THE MOST EXCRUCIATING TV DOC - ever

NO REASON FOR THE PICTURE, TAKEN 13 YEARS AGO ON MY HEN NIGHT IN DUBLIN, EXCEPT THAT MOST OF THE TIME, IT'S STILL HOW I FEEL. 

It seems there really is a price for anything, and the price for a television company coming in and re-modeling your garden/decorating your house/cleaning your oven/disciplining your children is privacy. They will come and change your life, but first you have to reveal yourself to be anything from a bad gardener to a slovenly housekeeper or a bad mother. There is an obvious progression here. How we all used to stutter with tense disbelief when the ‘ordinary couples’ had their made-over rooms revealed to them in changing rooms. Lucky them, we used to think. I wish that could happen to me! Now we are on the edge of our seats watching while some hapless mother allows her four year old whack her six month old over the head with a meat mallet under the head-shaking supervision of a TV nanny. Thus type of programming reached an all time low for me recently when James, a twenty six year old paperboy who lives with his parents in a soulless English suburb was taken to some wacky sex clinic in Amsterdam to lose his virginity. We watched as James was coaxed into sex over a three month period by three matronly looking “sex counselors”, old enough to be his mother. It was painful, yet compelling viewing and markedly un-sexy. These women were not prostitutes but dingly-dangly therapist types and their methods involved the sprinkling of essential oils, learning-about-your-body massage in a ‘motherly’ way (euk!) lots of miscellaneous tugging about and some which was not nearly miscellaneous enough. By far the low point was familiarizing complete ingénue James with the female ‘privates’. (They did not use the word ‘vagina’ which I thought was strange. Maybe they felt that was too much information.) They did this, not through a black and white illustration, which my husband described – with admirable accuracy – as looking like a “fruit bat”. His white-haired counselor then pulled up her skirt and James was invited to have a good old look for himself at the real thing. I found this excruciating beyond belief but my husband said that, for technical reasons, he thought it was rather a good idea. As we followed the James from a very sad, painfully shy, newspaper delivering virgin into a slightly more hopeful, more confident paper boy who had had sexual intercourse, I just thought how horrendously exploitative and screwed up we are to be glued to the private parts – inside and in this case also out – of this fellow human being. At one point the gravitas-laden voice of the narrator, (because, after all, this was not mere titillation but a serious ‘documentary’), asked James how he felt about being in the program. Did he worry what other people thought of him? “No,” James asserted, “I am doing this for myself.” Or rather, the TV company were doing this for him in return for all the gory details captured on film. It would be interesting to know who the researchers found first – the virgin in need of help or the nutty sex counseling clinic in Amsterdam.  Who was serving who? Despite this, by the end of the program I found that, for me in any case, James had retained his dignity.  Because in his innocent candor and his willingness to expose him self – literally and physically – he perhaps deserves more respect than those of us who cling to our privacy as if we are something special. Who hide our weaknesses and are afraid to present our vulnerabilities to the world. In that sense James had more courage than most so perhaps we all have something to learn from a man willing to lose his virginity on television. Although, cynically, I doubt that was the producer’s intention. 

 Killala in the snow last year.
The world looks better when you look outwards.

In any case, I have discovered a fabulous new anti-ageing trick. It involves removing half of the mirrors in my house. There is one of those annoying skin-cream ads on the TV at the moment featuring Claudia Sheiffer talking about what a struggle it is getting older and she actually uses the word ‘heal’ – the implication of course being that if you are getting older you are ill in some way. Wrinkles are called “damage” in this new world where women must fight, fight, fight against getting older. Ageing is the new disease. It has to be cured, or “reversed” and, at all costs, made to go away.

If there is one thing that you can be sure is going to happen to you in your life it is this: you will get older. Then, at some point down the line, you will die. That’s the only, the only certainty there is.

So, as if my life isn’t hard enough – with kids and work and having to have a perfect house, and a perfect wardrobe and enough groom time to keep my highlights up to speed – now I have to actually defy nature and not get old. Or at least hide the process from the outside world with every bit of energy I can muster.

I’m sensitive about this subject right now because in the past few weeks I feel I have crossed some kind of threshold visa-vi my physical appearance.

I do try not to be overly neurotic about what God gave me. I would like to be slimmer and brave enough to wax, but you can’t have everything. I achieve a certain level of laissez fair about my looks – or lack of them – because I have always been able to rely on an ability to put myself through hair and make-up and come out transformed at the other end.

