I Don't Know How She Does It by Allison Pearson. (1/2)

[midnight_birth]

Title: I Don't Know How She Does It.
Author: Allison Pearson.
Genre: Fiction, family, humour, domestic fiction.
Country: U.K.
Language: English.
Publication Date: 2002.
Summary: With unsentimental irony, this novel dramatizes the dilemma of working motherhood at the start of the century. Meet Kate Reddy, hedge-fund manager and mother of two. She can juggle nine different currencies in five different time zones and get herself and two children washed and dressed and out of the house in half an hour. In Kate's life, Everything Goes Perfectly as long as Everything Goes Perfectly. She lies to her own mother about how much time she spends with her kids; practices pelvic floor squeezes in the boardroom; applies tips from Toddler Training to soothe her irascible boss; uses her cell phone in the office bathroom to procure a hamster for her daughter's birthday; and cries into the laundry hamper when she misses her children's bedtime. And when she meets a handsome American client and begins getting closer and closer to him, her juggling ability begins to suffer more and more. Both funny and sad, the novel captures the guilty secret lives of working women.

My rating: 7.5/10
My review:


♥ But with a firm downward motion-imagine enough pressure to crush a small beetle-you can start a crumbly little landslide, giving the pastry a pleasing homemade appearance. And homemade is what I'm after here. Home is where the heart is. Home is where the good mother is, baking for her children.

♥ "You see, Katharine," Mrs. Davies explained later, doing that disapproving upsneeze thing with her sinuses over teacakes, "there are mother who make an effort like your mum and me. And then you get the type of person who"-prolonged sniff-"don't make the effort."

Of course I knew who they were: Women Who Cut Corners. Even back in 1974, the dirty word has started to spread about mothers who went out to work. Females who wore trouser suits and even, it was alleged, allowed their children to watch television while it was still light. Rumors of neglect clung to these creatures like dust to their pelmets.

So before I was really old enough to understand what being a woman meant, I already understood that the world of women was divided in two: there were proper mothers, self-sacrificing bakers of apple pies and well-scrubbed invigilators of the washtub, and there were the other sort. At the age of thirty-five, I know precisely which kind I am, and I suppose that's what I'm doing here in the small hours of the thirteenth of December, hitting mince pies with a rolling pin till they look like something mother-made. Women used to have time to make mince pies and had to fake orgasms. Now we can manage the orgasms, but we have to fake the mince pies. And they call this progress.

..But what's the alternative? Go in to school this afternoon and brazen it out, slam a box of Sainsbury's finest down on the table of festive offerings? Then, to the Mummy Who's Never There and the Mummy Who Shouts, Emily can add the Mummy Who Didn't Make an Effort. Twenty years from now, when my daughter is arrested in the grounds of Buckingham Palace for attempting to kidnap the king, a criminal psychologist will appear on the news and say, "Friends trace the start of Emily Shattock's mental problems to a school carol concert where her mother, a shadowy presence in her life, humiliated her in front of her classmates."

♥ Through the landing window and the December fog, a crescent moon is reclining in its deck chair over London. Even the moon gets to put its feet up once a month. Man in the Moon, of course. If it was a Woman in the Moon she'd never sit down. Well, would she?

♥ Benjamin never holds my absences against me. Too little still. He always greets me with helpless delight like a fan windmilling arms at a Hollywood premiere. Not his sister, though. Emily is five years old and full of jealous wisdom. Mummy's return is always the cue for an intricate sequence of snubs and punishments.

"Actually, Paula reads me that story."

"But I want Dadda to give me a bath."

Wallis Simpson got a warmer welcome from the Queen mother than I get from Emily after a business trip. But I bear it. My heart sort of pleats inside ans somehow I bear it. Maybe I think I deserve it.

♥ There have been times over the past year when I have tried to explain to my daughter-I felt she was old enough to hear this-why Mummy has to go to work. Because Mum and Dad both need to earn money to pay for our house and for all the things she enjoys doing like ballet lessons and going on holiday. Because Mummy has a job she is good at and it's really important for women to work as well as men. Each time the speech builds to a stirring climax-trumpets, choirs, the tearful sisterhood waving flags-in which I assure Emily that she will understand all this when she is a big girl and wants to do interesting things herself.

Unfortunately, the case for equal opportunities, long established in liberal Western society, cuts no ice in the fundamentalist regime of the five-year-old. There is no God but Mummy, and Daddy is her prophet.

In the morning, when I'm getting ready to leave the house, Emily asks the same question over and over until I want to hit her and then, all the way to work, I want to cry for having wanted to hit her.

"Are you putting me to bed tonight? Is Mummy putting me to bed tonight? Are you? Who is putting me to bed tonight? Are you, Mum, are you?"

Do you know how many ways there are of saying the word no without actually using the word no? I do.

♥ Highlights must book soonest (starting to look like mid-period George Michael).

♥ She is standing by my side of the bed and she wants to know where her present is. "You can't buy their love," says my mother-in-law, who obviously never threw enough cash at the problem.

..You see, what you can buy from a five-year-old when you get back from a client visit is, if not love or even forgiveness, then an amnesty of sorts. Entire minutes when the need to blame is briefly overcome by the need to rip open a package in a tantrum of glee. (Any working mother who says she doesn't bribe her kids can add Liar to her CV.) Emily now has a gift to mark each occasion of her mother's infidelity-playing away with her career-just as my mum got a new charm for her bracelet every time my father played away with other women. By the time Dad walked out when I was thirteen, Mum could barely lift the golden handcuff on her wrist.

♥ Since the revamp eighteen months ago, the lobby of Edwin Morgan Forster, which used to look like a bank, now resembles one of those zoo enclosures designed by Russian contructivists to house penguins. Every surface is an eyeball-shattering arctic white except the back wall, which is painted the exact turquoise of the Yardley gift soap favored by the designer as an "oceangoing color of vision and future." For this piece of wisdom, a firm which is paid to manage other people's money handed over an unconfirmed seven hundred and fifty thousand dollars.

♥ It is possible to get away with being late in the City. The key thing is to offer what my lawyer friend Debra calls a Man's Excuse. Senior managers who would be frankly appalled by the story of a vomiting nocturnal baby or an AWOL nanny (mysteriously, child care, though paid for by both parents, is always deemed to be the female's responsibility) are happy to accept anything to do with the internal combustion engine.

"The car broke down/was broken into."

"You should have seen the"-fill in scene of mayhem-"at"-fill in the street.

