything. John was calling to tell me it was raining. You don’t say.

We agreed that the rain was a wonderful thing because in approximately 16 weeks we wouldn’t be dealing with rain again. Unless it’s tropical rain, and that kind of rain, the kind of rain you can run around naked in, the kind of rain you can dance in, that’s the only kind of rain I like.

In the car on the way home I started to wonder if perhaps I was focussing too much on the bad stuff about the UK. Like how as a nation we are getting humungously fat. When I see how fat the kids are in the playground these days, I just want to leave before I get eaten. Someone important and connected to scientists at the department of health, told me the other day that by 2050, 9 out of 10 people will be obese. I flinch in revulsion at what the world is coming to (half dying of obesity and half of starvation – my liberal sensibilities are mightily offended). Then Lula tells me at dinner that I have ‘a great, big, fat tummy’.

I put my fork down (the one laden with blackberry crumble) and tell her that I don’t have a great, big, fat tummy, that I’m still a size 10 and that if I have a little pot belly that’s from carrying her for nine months and lets not even talk about the little issue of a herniated disc that popped out the same time she did.

‘But nana has a great, big, fat tummy so you will too.’ she says. John congratulates her on her logic. I want Lula to take her logic one step forward and thirty years into the future.

I add ‘because everyone is fat or is going to end up fat’ to my list of 999 reasons why I’m leaving the UK. John points out I’d be best off writing for the Daily Mail and not the Guardian. It is the hangover making me evil. The hangover and pmt. So from now I vow, I am only going to focus on all the things I am going to miss about the UK and in this way become the kind of wife John wants and not a vile, right wing, people hating, daily hate reading Tory (do they warrant capital letters?) wife.

I am going to make a list of the things I will miss the most and therefore must do, eat, see, touch and hear before we leave, as though I am a dying person with just 4 months to live.

I start my list with the following:

1. Percy pigs

2. Cadbury’s dairy milk

3. PG tips – because Lipton tea sucks.

I shall keep adding as things come to me.

Ok, I’ve thought of one more thing

4. Karine Jackson (best hairdresser in the world)

and here is something I won’t miss… ROYAL MAIL

Waitrose, Denial and Consulting

SarahAlderson

2 comments

October 2, 2009

I am in Waitrose and I am about to cry. It isn’t because of the prices, nor because of the semi-religious experience that shopping in those wide, airy aisles inspires in me, nor because Lula now strapped firmly into her buggy after hightailing it around the store, is screaming ‘But I WANT a croissant!’ over and over until every person in there is standing with their hands clamped to their ears, staring in horror at the middle class monster I have spawned. No, I’m not crying about that, although I want to. I’m crying because I have realised my days of shopping in Waitrose are numbered.

I don’t always shop in Waitrose. Some days I slum it in M&S. Ok, that’s not true, though I’d like it to be. I’m actually a Sainsbury’s girl. Waitrose is my treat shop. Some women go for facials – I go to Waitrose. Some people go to church – I find enlightenment and a rather nice line in rice crisp things at Waitrose. My days of shopping there are numbered however, because I have only just realised that very shortly I will have no money. Even though I resigned a while back now, this particular fact didn’t permeate my consciousness until today. If it had I probably wouldn’t have resigned. Denial is a handy psychological tool.

Come January I won’t have anyone paying me anymore for delegating, practicing creative writing in fundraising reports and reading Lainey Gossip in my downtime. I won’t even be able to shop in Lidl. The thought is enough to turn my insides liquid (the thought of having no income, not the thought of shopping in Lidl – I get my catfood there). I have never not had money coming in. When I was a kid I had pocket money (actually one of the many bonuses of my parents divorcing was that both of them paid me pocket money – it was like double funding). When I was a teenager I had money earned from temping (I was a very good receptionist though I did get fired from Accenture – the thing I am most proud of in my life – yes even more so than having a child). And I’ve spent every year since graduating earning. What will happen at the end of January when no money comes popping into my account? Well, not much actually because I’ll have the money that is supposedly buying a new bathroom with marble tiling and gold plated taps to see me through for a while. And when payday does come around, I will be laid out on a massage table under a coconut grove in Patnem beach in Southern Goa so hopefully I won’t even notice.