I can happily push myself forward into the public eye knowing that once I have whacked on the slap and thrown in a few heated rollers I will come out the other end looking fresh and groomed and ready for my cocktail – if not my close-up.

However, the last few times I have gone out, there has been a point in the evening where I have caught sight of myself in a mirror and gone “Rah! Who’s that!”  

I have never gone in for the no-make-up-make-up look. As far as I am concerned if you are going to go to all that effort, you might as well go the whole hog. But as a woman who has been sauntering through her forties, happy and confident – I have suddenly hit the brick wall of looking like somebody I don’t recognize. When, exactly, did I become a middle-aged woman in too much make-up? Or a jowly bag lady? There does not seem to be any middle ground. When I am not made up, I look like my brother in a wig. When I make an effort these days I just seem to look like mutton dressed as lamb. When I tone down the cleavage and the big hair and the smoky eyes and the glitter, I look tweedy and old, like Angela Lansbury.

I suppose the real truth is, I’m fighting against glamour more and more as I get older. I am a sensible old-lady novelist trapped in a Joan Collins make-up routine. I want to be Angela Lansbury. I want to wear high-waisted beige slacks, and nice blouses and tweed jackets and have my hair blow-dried into a solid “do” and take my lipstick out of my bag in taxi’s, slick it and pucker it without looking in the mirror. I want to be slightly portly, and rather clever, and have young people defer to me in a mystery-solving, amused but respectful way. I want to be my favorite aunt, and wear smart-casual jeans to prune my garden, and sensible shoes, even when I am out and clip a nice broach onto my lapel and go for lunch in hotels and shrug my shoulders and say “this is lovely.”

What I do not want to do is have to go to the gym every day and slather myself day and night in “serums” to try and make myself look twenty years younger than I am so I can go out late at night because I am the new breed of “cougar”.

When did female role models for women of my age become such hard work, and frankly - so undignified. Madonna? Now there’s that ghastly U.S. drama Cougar Town where Courtney Cox and her co-horts go around clambering over teenage boys. Looking, and acting your age has become synonymous with “Letting Yourself Go” when it should be Copping Yourself On.

Getting older should be an invitation to embrace dignity, wisdom and the experience of a life full of adventure and education.

Letting the kids out

I let Leo and his friend Fin go to Killala’s play park on his own recently. It’s a fantastic new facility with all manner of mod- con, slidey, swingy things, as good as you’d pay good money to keep them happy for an hour.

It was Sunday morning, and the day seemed mild enough and they were harassing me. The two lads are sensible 9 year olds, and know everyone in the village. Leo is at that age where is starting to crave a bit of independence, we send him down to the chip van at the end of the pier on his own once a week, although the convenience factor is diminished slightly by my standing at the front wall craning the two hundred yards to check on his progress there and back. Pete, (my beloved supplier of the best fish and chips in Ireland), knows Leo and keep an eye out for him, and if it’s lashing with rain and there’s a wait, he will send him home and drop our dinner down himself. It’s not much of an adventure really. Leo and Fin go up on outings to the local garage the odd time for sweets, but the play park is a good walk, there’s a couple of roads to cross – and, well, I wasn’t sure. I rang Fin’s Dad for advice and permission and he said, “no problem,” so we compromised. I would drop them down in the car, go and pick my mother in law Renee up from Crossmolina, twenty minutes away, and collect them on the way back. Don’t talk to strangers, get bullied, bully anyone else, go outside the confines of the play area etc.

The park was empty, “Hooray! The place to ourselves!” they shouted and I drove off. On the way up the hill through the village I almost turned back. It didn’t feel right leaving them there on their own. But I trusted them and I had promised. I kept going but by the time I reached the half-way mark to Crossmolina my head was buzzing. What if I went back and they weren’t there? Supposing they were abducted? I would never see my son again – how would I explain myself to Fin’s parents. Perhaps some evil paedophile had seen me leave them there, small, vulnerable, unaccompanied children – and was at this very moment drugging them and putting them into a van to be trafficked. I pulled over to the side of the road, the sweat pouring off me, and rang Niall. “Go and get them,” I said, “I’m having a ‘moment’. At least go and check on them on your way into Tesco’s.”

I felt slightly better for another five minutes but before I reached my mother-in-law's, it started to rain. They’d get wet! Fin has a bad chest this could bring on an asthma attack! Did Leo’s ‘hoodie'; have a hood?

