Oh for heaven's sake I thought she'd packed this in!

Is there anything more depressing than coming across your old blog page and reading your pathetic and mostly failed attempts at humour? 'Of course there is, you self-important tit!' I imagine you cry, and having to read this awful crap in the first place is surely one of them. But that's your own fault. All of which is a roundabout way of saying that I'm three years older than I was then, several stones heavier, and now have a third child to add to my collection. I did give birth to all three of them by the way - I don't really collect children, if that was worrying you. This blog may be a cry for help, but not in that way.

Anyway, I expect there will be more of the same garbage for a while, until I can stand myself no longer and finally get the job in Morrisons I've been promising to for years. Coming back home to North Yorkshire may be the most interesting thing that has happened to me since I had an eight-weeks-premature baby by emergency caesarian aged 42, (my age, not the baby's) but that doesn't make it interesting in the real sense of the word. Still, as I mention in my profile, if you want that sort of thing there's always Twitter. Davina McCall has given up sugar recently, for example. And that's just one example - there's loads more where that came from.

So now I have to decide what to write about I suppose. I no longer live in a listed building as we opted for a leap forward in time for our next purchase. Right up to 1960, pop pickers, and a bungalow to boot! It's a cross between Peter Stringfellow's dream retirement villa and the toilet block of a Hoseasons caravan park. Still, at least it's warm, and when you close a window the weather remains on the other side of it, which is a novelty, and makes us want to join hands, sit in a circle and drink hot chocolate, but we don't.

I do of course still attend the primary school playground twice daily, and as we've lived here for a year now, sometimes have conversations with people. The 'mummy categories' have migrated north fairly intact, but our more rural aspect has introduced a couple more sub groups. I can now add 'farmers wives' and 'horse whisperers' to my pork pie chart, but have little more to say yet on this topic, even though preliminary research has revealed to me the difference between 'hay' and 'haylage'. I have however ordered a box set of Countryfile and added a series link to the Claire Balding Show, so once the hard work is done it's only a matter of time before I can start to do what I do best, which as you know, is breaking down barriers.

In 1986 a fresh-faced brunette called Phillip Schofield got his big break when he became the first live in-vision continuity announcer on Children's BBC. He presented from the 'broom cupboard' and had a puppet sidekick called Gordon the Gopher. If you're roughly my age you'll have seen it, and if you're one of those youngster types you can check out how good kids' telly used to be on YouTube. Gordon was, as his name suggests, a gopher, but also, as it doesn't, an anarchist, and the joke was that Phillip would begin to announce the programmes while the puppet tried to sabotage things by making him laugh. Schofield did his job by talking to camera while simultaneously trying to anticipate the random and disruptive mugging of a naughty yellow soft toy lurking in his peripheral vision. Every day he faced the same problems that a ventriloquist does, but was denied the control of being the one with his hand up the puppet's arse. Occasionally, he tried to tackle Gordon head on, and would stare threateningly into the cold, dead, beady eyes of his co-host but this never worked, as Phillip was too nice, and Gordon too powerful, and so the battle was lost. Anyway, you don't need to have watched many episodes of This Morning before you realise that people rarely stray from a formula that works for them. *


* I'd like to thank everyone who supported that joke all the way to its punchline, which was, I admit, a long time coming. The more of this I do, the better I''ll surely get, and if any of you are still reading, you can be consoled by the thought that you're making a difference. Thank you.


Which is a rather long-winded way of saying that, unlike Phillip Schofield, I'm having a stab at something I'm garbage at at the moment - sketch writing - which is taking up loads of my time and stopping me doing the other thing I'm garbage at - like blogging. Hence the above joke. I'm having a go at a topical comedy sketch show open to new writers and am finding it very hard. It's the kind of thing that is written usually by very young, testosterone-fuelled bucks, fresh out of university and hungry for their big break. You can imagine what my middle-aged, mumsy attempts have been like so far...

'Junior minister, is that a suitable curtain material for your office, do you think?'

'What do I care for such things! I'm a thrusting young politician with a penchant for stabbing colleagues in the back and my eye on the main chance. Pull yourself together woman.'

'Right. I'll be off then.'

It's not exactly The Thick of It. So if I can think of anything funny for next week, I'll post it. Otherwise, expect more of the same rubbish for a bit until I get sick of it all and return to a life of obscurity. A bit like this.

Pumpkins, perverts and parental input

With the all-embracing festival of kitsch that is Halloween fast approaching, the opportunities for the maladjusted to get things wrong by trying too hard become almost infinite. But you have a go, because nothing says community spirit like a tramp round a dark, deserted housing estate with shivering, whingeing children who would rather be inside watching telly. And you'd be fed up too if you had to keep bending over to pick up the fake rubber teeth which fell out of your mouth every time you opened it to say 'Twick or Tweat'.