Either of these will do very well. Car alarms have been a valuable recent addition to the repertoire of male excuses because, although displaying female symptoms-hair-trigger unpredictability, high-pitched shrieking-they are attached to a Man's Excuse and can be take to a garage to be fixed.

♥ Most of all I love the work: the synapse-snapping satisfaction of being good at it, of being in control when the rest of life seems such an awful mess. I love the fact that the numbers do what I say and never ask why.

♥ Next, I check currencies for any dramatic movements, then type in TOP to call up all the big corporate news stories. The main one is about Gayle Fender, a bond trader or, rather, an ex-trader. She's suing her firm, Lawrence Austen, for sex discrimination because male colleagues got far bigger bonuses than she did for less good results. The headline reads: ICE MAIDEN COOLS TOWARDS MEN. As far as the media is concerned, City women are all either Elizabeth I or a resting lap dancer. That old virgin-and-whore thing wrapped up in the Wall Street Journal.

Personally, I've always fancied the idea of becoming an Ice Maiden-maybe you can buy the outfit? Trimmed in white fur, stalactite heels with matching pickax. Anyway, Gayle Fender's story will end how those stories always end: with a No comment as, eyes lowered, she leaves a courtroom by a side door. This City smothers dissent: we have ways of making you not talk. Stuffing people's mouths with fifty-pound notes tends to do the trick.

♥ Until recently, Candy's diet was confined to Coke-the Diet kind and the other kind-which left her pencil-thin with prominent breasts; this got her plenty of lovers but not a lot of love.

♥ Coming out of Rod's room, I run smack into Celia Harmsworth, although no injury is done to either party because I simply bounce off Celia's stupendous bust. When Englishwomen of a certain background reach the age of fifty, they no longer have breasts, they have a bosom or even, depending on acreage of land and antiquity of lineage, a bust. Breasts come in twos, but a bust is always singular; the pliant pair meld into a fiberglass monopod sloping gently downward like a continental shelf. The bust denies the possibility of cleavage or any kind of jiggling. Where breasts say, Come and play, the bust, like the snub nose of a bumper car, says, Out of my way! The Queen has a bust and so does Celia Harmsworth.

♥ As head of Human Resources, Celia is effortlessly one of the least human people in the building; childless, charmless, chilly as Chablis, she has this knack of making you feel both useless and used.

♥ This year's bunch of novices is pretty typical: four guys, two girls. The guys always slouch at the back; the girls sit upright in the front row, pens poised to take notes they will never need. You get to know the types after a while. Look at Mr. Anarchist over there with the Velcros sideburns and the Liam Gallagher scowl. In a suit today, but mentally still wearing a leather jacket, Dave was probably some kind of student activist at college. He read economics the better to arm himself for the workers' struggle while morally blackmailing all the kids on his corridor into buying that undrinkable Rwandan coffee. Right now, he's sitting there telling himself he's just going to do this City shit for two years, five tops. Get some serious dough behind him, then launch his humanitarian crusade. I almost feel sorry for him. Seven year down the line, living in some modernist mausoleum in Notting Hill, school fees for two kids, wife with a ruinous Jimmy Choo habit, Dave will be nodding off in front of Friends like the rest of us, with a copy of the New Statesman unopened in his lap.

..As usual, the girls are unmistakably women, whereas the men are barely more than boys.

♥ The girl next to her looks more interesting. Born and brought up in Sri Lanka but educated in Cheltenham Ladies and the London School of Economics, one of those granddaughters of Empire who end up more English than the English-the sweetness of their courtesy, the decorum of their grammar.

♥ In my experience, the biggest test for any Edwin Morgan Forster trainee is not the ability to grasp the essentials of investment or to secure a pass for the car park. No, the thing that shows what you're really made of is if you can keep a straight face the first time you hear the firm's Mission Statement. Known internally as the five pillars of wisdom, the Mission Statement is the primest corporate baloney. (By what freak of logic did hard-core capitalists of the late twentieth century end up parroting slogans first chanted by Maoist peasants who were not even permitted to own their own bicycles?)

"Our Five Pillars of Wisdom are (1) pulling together, (2) mutual honesty, (3) best results, (4) client care and (5) commitment to success!"

.."If you're really lucky, I'll give you my personal Pillar Number Six."

They look at me dumbly.

"Pillar Number Six: If money responds to your touch, then there's no limit to what a woman can achieve in this City. Money doesn't know what sex you are."

♥ At the festive refreshments, there are a handful of fathers hiding beyond video cameras, but the hall is aswarm with mothers, moths fluttering round the little lights of their lives.

♥ I brought her a musical snow shaker of New York, snatched up in Saks Fifth Avenue, as a consolation present, but it was no consolation. The times you don't make it are the ones children remember, not the times you do.

♥ Leaning over the empty tub, I clear out the Pingu toys and the wrecked galleon, unstick the alphabet letters which, ever since the vowels got flushed down the loo, have formed angry Croat injunctions around the rim (scrtzchk!)

♥ She asked me to be honest. Should I have been? Told her that the only way to get on at EMF is to act like one of the boys, and when you act like one of the boys they call you abrasive and difficult, so you act like a woman, and then they say you're emotional and difficult. Difficult being their word for everything that's not them. Well, she'll learn.

♥ I can get myself and two children washed and dressed and out of the house in half an hour, I can juggle nine different currencies in five different time zones, I can make myself come with quiet efficiency, I can prepare and eat a stand-up supper while on the phone to the West Coast, I can read Guess How Much I Love You? to Ben scanning the prices on Teletext, but can I get a minicab to take me to the airport?

♥ Said he simply couldn't understand why I spent more on the nanny's Christmas present than on the rest of the family put together.

I tried to explain. "Because if I don't keep Paula happy she will leave."

"Would that really be so bad, Katie?"

"Frankly, it would be easier if you left."

♥ When I used to live in a house like that, Christmas was still a pretty simple affair. It was a tree, a pimply turkey, satsumas trapped in an orange net, maybe some dates clinging gummily together in a palm-tree canoe and a bumper tin of Quality Street eaten by the whole family in front of Morecambe and Wise. Your big present was always waiting for you downstairs next to the tree-a doll's house, roller skates, maybe a bike with training wheels or a bell-and there was a stocking whose thrilling misshapen weight your feet discovered at the end of the bed. But Christmas, like everything else, has moved up a gear. Now it's productions of The Nutcracker (book tickets in August) and Kelly Bronze. When I first heard the name, I assumed Kelly was one of those inflatable Baywatch babes, but she turns out to be the only kind of turkey that's worth eating anymore. And once you've spent an hour on the phone being held in a queue in order to beg the supermarket to put you on the waiting list for Kelly, you have to get the bird home and stuff her. According to my Yuletide supplement, stuffing, which was once stale bread crumbs with diced onion and a spoonful of fusty sage, has evolved into "porcini butter with red rice and cranberry to revive jaded palates."