Then I remembered. I spent my whole childhood getting soaked through to the skin in unsuitable clothing. In winter I can clearly remember, at eleven years of age, standing frozen solid in the snow, wearing flimsy shoes and a school blazer, waiting hours for one of three buses to take me home, alone from first year secondary school. From as far back as I could walk, we played out on the street with the other kids, regularly calling into each others houses, and often the houses of lonely adults for a chat and a biscuit. We were told not to talk to strangers, but we didn’t really understand why. And when I acquired a middle aged male stalker – a mysterious man in a grey coat and astrakhan hat who followed me to and from secondary school every day from the age of thirteen to fourteen – I didn’t quite know what to do about it. I certainly couldn’t tell my parents, and, while his presence sort of unnerved me, when he sat next to me on the bus one day, I still chatted politely to him although, I said, I really didn’t think it was a good idea for us to “meet-up” on our own.

Although I was young and vulnerable, I was also capable of keeping myself safe.

We had a play park near our house in London where played, unsupervised every day from as far back as I can remember. The parents didn’t come and sit on benches and read the Sunday Papers and drink Starbucks and make sure we weren’t being abducted. They had got on with their daily lives and came looking for us if we weren’t back in time for tea. Play-parks were for kids.

We now live in a culture where childhood independence is taboo. A father in the U.D recently took his eye off his 5 year old in a play park for two minutes and the child ran into the road and was killed. In addition to the appalling grief and guilt – this man is now serving a sentence for involuntary manslaughter. He was only as negligent as any parent is from time to time in taking their eyes off a toddler for a few seconds. The tragedy was the kind of appalling freak of fate all parents dread, yet our fear-mongering society is holding him responsible. In actual fact crime in the Western world is actually lower than it was when most of us were growing up. So there is no reality-based reason that children today should be treated as more helpless and vulnerable than we were when we were young. 
We are so overprotective of our children that an American journalist Lenore Skenazy who was accused of branded as being America’s Worst Mom In The World after allowing her 9 year old boy to ride the New York subway alone. The freedom she allowed him in doing so was not an act of neglect, but a deliberate, carefully considered act of parenting to acknowledge her child’s growing desire for independence, and encourage him to see the world as a safe place to live, as opposed to “the world is a dangerous place” culture depicted by the media seemingly to no other end but to put the fear of God in parents. In reality, Skenazy argues on her excellent website http://freerangekids.wordpress.com/

“Mostly, the world is safe. Mostly, people are good. To emphasize the opposite is to live in the world of tabloid TV. A world filled with worst-case scenarios, not the world we actually live in, which is factually, statistically, and, luckily for us, one of the safest periods for children in the history of the world.”

Skenazy’s parenting ethos makes a lot of sense, based as it is the idea that is a parents job to teach our children how to get along in the world rather than coddle them; “because the coddled child will not have Mom or Dad around all the time. Adults once knew what we have forgotten today. Kids are competent. Kids are capable. Kids deserve freedom, responsibility, and a chance to be part of the world.”

Amen to that. Looks like Leo and Fin might get another outing to the play-park soon. Just as soon as I have his electronic abduction tag fitted!

BRED FOR WORK

“Any fool can get married and have a baby,” I remember my mother saying to me as a teenager. “Work” was the mantra of my mother’s generation as they drove the ideal of independence into our skulls from birth. Our careers were our mothers holy grail. Proof that generations of oppression was over, the women’s revolution complete and women were finally “free”.

 
Lady GaGa said this month; "Some women choose to follow men, and some women choose to follow their
 dreams. If you're wondering which way to go, remember that your career will
 never wake up and tell you that it doesn't love you anymore.” Her comments caused a blog-storm as women all over the world asserted that you can most certainly wake up and find that your career doesn’t love you any more, and to put career ahead of love and family can be a treacherous mistake.

 In a recent survey it was revealed that young mothers between the ages of 18 and 34 consider homemaking the aspirational lifestyle choice as opposed to ‘career woman’. Luxury is no longer a four thousand pound handbag, but the time to stay at home and decorate cupcakes, pot up jam for the farmer’s market and spend quality time with their children. Like our grandmothers, but without the scratchy woolen underwear and mangles. Bluntly, the lifespan of the “Amazing Juggling Woman” is over. We made it look too hard. And that’s because it is hard.