However, John says I need to focus on thinking up ways of earning income when we are away. I worry that maybe he doesn’t want to ‘keep me.’ As if I would be a kept woman I want to yell, but secretly and appallingly, I think I wouldn’t mind it. The feminist in me is like a caged beast. I can hear her snarling at me. Oh, Ok. I let her out. I need to earn my own money. I will not take money from my husband. Just from the bank.

So, I sit with my pencil hovering over the paper trying to work out what possible skills I have that I can use when I am away travelling. An hour passes, then a day, then several months. Then it comes to me. I can be a consultant. There are so many people calling themselves consultants then surely I can too. What do you need to be a consultant? You need people to consult you. And you need to be able to look like you know what you are talking about. I know I can do this latter. It is what I do in my job every day. I am well practiced. I just need people now to consult me about things. What should I consult on though? I only have two ideas so far: I could consult on how to commit career suicide. Or on how to not get divorced whilst planning a round the world trip (though I might have to wait on this one until we’re safely on the plane or I might not have any credibility).

Failing that, I can write. And try to get paid for it. And maybe one day my blog will be as big as Lainey’s. Though with fewer pictures of Robert Pattinson on it.

Why Barbie can’t come with us either. But why Shrek can.

SarahAlderson

4 comments

September 30, 2009

‘Mummy, I just want to be prettier still.’

‘Sweetheart you don’t need hairclips in your hair to be pretty.’

‘No. I need to wear bracelets too. I need to be more prettier.’

Damn. How did this happen? How did our three year old daughter become so obsessed by her looks and notions of beauty? That’s rhetorical. Because I know the answer. It’s because we tell her she is beautiful about a thousand times a day (there’s something Freudian in it I’m sure), reinforcing the idea that it’s only what she looks like that’s important. Oops.

I add ‘demonstrating to Lula that beauty is a subjective notion with cultural norms attached to it and that real beauty, like the Dove people tell us, comes from within (is that what they tell us? Or is it that real beauty is in all shapes and sizes and colours?)’ to my list of reasons for going travelling.

I am thinking of telling Lula her Barbie can’t come with us on the plane because it might make her head explode (her Barbie’s head, not Lula’s). If I can prise her away from Barbie, her princess outfit and her addiction to accessorize jewellery and stickers then maybe, just maybe, I can divert her off the path that at the moment is leading her, aged thirteen, to Topshop, where she will hang around waiting to be spotted by a scout from Select Models. My mother in law points out to me though that there are televisions and Barbies in every country. It is simply impossible to avoid the global obsession over what we look like. Blonde, blue eyed, slim – all these things are ingrained in the global conscience as the definition of beauty. In which case, Lula is very lucky. But I don’t want her to think that.

In the meantime, in a rubbish attempt to teach her that beauty comes from within, I point to her tummy and tell her that that’s where beauty comes from. Then I press on her tickle spot. She laughs and I say ‘See, there! Right there – that’s where beauty is. In a smile.’ I realise I sound like a self-help book even as I say it. Seeing as she’s a bit too young for The Beauty Myth, I vow to look on Amazon at the children’s books to see if I can find one about the beauty within. Or better yet, about a princess who finds the beauty within. Hang on – that’s Shrek isn’t it? I buy it.

On the way to nursery I attempt to show her that beauty lies in natural things – look at the sky isn’t it beautiful. Look at the red leaves on that tree – aren’t they beautiful? She catches on. ‘Look mummy, the purple flowers are so beautiful. I could put one in my hair.’ It doesn’t seem to be working.

This morning she tells me, ‘I love you mummy.’ And I say, ‘That’s nice darling. I love you too. Do you know what love means?’

‘It doesn’t mean anything mummy! It means NOTHING!’ she yells.

It gives me hope. Maybe she secretly thinks the same about beauty.

by Sarah

John can’t take his vinyl collection with us

SarahAlderson

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September 28, 2009

There is a wall of records in John’s study. Roughly 3,000 in total. They make up the third person in our marriage but I have long since come to love them. A bit like Keira Knightley does in the Duchess with that other woman who shacks up in her house and sleeps with her husband. In a remarkably similar set up, John spends most of his nights with his vinyl collection, but just like Keira, I’ve learnt to not be jealous. They make him happy and, when he puts on a good disco classic, they make me happy too. Once, someone asked him what he would save first in a fire (actually maybe I asked him this) – his records or me – and he actually paused. He paused before he answered me.