I don't believe we had palates in the seventies; we had sweet teeth and heartburn that you eased by sucking lozenges the color and texture of gravestones. It's a good joke when you think about it, isn't it? Just as women were fleeing the role of homemaker in their millions, there was suddenly food that was worth cooking. Think of all the great stuff you could be making, Kate, if you were ever in your kitchen to make it.

♥ So I was going to have to leave. But then Emily hit the Terrible Twos and I bought a book called Toddler Taming. It was a revelation. The advice on how to deal with small angry immature people who have no idea of limits and were constantly testing their mother applied perfectly to my boss. Instead of treating him as a superior, I began handling him as though he were a tricky small boy. Whenever he was about to do something naughty, I would do my best to distract him; if I want him to do something, I always made it look like it was his idea.

♥ "That's what I love about you, Kate. Smartest female economist since Maynard Keynes, and you still think when they mug you they're doing you a favor."

"Candy, Maynard Keynes was a man."

She shakes her head and the tinsel sends out prickles of light. "He was not. He was a fruit. Way I see it, we women have to claim all the guys in history with a strong feminine side as ours."

♥ Like my other family, the Shattocks have their Christmas traditions. One tradition is that I buy the presents for my side of the family and I buy all the presents for our children and our two godchildren and I buy Richard's presents and presents for Richard's parents and his brother Peter and Peter's wife Cheryl and their three kids and Richard's Uncle Alf, who drives across from Matlock every Boxing Day and is keen on rugby league and can only manage soft centers. If Richard remembers, and depending on late opening hours, he buys a present for me.

♥ I know you're meant to disapprove of the drunks who only come to church this one time in the year, but standing here next to Rich, I think how much I like them, envy them even. Their noisy attempts at hush, the sense they've come in search of heat and light and a little human kindness.

♥ Richard gives me: (1) Agent Provocateur underwear-red bar with raised black satin spots and demitasse cup over which nipples just like helmeted medieval warriors peeking above parapet; also, a suspender/knicker device apparently trimmed with trawlerman's netting, and (2) Membership of National Trust.

Both fall into category of what I think of as PC presents: Please Change.

♥ At the table, I sense another source of conflict when I remind Emily to stop playing with the salt.

"Emily, Grandpa asked you to put that down."

"No, I didn't," says Donald mildly. "I told her to put it down. That's the difference between my generation and yours, Kate: we told, you ask."

♥ Peter is a lot less help with the family than Richard, but over the years I have come to see that Cheryl enjoys and even encourages her husband's selflessness. Peter plays the valuable role in Cheryl's life of the Cross I Have to Bear. Every martyr needs a Peter who, given time, can be trained up to not recognize his own underpants.

♥ There is a point during these Yuletide conversations when the person you are for the rest of the year, struggling to come up for air through the layers of wrapping paper and saturated fats, finally bursts out like the alien from John Hurt's chest.

♥ Come on, Kate, why did you put down that good-hearted old boy in there just now? Showing off. Showing him I wasn't just another blonde in a twinset. He didn't mean any harm. How's poor Jerry supposed to know what manner of woman I am, what strange new species? Back in London, at Edwin Morgan Forster, they think I'm deviant for having a life outside the office. Up here, people think I'm a freak for having a job instead of a life.

Yesterday, I told Barbara that Emily loved broccoli. I've no idea if that's true. At EMF, on the other hand, I pretend I read the FT's Lex column every day before work, although if I actually did I wouldn't sometimes snatch those thirteen minutes on the bus with Emily, testing her spellings, chatting, holding hands. Double agents lie for a living.

♥ Well, we made it through the season go goodwill, all right. Except for Boxing Day lunch, I forget the derivation of Boxing Day, but the feeling of wanting to invite your loved ones outside one at a time and punch them in the face, does that come into it somewhere?

♥ All the elements of the traditional English Xmas here: sausage rolls, carols, subtle recriminations. Mother-in-law busy preparing emergency food parcel for son neglected by callous City bitch (me).

You know that I always say I want to be with my children. Well, I really want to be with my children. Some nights, if I get home too late for Emily's bedtime, I go to the laundry basket and I Smell Their Clothes, I miss them so much. Never told anyone that before. And then when I'm with them, like I am now, their need is just so needy. It's like having a whole love affair crammed into a long weekend-passion, kisses, bitter tears, I love you, don't leave me, get me a drink, you like him more than me, take me to bed, you've got lovely hair, cuddle me, I hate you.

Drained & freaked out & need to go back to work soonest for a rest. What kind of mother is afraid of her own children?

Yrs Wrothly,

K8 xxxxxxx

I am about to hit SEND, but instead I press DELETE. There's only so much you can confess, even to your dearest friend. Even to yourself.

♥ And that was when I began a sentence with the words, "As the main breadwinner in our house-" A sentence I would never finish as it happens because, when I looked at the startled faces round the table, it seemed safer to let it die away like a bugle call.

Donald pushed his specs up his nose and helped himself to parsnips, which I know he can't stand. Barbara put her hand to her throat as though to cover the puce flush of shock spreading beneath. It couldn't have been worse if I had announced breast implants or lesbianism or not liking Alan Bennett. All upsets in the natural order.

♥ I join the queue at the buffet. My fellow Christmas refugees are all eager for alcohol. Either they have no family or are in flight from too much family, both of them lonely and exhilarating conditions.

♥ The woman can feel her throat constricting and when she swallows she gets no moisture in her mouth but a thin cardboardy coating. This, she thinks, is what it would taste like if you were forced to eat your words.

♥ Of course, she wants to spoil her children. Desperately. She needs to believe that, in this way at least, they're better off for her not being with them. She wants Emily and Ben to have all the things she never had. But she can't tell the men in the court that. What do they know about turning up on your first day at junior school in the wrong shade of gray jersey, because your mum bought yours at the Oxfam shop and everyone else in the class was in the new gunmetal range purchased from Wyatt & Moore? Nothing. She knows they know nothing about what it is to have nothing.

♥ Richard is a nicer person than me, anyone can see that. But in suffering, in bitter experience, I am his superior and I carry that knowledge like a knife. Why am I so much tougher on Emily? Because I guess I'm scared that Rich would bring up our children to live in an England that doesn't exist. A place where people say "After you" instead of "Me first," a better and a kinder place, for sure, bu not one that I have ever lived or worked in.