 Our mothers wanted us to be independent from men – but they equated independence entirely with money. So while we no longer rely on men for cash, now that we are working, we need them more than ever in so many more ways than before. The monthly wage packet no longer buys them their slippers by the fire. We need them to empty the dishwasher, and forgo their Saturday sports to take the kids off our hands. Men have gone from being the petrol that fuelled the household machine, to being an essential cog in the wheel.

Except now it only works when it is prodded and pushed and now we have to provide half the petrol ourselves. Did our mothers honestly think that men were going to step up to the plate and take fifty percent of the fall out from a battle that was, frankly, not theirs? My parents were both teachers. My mother worked locally, my father in the city. So every morning he would leave the house an hour earlier than my mother with his paper tucked under his arm and get the tube to work. My mother had to wash, dress, and feed and transport three of us to school, leaving the baby at home with her mother. After school she had to take us all home, feed us and do our homework and by the time my father got home, less one hour after she did, have a hot meal ready on the table.

 The truth is she was so thrilled to be allowed to work (her own mother was a trained teacher who had to, by law, give up work in Ireland after she got married) that she didn’t take all the other ‘work’ into account. The unpaid, thankless work that women had been doing since time began, so low was the self-worth of our mother’s generation that they barely noticed that they were now bringing home the bacon and cooking it.

 The drudgery of cleaning and cooking and child-rearing that had trapped women in their houses until the 1960’s it has now transpired was actually very important, and very skilled labor. So skilled, in fact, that we now need television programs to show us how to clean our toilets, and rear our children and cook our dinners. The most basic housekeeping skills, like working out how much money you have to spend each week and sticking to it, seem to have completely eluded us. Debt? Our grandmothers did not know what that meant. Could they have ever imagined their granddaughters would be stupid enough to spend half a month’s wages on a handbag and the other on Marks & Spencer’s ready meals? Or throw a perfectly good blouse out because of a missing button, or not know how to bake a batch of buns without looking up a lavishly illustrated cookbook.

 Our mothers wanted to go out to work for all sorts of reasons. Independence, freedom, fulfillment – but mainly they wanted to do it because men did it and their work was more valued in society. In actual fact, men were not valued because of the work they did outside the home, but simply because they were men. And they were valued and respected not because they deserved it, but because they set the rules and the men need to be valued and respected otherwise they won’t do anything! So we set a new rule saying, we’ll go out to work too (if you do fifty percent of the house and kids stuff. Ok – do thirty and I’ll pretend it’s fifty. Hell – I’ll pretend it’s eighty!) and in one generation we have reversed the situation so that a man who allows his wife to stay at home and keep house is doing her a favor.

Economically, the woman who has time to stay home and cook her kids a dinner from scratch is not down-trodden but privileged. Menu-planning and having the time to steam clean your upholstery is a luxury ladies. I remember my poor, emancipated mother looking on aghast one Saturday afternoon as I modeled my new Anthropologie apron and discussed brownie recipes with my sisters. “I wanted you educated so you’d discuss Proust – or at least current affairs!” We reminded her that as full time working mothers, we barely have time to read the newspapers never mind discuss them. Our homes and children have become our recreation. Our aspiration is not longer to be more intelligent, or accomplished but to become more “homey”.

Money has outlived its promise as a means towards independence or even a designer handbag. What we want money to buy us now is time, the time to sit around our perfectly managed kitchens discussing current affairs. The time to not feel guilty about the amount of time we’re not spending with our kids. The time to give our cutlery drawer a good clear out without eating into a precious Sunday afternoon. Enough time to feel that being a good mother and earning and income is not an either/or decision. Our mother’s told us we would need to learn to “juggle our lives”. You’ve got dishwashers now, they said, today’s young men are great – they’ll help out. You can cook a dinner with one hand tied behind your back, microwave some chips – that’ll do them. After a generation of trying to hold it all together frankly, we’ve already dropped a few balls and now we’ve discovered they were the one’s marked “cup cakes” and “cuddle baby all day”. Balls marked “2 Hour Commute” and “Midnight empty-dishwasher” we’re still endlessly throwing round, and round, and round. We’re not fighting for our right to work any more, we’re fighting for our right to knit.

 What our mother’s neglected to tell us was that women had been keeping the show on the road for centuries. That our skills as homemakers were important. Nourishing our children, managing the money, the traditional crafts of knitting and sewing – these were not simply things we had to do, but creative occupations that added as much value to family life as they money the men bought it. Or, as we are discovering now, more. The pressure of the modern working mother is turning the next generation into aspiring Stepford Wives – and nobody wants that either. Maybe instead of passing the values of working independence to our daughters, our mother’s would have been better placed in validating the importance of being good homemakers to their sons. Although with our macho TV chef-culture it looks hopeful that, before long, men will be convinced that at home growing vegetables and pottering around the kitchen, baby in one arm, roulade mould in the other is where they truly belong.