I have no doubt that he has counted each and every one and that if he had more time they would be sorted by alphabetical order, cross referenced by genre. He has also already sourced a shipping quote, on the offchance that we do decide we are moving to Australia or Bali or America. I wind him up by asking what he’ll do if the ship sinks. Or if it gets captured by Somalian pirates. How much he’d pay in ransom.

Then I go back to staring at the wall, like a mountaineer contemplating the North Face of the Eiger. I look at the loft planks John has bought. He is intending on packing all this vinyl and then putting it up in the loft. Good luck with that I think. Never have I been so pleased to have the bad back excuse. Sorry darling, I really can’t help you load these 3000 records up in the loft, you’ll have to find someone else to help.

John and I have very different approaches to packing, to cleaning – to living in fact. He does detail. I do not. He does perfection, ponderously. I do imperfection, fast. Somewhere, there is a middle ground but we struggle to find it. I guess all marriages are a compromise.

To illustrate this in the context of the house clearance currently going on, yesterday we decided to tackle the garage over the way. The one that is full of my mother’s junk. The one that should have a sign over it reading ‘Abandon all hope, ye who enter here.’ It is a mammoth task on a monumental hangover. I decide the best way to deal with it is to not look in any of the boxes but to just shove them in the car (actually to direct John to shove them in the car) and take them to the dump. John’s approach, which I gawp at open mouthed, is to sort through each box, put everything into freecycle, recycle, ebay and dump piles and then, SWEEP out the garage. I’m literally dumbstruck. I would never have thought about doing that. The effort. The point. But the result is amazing. We could almost set up home in the garage once he is done. It is perfect. Ready to accept the offerings of furniture and household goods I have boxed up ready to go. Then john looks at the boxes I have sealed up. They look like the carboard equivalent of mummies, parcel tape wrapped around and around them in ever increasing desperation, vainly trying to contain contents that clearly are the wrong size and shape for the box. ‘Dude,’ I say, ‘they’re just going into the garage, who cares?’

‘I hope it’s not my stuff.’ he says.

‘As if I’d dare.’ I mumble.

by Sarah

How to pack up an entire house in the manner of a Tate installation

SarahAlderson

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September 25, 2009

Tomorrow we are having people around for dinner – Claude will be having his in Lula’s pink wendy house if she gets her way. He will be wearing a prince outfit, she a bridal veil made of her christening blanket and a Rambo hairband. Explaining to her that Claude already has a girlfriend and wants to eat at the grown up table is the least of my worries though right now. The house is so full of boxes it reminds me of the Rachel Whiteread installation at the Tate a while back and I’m not sure I can find the table in amongst them, in which case Claude will be the only one eating.

Packing up the house is quite a task. My friend is moving house and I ask her how she is managing to stay away from the Valium. She looks at me blankly and then tells me they’re getting in packers. I stare at her amazed that there is such a thing (I’ve never moved house before) and for about five seconds I can breathe again. Then I realise that packers are for when you are moving house and not when you are squeezing excess furniture into your spare garage amongst all your mother’s rotting junk and have no new house to put your belongings in.

I am on the other hand essentially trying to shove a whole house, minus bits of furniture, into one rucksack. Surprisingly, it won’t all fit. The spare room has become my dumping ground for things I may very well want to take. Like flip flops, out of date suncream, flash cards (someone’s going to have to take over where the preschool will leave off) and a pile of books so high it’s skyscrapering the wardrobe. And we’re not even leaving for another 18 weeks. When I work that ou I start to hyperventilate again and miss letters off the keyboard.

We are renting our house out. (I hope – otherwise we won’t be able to pay the mortgage when we’re away). I stare lovingly at our Philippe Starck stools for half an hour. Then at the railway sleeper coffee table. It feels like I’m renouncing middle-classness in one fell swoop. I go upstairs and kneel before my wardrobe and my shoe collection. I have to put my head between my knees. I decide I must give every piece a turn before I pack them away – a bit like I used to do with my teddies so they didn’t feel left out.