Rich had a happy childhood, and a happy childhood is terrific preparation-indeed, the only know apprenticeship-for being a happy adult. But happy childhoods are no bloody good for drive and success; misery and rejection and standing in the rain at bus stops are the fuel of those.

♥ A basset hound in human for, Dr. Dobson has that wet-eyed solicitude common to dogs and caring professionals.

..Dr. Dobson returns my smile, but with wary creases at the edges-creases that act like inverted commas around the smile. I realize that the look on his face can properly be described as long-suffering. Who is long in suffering if not a doctor? The amount of pain he must see.

♥ Can someone pls coin new word for holiday with children that doesn't imply (a) holiday, (b) rest, (c) pleasure?

♥ MUST REMEMBER
..Emily school applications get organized. Be nicer, more patient person with Emily so doesn't grow up to be needy psychopath.

♥ Sleeping like a baby. (Where the hell did that expression come from?)

♥ Through the landing window I can make out the terrace of houses at the bottom of our garden with their spooky sightless eyes. An early riser turns on a kitchen light and the room ignites with a saffron flare like a match. The windows offer a pretty good view of the wealth of the people inside: our area lies to the northeast of the City, so plenty of astute financial types like me have moved in here and ruined themselves doing up damp and peeling Victorian wrecks. Our houses are the ones with no covering at the window, their owners preferring to rely on expensively restored shutters while our poorer neighbors still comfort themselves with proper curtains or hide their business behind nets like veils. In the seventies, couples like us tore out all the old Victorian fittings-fireplaces, cornices, baths wit a beast's gnarled claw at each corner-in the name of modernity and now we, in the name of a newer kind of modernity, have paid a fortune to have them put back again. (Is it coincidence that we spend far more than our parents ever did on the restyling and improvement of our homes-homes in which we spend less and less time because we are out earning the money to pay for French chrome mixer taps and stripped oak floors? It's as though home had become some kind of stage set for a play in which we one day hope to star.)

♥ I never wanted a boy. After Emily, I suspected my body could only make her kind, and anyway I was more than happy to have another girl-beautiful, self-contained, intricate as a watch. "Boys are like so over," Candy announced to a lunch for female colleagues this time last year. My bump was so big the wine-bar manager had to fetch a chair, because I couldn't slip inside the booth with everyone else. We all laughed. Nervous, insubordinate laughter, but tinged with triumph-the laugh of the Celts when they knew the Romans' time was nearly up. But then, three days later, they handed him to me in the delivery room. Him! Something so small, faced with the vast and implausible task of becoming a man, and I loved him. Loved him like a shot. And he couldn't get enough of me. Still can't. A mother of a one-year-old boy is a movie star in a world full of critics.

♥ Mothers have been singing this for centuries and still no one has the faintest clue what it means. The singing of lullabies is a bit like motherhood itself: something to be done instinctively in the dark, although its purpose feels magically clear.

♥ (Babies never extend any credit. They have a tyrant's disdain for fairness. They grant no time off for cuddles received, no parole for long hours spent nursing in the dark. You can answer that cry a hundred times, and on the hundred and first they'll still have you court-martialed for desertion.)

♥ Back in Task's office, my male colleagues are doing what they like doing best: they are having a meeting. If this meeting goes really well, if they drag it out long enough, then they can reward themselves with another meeting tomorrow. With luck, the lack of progress in Meeting One can be reviewed in Meetings Three, Four, and Five. When I first arrived as a trainee in the City, I assumed that meetings were for making decisions; it took a few weeks to figure out that they were arenas of display, the Square Mile equivalent of those gorilla grooming sessions you see on wildlife programs. Some days, watching the men maneuver for position, I reckon I can actually hear the bedside whisper of David Attenborough commenting on the beating of chests and the picking of nits:

And here, in the very heart of the urban jungle, we see Charlie Baines, a young ape from the US Desk, as he approaches the battle-scarred head of the group, Rod Task. Observe Charlie's posture, the way he indicates his subservience while desperately seeking the senior male's approval...

Most women I know around her have a very low tolerance for this kind of politicking. For obvious reasons, we miss out on the willy waving that goes on at the corporate urinals, and seeking out some dandruffed drone to flatter him in a wine bar after work does not appeal-frankly, who has the energy? Like the good diligent girls we were at school, we still think that if we do our very best and get our work done on time, then (a) merit will have its own reward and (b) we can be home by seven.

Well, it doesn't. And we can't.

♥ Am losing my battle with unconsciousness again when I suddenly notice that Rod's computer is still displaying his Christmas screen-saver. It shows a snowman gradually disappearing in a blizzard. I think how restful it would be to be buried in snow, how delicious to slip into its cold accepting nothingness.

♥ There is a screech of metal on wood as Rich scrapes his chair away from the table. "I give up, Kate. You ask me to do things to help out, and then when I do them you despise me for it."

Somehow I can't formulate a reply to this. It seems both an incredibly brutal thing to say and impossible to argue with. Women often joke that they need a wife to take care of them, and they mean it: we all need a wife. But don't expect us to thank the men who sign up for the role of homemaker for taking it away from us.

♥ He thinks she has too much power in our house. He's right. But Rich doesn't worry about child care the way I worry; men think about child care with their wallets, women feel it in their wombs. Every twist in the relationship with the person minding your young is a tug on the umbilical. Phones may have become cordless, but mothers never will.

♥ People say the trouble with professional women of my generation is that we don't know how to behave with servants. Wrong. The trouble with professional women of my generation is that we are the servants-forelock-tuggingly grateful to any domestic help, for which we pay through the nose, while struggling to hold down the master's job ourselves.

♥ At the end of the say, the woman reported that Emily had cried constantly, save for an hour, when they had watched a video of Sleeping Beauty that seemed to comfort her. That day my daughter formed her first sentence: "Want to go home." But I was not there to hear it, nor was I at the home where she so badly wanted to go.

So, no, Paula is not ideal. But what is ideal? Mummy staying at home and laying down her life for small feet to walk over. Would you do that? Could you do that? You don't know me very well if you think I could do that.

♥ (The book says children get over Separation Anxiety by two years, bu no age limit given for mothers.)

♥ Exhausted working mothers helplessly enrolling their girls in academies of stress. It's not the only way, but maybe it's the only way we understand anymore. Stress. Success. They even rhyme.