 The problem for women might be – can we get back in there first before men discover the joys of knitting? More terrifying a prospect than that is what are we going to tell our own daughters having got it so very wrong ourselves. We’re certainly never going to allow ourselves go back to the Jane Austen days of simply marrying a rich man (not least because there aren’t enough of them to go around and more!)

Perhaps what our mother’s mistake has taught us is that when it comes to living a truly successful life there are no absolutes. Women do have more choices, we just have to make sure we help the next generation make the ones that will help them fulfil their dreams – not ours.

Crossing the Road in LA

I'm in L.A on research and trying to cross the road. I do not know which way the cars are coming from, and they all seem to be going really fast. I do not understand the whole pedestrian lights/crossing thing and neither, I suspect, do many of the cars. I shadowed a woman across a pedestrian crossing yesterday and she stopped in the middle of the road to argue with a revving truck driver about right of way. I cross the road like I’m on crack cocaine, ducking this way and that, hopping from side to side, jumping with surprise and raising my hands in apology as a car I didn’t see suddenly appears behind me. All the roads are two way and very wide and treacherous for pedestrians. It is truly terrifying. Now that I come to think of it, there are very few pedestrians, and many of them are homeless. Which is kind of how I feel right now.

dust-gathering kitchen utensils

I came out of my weekly shop in Lidl this week and the sun was shining. It is always raining in Ballina Lidl car park. I have come to think of it as a sort of punishment. I go in on a perfect sunny day, get my trolley, fill it – go through my impressive high-speed bagging routine. (I often attract an audience as I can separate frozen, fresh and larder goods at the same speed the uber-fast checkout workers throw them at me.)
I love Lidl. It’s cheap, has a limited and regular selection of stock – so you are not loading your trolley with foie-gras-in-a-tin and ingredients you are never going to use or forget you already have. (I have about five complete sets of sushi ingredients in my larder and every time I want to make sushi, like - once a year, I go and buy more.)
However my real motivation for shopping there is that I have a weakness for Lidl lifestyle offers. Camping gear, workshop benches, scuba diving equipment, oil-painting kits. Wonderful hobby-enabling stuff that inspires me to take up a new activity with impressive Germanic confidence. “Why, if I buy that harness and hat in Lidl, I shall be horseriding in no time!” “A complete sets of oils in a box that turns into an easel! Well, if that doesn’t get me painting a masterpiece, I don’t know what will!”
It is the curse or the gift of a peculiar sort of optimism, depending on how you look at it. If only I had a surf-board, crepe-pan, bread-maker, compost-making kit – everything would be better. Everything could be so different. I’d be the sort of person who’d have crepes for breakfast and go surfing and make-my own compost. Whatever that means. It’s an escape from oneself, of course and yet – sometimes it works, and when it does, it’s wonderful.
My father in law Joe, who passed away in 2009, was my Lidl-buddy. Joe and I clashed horribly at times, but on that one thing we were agreed. Lidl rocked. While my husband and mother in law raised their eyebrows in frustration, we formed a sort of Lidl support group. Joe was a generous man and a great man for buying gifts. He was the person who gave Leo his pocket money every week, and he always had the eye out for bargains that he could pass on. The key to Joe’s gifts was they had to be something that you didn’t know you needed until he arrived up “da-daah!” and presented you with it. A car cover, hose attachment kit, a pasta-making machine. Most of them went straight into the cupboard with a curt thank-you. Joe didn’t mind - he was wiser than that. He knew his stuff would come in handy one day.
And it almost always did. The car cover got dug out and used to cover Niall’s vintage jalopy the winter we did the garage up to house his office. A few years ago when Niall’s brother Fintan came home from Australia for my husband’s fortieth bash he decided to teach me how to make pasta. Joe’s pasta making machine was in the very back of the cupboard under the sink. Covered in that mysterious sticky dust that gets inside my kitchen cupboards, I honesty never thought it would see the light of day. Fintan was thrilled with it and, after a short lesson in making home-made pasta, so was I. It has become one of my kitchen staples, serving all sorts of culinary mood. I use it for kids cooking when the cake icing runs out and if I want to impress guests with home-made ravioli – out it comes.
Since that afternoon when my jovial brother in law broke eggs in my kitchen, and the two of us wondered at the miraculous compulsion of his father to buy me a pasta maker in Lidl, both of those men have died. Tragically and unexpectedly, insofar as all death is both.
Joe’s gifts have outlived him. The car polishing kit is still in the cupboard under the stairs along with the baseball mitt Leo has yet to use. Niall had to fix a burst pipe in the garden the other day and broke open a multi-purpose hose attachment set which has been in the shed for years and which I am certain has Joe’s stamp on it.
It’s the small details of ordinary life that sometimes put us in mind of lost loved ones. The memories they made for us are the real gifts.
I’ll never make pasta again without thinking of Fintan and Joe.