How will I be able to whittle it all down? Who can I trust to take care of my shoes? What will I do with my excessively large collection of nail polish? I look up and see the 10×10 foot canvas on the wall that John and I made by covering ourselves in paint and rolling all over it (if you look closely – those two orbs – that’s my butt) – who the hell is going to want that on their wall? Possibly the Tate. I will call and check.

Then I remember I have a cat to rehouse. You can see where my priorities lie.

Explaining the world to a toddler

SarahAlderson

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September 23, 2009

‘So, Lula, do you know what we’re doing next year?’ (Next year could just as well be in five minutes to her. She thinks her birthday is every single day, that Christmas is next week and that Claude, her favourite person in the whole world is coming to stay in her Pink House at the weekend – when she is eighteen.)

‘We’re going travelling.’

She says ‘travelling’ with the gravitas of Livingstone. Yet I am fairly sure she knows not what this means.

So I attempt to explain several concepts at once in a way that a three year old with a princess obsession can understand. I have to break it to her that:

1) Her world map puzzle (age 3+) is not a direct representation of the globe. Which is in reality neither flat nor made up of interlocking pieces.

2) As such, we won’t therefore be seeing kangaroos half the size of Australia or a Golden Gate Bridge that stretches four hundred miles out to sea.

3) Her Uncle Rich and Auntie Pooja live in the place marked India but not in her puzzle, no matter how close she looks.

4) Travelling means leaving behind most of her toys and books, including Marcel Mouse and her fairy wings BUT there is definitely room for Mamma Mia! and her pink flower princess dress. So she mustn’t panic.

5) Molly the cat won’t fit in her Upsy Daisy backpack.

I wonder at what point when we’re away she’ll turn to us and say ‘Can we go home now?’ In Mexico it took about a week. When we went camping in Somerset in May it took her about an hour. To be fair, it took me fifteen minutes.

At least though she doesn’t understand the concept of time. So when we say ‘not for seven more months darling,’ she’ll probably think that that means on her birthday on Friday, just before Father Christmas arrives with a sack load of presents and the day after Claude moves into her pink house.

by Sarah

Nightmares, feeling the fear and a little thing called status

SarahAlderson

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September 20, 2009

Last night I dreamt I was running around a supermarket with towering white shelves. We were in India. I was looking for something. I can’t remember what now. And I was throwing up all over the shelves, projectile style.

The night before I dreamt – and this is a little weirder – that I was being tied to a giant wooden cross (like the one they use in Jesus Christ Superstar) and thrown into a swimming pool face down.

The night before that – I’m not going there on a public forum. I’d lose all my Twitter followers and gain a whole load more. It was dark. And graphic in a way that would take you days of trawling through the deepest recesses of the internet to find something that even came close. Which makes it sound like it was sexual – which it wasn’t. For me anyway.

I do what I always do with my hallucinogenic dreams – I turn to John and ask him to decipher them using his knowledge of pop psychology. Even he struggles to keep his face neutral at the symbolism of my drowning whilst being tied to a cross. Apparently the fear I’m prodding down during the day, is poking up at night into my dreams. But I don’t get it – fear? Why is fear hiding out in my subconscious? The first week after I slammed my resignation letter down on the CEO’s desk, the smile that was splitting my face was so wide that I thought I might need stitches. I wasn’t afraid. I was euphoric. But now that has started to fade. Which sucks. Because I can’t get it back. You can only resign once from the same job after all.

So I start blaming the voice of authority in my head, that sounds just like my father, for seeding the fear. I feel like I need to start reading ‘Feel The Fear and Do It Anyway’, donning a hooded sweater and dancing up the steps of Capitol Hill punching the air, before the voice in my head which is telling me loudly that I’m ‘insane to give up a well paid job in the midst of a recession’ makes me shuffle over to my boss on my knees and beg for my resignation letter to be shredded.

Luckily, before I can do this, the voice of the eighteen year old who normally rules the airwaves in my head (and convinces me I’m not too old to shop at Topshop) is like, ‘Whatever, shuttup,’ to the dad voice, and she’s shouting louder so I’m listening to her.