♥ Over the PA comes the voice of the pilot, one of those chummy call-me-Pete types. Heart sinks. At moments like this do not want pilot to be called Pete. Urgently want pilot to be chap named Roger Carter from Weybridge, Wing Commander, Battle of Britain type, mistress in Agadir, good friend of Raymond Baxter from Tomorrow's World. Sort of cove who could bring us into land with one hand tied to his handlebar mustache, if necessary. You see, I have to stay alive. I am a mother.

..No, no, no. I have to live. I am a mother. Death wasn't really an issue before; I mean, obviously you wanted to avoid it for as long as possible, but ever since having the children I see the Unsmiling Man with the Scythe everywhere and I jump higher and higher to avoid his swishing blade.

♥ There is an uneasy standoff between the two kinds of mother which sometimes makes it hard for us to talk to each other. I suspect that the nonworking mother looks at the working mother with envy and fear because she thinks that the working mum has got away with it, and the working mum looks back with fear and envy because she knows that she has not. In order to keep going in either role, you have to convince yourself that the alternative is bad. The working mother says, Because I am more fulfilled as a person I can be a better mother to my children. And sometimes she may even believe it. The mother who stays home knows that she is giving her kids an advantage, which is something to cling to when your toddler has emptied his beaker of juice over you last clean T-shirt.

♥ When a badly injured patient gets admitted to Casualty, the hospital staff do what they call triage. Triage is the assignment of degrees of urgency to decide the order of treatment of wounds. I first heard the term one night when I was watching ER on Channel 4-it was that riveting period when we were all wondering how things would work out between Hathaway and Doug-and I thought how much triage sounded like my life. Daily existence was a constant assessment of who needed my attention the most: the children, the office or my husband. You'll notice I leave myself out of that list and that's not because I'm a good and selfless person. Far from it. Selfishness just wasn't an option: no time. Most weekends, on the drive home from the supermarket, I would look through the teamed-up windows of a café and see a couple, fingertips touching over cappuccino, or a lone man reading a newspaper, and I would long to go in there and order a drink and just sit and sit. But it was impossible. When I wasn't at work, I had to be a mother; when I wasn't being a mother, I owed it to work to be at work. Time off for myself felt like stealing. The fact that no man I knew ever felt that way didn't help. This was just another area in which we were unequal: mothers go to the lioness's share of the guilt. So the last ting, the very last thing I needed was someone else to love..

♥ I was cool at first, but he was so playful and persistent that natural competitiveness took over and I was soon running to the back of the court to retrieve the ball and return it with some topspin. So, no, I didn't need him, but he created a Jack-shaped need in me, a need that only he could satisfy. Does the woman in the desert know how thirsty she is till they press the bottle to her lips?

♥ I like the night. More time in it than the day. Why waste it in bed?

♥ Not Shakespeare. Marlowe, I think. That's the unfair thing about Shakespeare, though-everything beautiful belongs to him whether he wrote it or not. He's the Bill Gates of emotional software.

♥ Was once a poor struggling English minor. Poverty, when ti's not being boring, is really quite scary. I didn't want to be scared all my life. In Britain there are plenty of people who will tell you money doesn't natter; these are the people we call the middle classes.

♥ For months on end I don't hear from him, except for reports passed via my sister of scandalous excesses and a list of ailments you thought had died out with Lord Nelson-lockjaw, scurvy, Vesuvian boils. Then one day, when I've given up on him, when the tug that feels like a bell pull on the heart has gone away, he pitches up and launches into a conversation that draws on a relationship we never had. My dad has always confused sentimentality and intimacy. As far as he's concerned, I'm still his little girl, although when I was a little girl he asked things of me that demanded a woman's strength. Now that I'm grown he wants a child's docility and is quick to anger when he doesn't get it. Sometimes he he has been drinking, you can never be quite sure, but always, always, he wants money.

♥ We sit at a corner table under the portrait of a red-cheeked earl, my father with a double Scotch and a maxi pack of peanuts and me with a bitter lemon. Bitter lemon was always my mum's drink. First it was a nonalcoholic beverage; only later did it become a state of mind.

♥ He was once a beautiful man, my father-beautiful rather than handsome, and therefore doomed not to ripen but to rot.

♥ A child's love for a parent is well-nigh indescribable, but down the years the drip, drip, drip of disillusion can corrode it.

♥ On the first run, Julie fell off right away and the sled completed the descent by itself. Dad told her not to be such a baby. Now it was my turn, and I clung on, determined to prove that our sled, the sled our dad had made, was as good as anyone's. But halfway down the hill, it hit a ridge and veered sharply to the right, slicing towards a steep drop fenced off by a low curtain of barbed wire. The metal strips, added to give a bit of go, made the sled unstoppable; it slammed under the fencing and the two front prongs dangled over the drop while I lay at the back, two feet from the edge, tangled in wire. He was panting so hard when he got to me I thought he would die, but he knelt down on the end of the sled to hold it in place and picked the wire thorns out of my anorak, out of my hands, out of my hair. As the last piece of wire was unsnagged, he pulled me clear and the sled shot forward. It was a couple of seconds before we heard it crack on the road beneath. I used to think that I remembered that day so well because he had saved my life; now I think it's because it was the only time in our years as father and daughter that he did anything to protect me.

But Dad was my first love and I always took his side even when my mother's hazel eyes disappeared in big raccoon circles and she started wearing those brushed-nylon keep-out nighties and laughing in the wrong places. One day at the VG stores, a man knocked over the pyramid display of Ideal Milk, the little blue-and-white cans went tumbling everywhere, and Mum laughed and laughed until Linda behind the counter had to fetch a glass of water from out back. But daughters don't want to pick up the signals of their mother's unhappiness; it might mean their father isn't perfect.

..A father is a template of a man that Nature gives a girl, and if that template is broken or disfigured, well, what then?

♥ I prefer not to look at the woman in the reflection: I don't want her seeing me like this.

♥ Was I shocked by the way Rod talked to me? Actually, you'd probably be shocked by how unshocked I was. Chauvinism is the air I breathe-a bracing blend of Gucci Envy and salt gym residue. Like one of those cuboid amber air fresheners Winston hangs in the minicab, the smell stuns you as soon as you enter the City; it lays waste to your septum before curling into your brain. Soon it becomes the only smell in the world. Other odors-milk, apples, soap-seen sickly and feeble by comparison. When I first came to the City I smelled the smell and recognized it immediately as power.

Truth is, I don't mind: let them comment on my legs if those legs help keep my children in shoes. Being a woman doesn't get you what you want within Edwin Morgan Forster, but it enables the firm to get what it wants outside-accounts, a reputation for "diversity"-and they owe you for that. It's the oldest trade of all and it's good enough for me. Sometimes I mind for other women, though. For the older ones like Clare Mainwaring in Operations, whose gray hair puts them among the firm's Disappeared, and for the kids like Momo who think that having an MBA means that guys won't look up your skirt.