The Polytunnel

A co

Aspiring to country living begins with looking out your townhouse window at your fat neighbour getting out of the shower and vowing to replace your current view with one of devoid of other people.
That done and a couple of years pottering about the village, boasting to city friends about the quality of local schools, tinkering about making jam for the farmers market one has finally had the last of the Cath Kidston sale fabric made into cushions and it is now time to get serious. The next step is self-sufficiency, the ultimate badge of the nouveau country wannabe – I speak of course of the polytunnel.
A couple of years ago we were out of our minds trying to score a bit of fresh coriander in the village shop and coming home from the supermarket bemoaning the price and quality of slimy bagged salad leaves. This year the asian herb has already bolted and there is a veritable field of mixed greens for us to choose from. Am I feeling smug? Frankly, if I wasn’t me – I’d hate myself.
Recluctantly I have to admit the polytunnel is not an entirely sole achievement. We share it with our neighbour Steve although, that was my idea. I knew if we invested on our own it would quickly become one of our great family failures. Like the platinum gym membership a life-changing lifestyle choice that came with great intentions and turned out to be a waste of money. My husband used to be one of those men who would edge himself out the patio doors for the odd fag, shrugging himself cautiously against the bit of rain, doubtless still wondering just quite how in God’s name he had come to live in Killala, County Mayo when he had signed up for a life in Dublin’s city centre with a media chick. Steve, on the other hand, is one of those energetic outdoorsy types, always mowing his lawn and calling to the door with hand-picked mussels and going mackerel fishing so I hoped he’d be something of a driving force.
As with most of my ideas I had sold it to my husband as a no-big deal thing. I have a terrible tendency to understate the amount of work involved in any outdoor activity I commission of him - my complete ignorance overtaken by unreasonable expectation. “It’s only a tree babe – how hard can it be to trim a tree? Look, I’ve borrowed you a ladder and everything….” So, having booked the tunnel men to come and erect it for us, (and having cleverly absented myself from all real work by falling pregnant) all the men had to do was dig up a patch of land. Easy. Or not at all, as it turned out. It seems that the scrub grass growing on our narrow field was, in fact, an obnoxious weed whose roots had reached down into the earth’s core. They hired every shape and type of man equipment from the man equipment hire store to no avail. Strimmers, rotivators, killer-grass cutting machines – until eventually they found somebody with a digger deep enough to wrench the triffid a few feet from it’s bedrock, and stop it growing for long enough to get the tunnel up.
Steve had, of course, already seeded his lettuces and planted them all in a neat row on his side. So, I had to quickly run to the garden centre and stock up on seedling greens, sprinkling a bit of compost over them so I could make them look convincingly home-grown. Other veg enthusiasts gave us various plants which I threw down willy nilly with great enthusiasm, labelling nothing and hoping that every salad contained actual lettuce and not a roving, poisonous weed.
A year later it’s a different story. My rain- reluctant, urbane husband has transformed into a Monty Don pin-up – all Hunter wellies and Barbour Jacket – out there every night watering and weeding and keeping evil slugs and weevils at bay. Every time I see him leave our back door, trowel in hand full of stern intent to plant another lettuce, or attack a chard that’s grown too big for it’s boots, I get a quivery feeling of marital contentment.
I remember sitting in a married friends kitchen in my early thirties and watching her husband mow the back lawn. I wanted what she had so badly - a kind man and a shed for him to potter about it – yet, at thirty three I thought I would never find it.
I assume, like everyone that life is short, yet my life suggests it is long enough. I look back on where my life was before I met Niall twelve years ago and it looks so different now.
Day by day, step by step in small un-noticed increments, my dreams have come true.
I’ve got a sexy outdoor-man in Hunters and a polytunnel full of fresh veg. Life doesn’t get better than this.