Anyway, I don’t need a job for the next year because the bank manager is nice and thinks we’re getting a new bathroom. And we shall be living in South East Asia on rice and beans and coasting in the spare bedrooms of friends and family wherever possible (and in a rather luxurious two bed villa with a pool in Ubud but shhhhhh). Thus I have declared to John that together with the bathroom slush fund, there are sufficient monies in the bump account (that we saved for a second child that we’re now definitely not having after the crushing tantrums of our first child showed me the light) to see us through on our journey. The extra pocket money from the bank manager is now necessary because having just paid £2000 for the tickets (Alula had better be sleeping in that seat and not on us for every single one of those flights), I have precisely £489 left in my travelling account. I know India is cheap, but it’s not that cheap.

But back to my nightmares, I hate to admit it but I think the real cause is not cheese, nor the voices in my head. It’s not the job issue, or rather the having no job issue, nor is it the giving up of a house, saying goodbye to friends, or the knowledge I won’t see Topshop in awhile (which actually, whilst I’m on a reality check, is coming at the right time – I just got caught in the stampede for Christopher Kane’s collection launch and realised that I actually am too old for dayglow and studs). It’s really all about giving up status. Such an ugly word but it’s the truth.

For the last eight years I’ve been working in the non-profit sector as a Head of Something. And there is a little part of me that is terrified of giving up that word. A head. I’m a head of something for another 13 weeks and after that I’m a nobody. I’m just me. And I won’t have lots of people to boss about. Only two, I remind myself, trying to look on the bright side.

I ask Lula, “Who’s the boss? Who’s in charge?”

“I am,” She tells me.

Damn it.

by Sarah

Why? Why? Why?

SarahAlderson

1 comment

September 18, 2009

A lot of people keep asking us why – what inspired us to do this trip?

About six months ago I wrote my reasons on some Post-Its and stuck them on our bedroom wall next to a pinboard that I covered in pictures of white beaches, turreted chateaux, hammocks and clippings from the guardian travel section. Oh and this postcard.

Here are my reasons:

There were several things that poked me along the way. It took ten months from niggling half-formed ‘got to do something’ thoughts, to resignation letters and flight bookings. Here are my main prodders.

1. We are sitting on a plane flying back from Mexico. It is early Feb 2009. There is a man behind me whose naked, tattooed gut is pressing against the back of my chair. I look around the plane and think of jumping out the emergency exit. And this is not a response to ten hours on a flight with a toddler. This is more to do with the horror of coming back to Britain after two sun drenched weeks road tripping up the Mayan coast. That was when I first had thoughts along the lines of ‘why are we living this life in London that allows us a couple of exotic holidays a year when we could be doing it full time?’

The idea parked for a while until…

2. We speak to Rich, John’s brother. He runs several social enterprises from Mumbai and is generally inspiring. He tells us to just do it. I feel like I’m in a Nike ad.

3. I read Tim Ferriss’ The 4-hour Work Week and fall in love with the concept of not working ever again.

4. I realise that Lula, our baby, is no longer a baby and will be starting school in 15 months’ time (Sep 2010). A quick scan of the local Ofsted reports puts me into a panic. We have ‘that’ private vs state debate and I realise that neither really works for me. I am just not sure that our education system is providing what children need for the 21st century in either sector. Add to this my horror of facing the prospect of being tied into working in London in stressful jobs for the rest of our lives (at this stage I had parked Tim Ferris and was getting realistic).

5. I manage to convince John on steak night Wednesday that this is what we need to do. Absolutely and completely. And totally.

5. I read Fuck it: The ultimate spiritual way and decide to say Fuck It to everything. Job? Fuck it. Scared of not having an income? Fuck it. Possibility of getting amoebic dysentary in India with a child in tow? Fuck it.

6. One of my best project managers at work tells me she is leaving. I say Fuck it. I am too.

7. I resign and they make plans for my succession. It is like a bridge is burning behind me and I can’t turn back.

8. Ex-housemate comes around to discuss renting house off of us. She looks out window, sees a robin and says, ‘but won’t you miss things like English birds?’ I look at John then back to Lizzie and say, ‘Er, no. When I’m lying on my sunbed by the pool in Bali, I don’t think I’m going to be thinking about how much I miss English birds.’

9. Every single person I tell our plan to turns around and says ‘That’s so inspiring’ except for my father in law who thinks we are mad. I feel like Gandhi. No one has ever told me I’m inspiring before and now I feel like I’ve been told it 384 times in the last week alone. I could get used to this. I might not be a Head of Projects anymore but I am inspiring.

by Sarah