..The way I look at it, women in the City are like first-generation immigrants. You get off the boat, you keep your eyes down, work as hard as you can and do your damnedest to ignore the taints of ignorant natives who hate you just because you look different and you smell different and because one day you might take their job. And you hope. You know it's probably not going to get that much better in your own lifetime, but just the fact that you occupy the space, the fact that they had to put a Tampax dispenser in the toilet-all that makes it easier for the women who come after you. Years ago, when I was still at school, I read this book about a cathedral by William Golding. It took several generations to build a medieval cathedral, and the men who drew up the plans knew that not their sons but their grandsons, or even great-grandsons, would be around for the crowning of the spire they had dreamed of. It's the same for women in the City, I think: we are the foundation stones. The females who come after us will scarcely give us a second thought, but they will walk on our bones.

♥ (The desire to get to a birthday when you're five is as urgent as the desire to miss one when you're thirty-five.)

♥ How much do you think the human brain can bear in the way of remembering? I read somewhere that our long-term memory is basically this giant storehouse where all the people and places and jokes and songs we've ever known are laid down like wine, but if you don't visit a memory often enough the route to it is lost, briared over. Like the approach to Sleeping Beauty's castle. Is that why all fairy tales are about trying to find the way back?

♥ The woman's hands are raw and bony, the tendons like red ropes. A mother's hands-one who did the washing-up three times a day, peeled the veg and stirred the terry nappies in their scummy cauldron. Hands like that will die out in another generation, along with waist pinnies and the Sunday roast.

♥ St. Davids is one of the few places that bids me be still. And here in the nave I realize that, these days, stillness is an unaccustomed, even an uncomfortable sensation. The cathedral is timeless, and my life... my life is nothing but time.

♥ Metropolitan brat. All my fault for giving her everything so young. I didn't taste my first pasta till I was nineteen years old. Rome. Spaghetti alla vongole-clammy in both senses, a shaming ordeal of alien shells and unmanageable strands.

Sometimes I worry that I've traveled this far, done this well in life, only for my kids to grow up as jaded and spoiled as the people I was patronized by at college.

♥ "Rich, what's a relict? I saw it on a tomb in the cathedral today: AND HIS RELICT ANGHARAD."

"Widow. It means literally what is left behind."

"So the wife was the remains of the husband?"

"Exactly, Kate." He laughs. "Of course, in our marriage, I'd be what was left of you."

It's said with enough love to sting. Do I really make him feel that way? That small? Over the miles to come, I embroider any number of plans, strategies to make things better between us. Put things right. But three hours later, as we pass Reading, I start to feel the gravitational pull of London, and the resolve to change my life burns up on re-entry.

♥ It's a little-known fact that the City of London employs a falconer who brings his sparrowhawk along every month to control the pigeon population. Last time he was here, Candy and I were on our way to lunch and my unshockable American friend was astonished to see a large countryman with a single leather gauntlet launching a feathered missile into the air above our heads.

"If you ever wondered why the City has such clean pavements compared to the rest of London, there's your answer," I said.

"Oh, I get it." Candy grinned. "That way they keep all the shit on the inside."

♥ In two days, I will be attending a final in the US for a three-hundred-million-dollar ethical pension fund which I will be presenting with a twentysomething graduate trainee who has all the qualifications for the job-not white, not male-except being able to do the job.

♥ "Are you going to be able to train her up?"

Candy is standing by my desk wearing a skirt so short it's practically a text message. I didn't even hear her come over.

"I don't know. I'm trying to introduce Momo to the idea that not everyone is a nice person."

"Omigod. We're not talking about a functional childhood, are we?"

"'Fraid so."

Candy shakes her head in wonder and pity. "Poor kid. She'll never get anywhere."

♥ Standing in the doorway, watching my husband's baffled misery form a long, long way off, I think how I know this situation so well and I know the ways out of it-either leave for the airport in the morning with a frost on the ground and hope it has melted by the time I get back, or take my clothes off right now and remind both of us that love is something you can make.

♥ "I don't understand you, Kate. Sometimes I think you think it's all the most terrific bullshit, and then it seems as though you really really want to win."

"Oh, I really really do. Just watch me. When I was little I used to hide a Monopoly hotel down my sock. If I landed on Park Lane, I'd smuggle the hotel out. My dad caught me one Christmas and hit me with the nutcracker for being a cheating little cow."

I can see Momo struggling to place this Dickensian episode in the polite well-ordered childhood that is the birthright of every middle-class girl. She hasn't worked out that I'm traveling on a false passport-why should she? These days even I'd struggle to spot myself as the imposter in a City lineup.

When she responds, it's as though the sun were in her eyes. "That's awful," she says. "Your father. I'm really sorry."

"Don't be. Be sorry for the losers."

♥ "I'm sorry, Kate, but do you know that guy?"

"No, I don't." A truthful answer. I don't know Jack Abelhammer, but I may be in love with him. How can you be in love with someone you don't know? It's probably easier, isn't it, all things considered. A blank screen you can type all your longings on.

♥ Even then I think I could smell the disappointment settling like damp on my father and I wanted to protect him from it. Disappointment unmans a man so. The women around him have to go on pretending they can't smell it, with him sitting there, hand shaking, using the other one to steady the glass and insisting that there's everything still to play for.

Now here's a funny thing. All the women I know in the City are Daddy's Girls one way or another. (Candy's dad walked out when she was five and I think she's been trying to find him ever since; Debra's ran a motor company in the West Midlands and was occasionally sighted by Deb and her sisters between rounds of golf at the weekend.) Daughters striving to be the son their father never had, daughters excelling at school to win the attention of a man who was always looking the other way, daughters like poor mad Antigone pursuing the elusive ghost of paternal love. So why do all us Daddy's Girls go and work in places so hostile to women? Because the only real comfort we get is from male approval. How fucking sad is that?

♥ "Christ, when will you learn, woman?"

A good question. There's no statute of limitations on pity, is there?

♥ In fact, Jack and I are in trouble. Like returning astronauts, we are struggling to make the switch from the weightless world of e-mail, were you can say what you like and mean it or not mean it, to the real world where words, being earthed by gestures, by arms and lips and eyes, have their own specific gravity.

♥ At the thought of Jack undressing me, my whole being feels like a stocking silkily descending a leg.

"Kate, are you OK?" Momo is back with black coffee and the British papers.

..How to explain to her? So many women of Momo's age look at the likes of me, driven crazy by our double lives, and decide to put off having kids for as long as possible. I've seen it in my friends. They get to their mid-thirties, panic, pick the wrong guy-any sperm donor will do by then-find they can't get pregnant and embark on IVF: painful and ruinous. Sometimes it works; mostly it doesn't. We think we've outwitted Mother Nature, but Nature isn't called Mother for nothing. She has her way of slapping us down, making us feel small. The world is going to end not with a bang but with a woman staring through a glass panel at her frozen eggs and wondering if she'll ever have time to defrost them.

.."Children are the proof we've been here, Momo, they're where we go to when we die. They're the best thing and the most impossible thing, but there's nothing else. You have to believe me. Life is a riddle and they are the answer. If there's any answer, it has to be them."

♥ Adrenaline always gets you through a job, but on the way home the fact that I've been away kicks in like a hangover. Home. I feel both vital to it-how will they manage without me?-and painfully peripheral-they manage without me.

♥ Children change your heart; they never wrote that in the books. Sitting here in the front row of Club Class, nursing a large gin, I feel that absurd organ inside my chest, swollen and heavy as a gourd.

♥ ..a baby's frustration at not being able to enter sleep is that of an alcoholic locked out of a bar.

♥ MUST REMEMBER
Children, bouncy castle, rabbit molds for blancmange, husband.

MUST FORGET
You. You. You.

♥ At first light, when Rich and I finally make love-with the children starting to stir in their beds overhead-there is something driven and possessive about it, as though my husband were acting out some deep territorial impulse to plant his flag and reclaim me. And, in a way, I am grateful to be reclaimed; less scary than setting out for a foreign land with its curious habits, its unknown banners.

♥ Emily and Ben need me, and it's me that they want. Oh, they adore Richard, of course they do, but he is their playmate, their companion in adventure; I'm the opposite. Daddy is the ocean; Mummy is the port, the safe haven they nestle in to gain the courage to venture farther and farther out each time. But I know I'm no harbor; sometimes when things are really bad I lie here and think, I am a ship in the night and my children yell like gulls as I pass.

♥ And how would I be, left alone with the kids all day? The need of children is never-ending. You can pour all your love and patience into them, and when is it all right to say when? Never. You can never say when. And to serve so selflessly, you have to subdue something in yourself. I admire the women who can do it, but the mere thought makes me sick with panic. I could never admit this to anyone, but I think giving up work is like becoming a missing person. One of the domestic Disappeared. The post offices of Britain should be full of Wanted posters for women who lost themselves in their children and were never seen again. So when my two bounce on the body they sprang from shouting me, a voice within me keeps repeating, Me, me, me.

♥ I lie back on the headrest and prepare for a long conversation. Can hardly tell my mother that busy no longer means what busy meant in her day. Busy isn't a morning with the washtub and a cheese sandwich for lunch before collecting the kids from school. Busy has got busy since my childhood; busy has gone global.

♥ When did I start lying to my mother? I don't mean the obligatory daughter-mother falsehoods-"Eleven at the latest; never tried it; three Cokes; but everyone's wearing them; he slept on the floor; yes, a friend of Deb's; no, not overdrawn; in the sale, yes, an absolute bargain; fine, couldn't be better."

Those lies aren't really lies at all but mutual protection. When you're young your mother shields you from the world because she thinks you're too young to understand, and when she's old you shield her because she's too old to understand-or to have any more understanding inflicted on her. The curve of life goes: want to know, know, don't want to know.

What I'm talking about here is the lies to my mother about being a mother. I tell her Emily has coped well with the departure of her best friend, even though I haven't heard about it. I'd rather Mum thought I was a failure at work than a stranger to my children. She thinks I have it all and she's so pleased for me. I can't tell her, can I? It would be like finding out that after Cinderella got to live in the palace, the Prince put her back on hearth-cleaning duty.

♥ Julie's tone still takes me by surprise: the adoring lisp of my little sister has been supplanted in recent years by something tense and grudging; whenever we speak these days, she seems to be spoiling for a fight about a grievance that's too painful to have a name.

I got away and Julie didn't. Julie fell pregnant and got married when she was twenty-one and had three kids by the time she was twenty-eight and I didn't. Julie's husband is an electrician and mine is an architect. Julie lives a mile away from our mother and tries to look in every other day and I don't. Julie, who is good with her hands, brings in a bit of extra cash by making tiny curtains and bits of furniture for a local dolls' house company and I, who am good with my head, don't. (In fact, I probably invest my clients' money indirectly in the Far Eastern sweatshops that are driving Julie's employer out of business.) Julie has been abroad once-Rimini, unlucky with the weather-whereas it is not unknown for me to go twice in a single week. And none of this is anybody's fault, but we exist now, my sister and I, in an atmosphere of guilt and blame.

♥ Think of all the time that must be wasted every day in those echoing antechambers where calls wait. Hell, contrary to what Sartre said, is not other people, hell is trying to get through to other people while listening to seven minutes of Vivaldi played on panpipes.

♥ Rich didn't want to save the world like my idealistic friends; he just made it a better place simply be being in it.

♥ Had I ever laughed at myself before? Certainly the sound that came out that night was rusty with lack of use, a stopped-up spring gurgling into life. "Your Bournville chocolate laugh," Richard called it, "because it's dark and bitter and northern and it makes me want to eat you." It's the sound I still like best: the sound of when we were us.

♥ Over time we began to face outwards. You could probably date that, our first separation, to the purchase of a king-size bed in the late eighties. And then, with the arrival of our first hold, the battle for sleep began. Bed became a place you sank into rather than dived into. We who had slipped in and out of consciousness as easily as we slipped in and out of each other-entrances and exits blurred by kissing-were now jealously guarding our place of rest. My body shocked me by bristling at anything that threatened to take away its remaining strength. A stray knee or elbow was enough to spark a boundary war. I remember starting to notice how loud Rich's sneezes were, how eccentrically articulated. Har-chew! he went. Har-chew!

When we were still students we had traveled round Europe by train, and one night we wound up in a small hotel in Munich where we collapsed in giggles on the bed. It looked like a double, but when you pulled the cover back it turned out to be two mattresses, divided and united by a thick wooden strip which made any meeting in the middle an effort rather than an inevitability. It all felt so Teutonic. "You be East Germany and I'll be West," I remember saying to Rich as we lay there on our separate halves in the light of the streetlamp. We laughed, but in time I came to wonder whether the Munich arrangement was the true marriage bed: practical, passionless, putting asunder what God had joined together.

♥ "Do you think we could avoid the New North lights, Winston, and cut round the back? I'm not convinced this is the quickest way."

He doesn't answer for a while but allows the track to finish. Then, with the final chord still thrumming in the air, he says, "You know, lady, where I come from it takes a long time to do things suddenly."

"Kate. My name is Kate."

"I know what your name is," he says. "Way I see it, rushing around just a waste of time. Fly too fast, lady, and you pass your nest."

The laugh I laugh sounds darker than usual. "Well, I'm afraid that is the more leisurely perspective afforded to the driver of the minicab."

Winston doesn't bite back at my snottiness, he just gives it a long gaze in the mirror and says thoughtfully, "You think I want to be you? You don't even want to be you."

♥ As I switch from slides to overheads, it suddenly occurs to me that I am the only person in the room without a penis. Not a good thought to have right now, Kate. Can we not think about dicks in a gathering of seventeen men?

♥ Not long ago, my friend Philippa told me that she and her husband had drawn up a will. Phil said she wanted a clause stipulating that, in the event of her death, Mark would promise to cut the children's fingernails. He thought she was joking. She wasn't joking.

♥ ..Tartuffe. Located in the penthouse of a building overlooking Royal Exchange, the restaurant has the kind off hush that, outside a monastery, only money can by. This must be the silence they call golden.

♥ "I'm from a bit farther north."

"The Borders?"

"No, more Derbyshire and Yorkshire. We moved about."

"Ah, I see."

Having established that I am no one worth knowing and no one who will know anyone worth knowing, our new client feels safe to blank me. Over the past decade, my country has become a classless society, but the news has been slow to reach the people who own it. For men like Jeremy, England still ends at Hyde Park, and then there is Scotland, where they go to kill things in August. The North, that great expanse of land between SW1 and Edinburgh which is best crossed by plane or at night in the sleeper car of a fast train, is a foreign country to them. Jeremy Browning's forebears may have conquered India, but you wouldn't get them going to anywhere as remote as Wigan.

♥ I love him for it, but it's no use. There are some men who will always prefer to deal with another man, any man, rather than a woman, and Jeremy Browning is one of them. A can see him struggling to place me: I'm not married to him, clearly I'm not his mother, I didn't go to school with his sister and I'm sure as hell not going to go to bed with him. So what, he must be asking himself as he chews on his pigeon, is this girl doing here? What is she for?

♥ Day of rest, otherwise known as day of ceaseless manual labor.

♥ Today, I have invited Kirsty and Simon round for a "relaxing" lunch. Important to see friends, remember there is more to life than work, weaving of social fabric that strengthens sense of community etc. Also important for children to see Mummy at ease in domestic context, build up glowing childhood memories, instead of woman in black running out of door yelling instructions.

♥ There are those who make their own filo pastry, but they are like people who go in for bondage in the bedroom: you admire the effort and technique without necessarily wanting to do it yourself.

♥ "I like Mary Poppins," chimes in Emily, God bless her, running up from the other end of the kitchen, naked except for her Little Mermaid green silk tail. "Jane and Michael go to work with their daddy at the bank. It's near my Mummy's work and there's lots of pigeons." She begins to sing loudly and tunelessly, with a child's open-faced fearlessness: "'Feed the birds, tuppence a bag, tuppence, tuppence, tuppence a bag.' Do you feed the birds, Mummy?"

No, I try to get men to come and kill them.

♥ What is the cost when you pay someone else to be a mother to your children? Has anyone calculated it? I'm not talking about money. The money's a lot, but how much is the other thing?

♥ You write so lovingly about the children-Emily's reading, the way Ben tries to talk to you-that I know you're a great mom. And you notice so much. My mom stayed home and played bridge and drank vodka martinis with her friends. She was there all day and never really around for the three of us. Don't go romanticizing the stay-home parent-you can screw up whether you're near or far.

Because you live in my head, you're very portable, you know. I find myself talking to you all the time. The worst thing is. I'm trying to think you can hear me. Jack xxxxxxx

To: Jack Abelhammer
From: Kate Reddy

I can hear you.

♥ Emily's questions often shock me, but not as much as the fact that I'm allowed to give her any answer I like. I can tell her there is a God or that there is not a God, I can tell her that Oasis were better than Blur, although at the time she's old enough to buy albums there won't be albums anymore and Madonna will be as distant as Haydn. I can tell her that Cary Grant is in a dead heat for the title of Greatest Englishman with William Shakespeare, I can encourage her to support a football team, or I can tell her sport is incredibly boring, I can advise her to be careful who she gives her virginity to or I can give her brisk early advice on contraception. I can suggest she start paying a quarter of her annual income into an index-linked pension as soon as possible or I can tell her love is the answer. I can tell her any damn thing I like, and that freedom feels both amazing and appalling.

When they sent a baby girl home from the hospital with us almost six years ago, they forgot to hand out a Meaning of Life Manual. I can remember Richard carrying her in from the car in her little seat with the big handle and setting her down with extreme tentativeness on the living-room floor. (At that stage, we still believed we might break her; not knowing it was more likely to be the other way round.) Rich and I looked at our daughter and then at each other and we thought: What now?

You needed a license to drive a car, but with a baby you were expected to pick it up as you went along. Becoming a parent was like trying to build a boat while you were at sea.

What the hospital did give us was a thin booklet in a blue plastic binder with several cartoons to the page, each starring two stick-figure parents. There were stick-figure parents tentatively dipping their angular elbows into baths or trying out the temperature of milk on the back of their stick hands. There was a feeding timetable, tips on the transfer from formula to solids and, or so I seem to recall, a list of common rashes. But there was definitely no word on how to prepare your child for the fact of your own death.

As I look down at Em's face, at once radiant and perplexed, I get that breathless feeling you get every so often as a mother, the pressure of hundreds of millions of mothers before you, all fighting tears as the child poses the most ancient of questions.

"Are you going to die, Mummy?"

♥ ..I notice a man in the queue trying to place me. It's Martin, an old boyfriend. You know that weird sensation seeing an ex can induce? I feel it now. The ghost of a passion, a silk handkerchief being pulled out of the heart.

♥ Desperately trying to recruit new nanny. Anka stormed out after I confronted her over the stolen property. Jim's mum has come up from Surrey to cover for a bit, but she has to go back Friday. Help!!!! Any ideas? Most candidates seem to require a car, all the rest are 37 w severe personality disorder demanding salary equal to editor of Vogue.

Reason to Give Up Work: Because I can't afford to go out to work anymore!