Last year I was invited to join the annual cavalcade of misery known in our town as the 'Halloween Parade' which was organised by a local charity, and intended as a grand evening out for all the family. So naturally I braced myself, had a look at my options, and decided to go as a pumpkin. I opted for pumpkin because (a) I was the right shape and (b) We had loads of orange foam packaging left over from a patio set we bought in August. The kids were very supportive and told me I'd be winning prizes all night for the most realistic costume in the mothers' category, so when the doorbell rang and I waddled down the hall, like Mr Bump, to meet my public, it honestly hadn't occurred to me to be worried. They already knew I was fat, so they wouldn't be expecting much, surely?

I opened the door to be confronted by what, in my panic, looked initially to be a raiding party from Ann Summers. There were about twenty women all dressed as sexy zombies, sexy bats, or sexy vampires. Some were wearing lace cobweb bras over black velvet leotards. Others had squeezed themselves into basques onto which they'd stuck little Halloween-themed trinkets. One of the boldest of the party was sporting a French maid's outfit, fishnet stockings and thigh boots. Her son was wearing a Scream mask and an Incredible Hulk suit and the picture of them walking hand in hand past Blockbusters will stay with me until I draw my final breath. Obviously, being bright orange and having a circumference of at least 3.5 metres, I was not in a position to ask searching questions about people's sartorial choices, so I never did discover the link between All Hallow's Eve and bedroom roleplay. But there must have been one because these things don't happen by accident do they? Anyway, no-one had told me but Halloween, apparently, was now all about sex. Of course! Cute sexy ghosts in see-through sheets, burlesque witches in nipple clamps, 50 shades of grey cat. Go for it girls! I felt great in my pumpkin outfit, and happily joined the insane throng with a merry laugh and a spring in my step.

Needless to add that after that experience, I thought long and hard about what I was going to do this year...

 

I'm desperate and I know it

.... When you're a woman of the larger pursuasion, and by that I mean fat, you do get quite good at sourcing poor-quality, ill-fitting clothing in man-made fabrics from dubious websites. These tend to have one-word titles and use lots of exclamation marks to convey the excitement of being too big to buy real clothes in normal sizes from High Street chains. Fat!! It's the new thin! That sort of thing. And awful euphemisms like 'curvilicious', 'billowing ' and 'extravagant'. Like that. But the handy thing about them when you're looking for something that might double as a Halloween costume is that most of the clothes are black (so you can tell yourself that those capri pants make you look like Margot Fonteyn on her way to rehearsal, or a backstage hairdresser at the Brit Awards) and all of them contain lycra, and so are shiny, which is ideal if you're going to have a stab at Catwoman.

I probably don't need to dwell too long on the detail, but when my purchases arrived, and I'd got them all on, the resulting ensemble didn't say 'cuddly but cute' like a pre-diet Dawn French. It said '60-year old Grimsby prostitute' and if I'm honest, it said it quite loudly. Actually, once I'd added the cape, things improved slightly, and I could have probably passed for Russell Grant as Buttons in Aladdin. But then I spoiled things again by going over the top with the eyeliner and backcombing my hair... Six hours later and my eldest daughter was locked in the bathroom texting her friends and stuffing towels into her mouth to silence the laughter, while my youngest was crying, and too terrified to come into my bedroom. At my weight, it's not possible to look exactly like a methodone addict with a taste for the carnival, but I wouldn't have looked out of place in one of Tim Burton's worst nightmares, even one he'd had after a particularly heavy night on the cheese and pickle sandwiches.

Things were much better in the Olden Days

So obviously sexy's not for me, and I'll probably be staying in this year. Which after all is what everyone's mum used to do isn't it? When we were little, our mothers and fathers didn't have to dress up at Halloween. They came out with us to make sure we weren't run over in the dark, but they stood out of the way, at the ends of people's drives, trying to light a crafty fag inside the collars of their macs. That was because, in our mam's case (yes, we call them 'mam' in Middlesbrough - like they did in the Royle Family - aren't we quaint?) the hard work had already been done during the day while we were at school.

All afternoon, our mam had been hunched over the kitchen table, frantically digging out the insides of two swedes with a sharp vegetable knife. Yes, I said swedes. Swedes! I have trouble even chopping them up for a stew, they're so hard. But pumpkins hadn't arrived in Britain in the late seventies and early eighties, or not in Middlesbrough anyway, so that's what was used. Once she'd finished hollowing them out, she carved a scary face on the front, threaded a piece of string through two holes in the 'lid' and finally inserted a birthday cake candle inside. And there you had it! My sister and I were now the proud owners of what were basically illuminated vegetable handbags, which we would then carry through the night, dressed as witches, accompanied by the smell of burnt turnip, and developing welts on our fingers where the string dug in.

The more alert reader will have noticed that I said 'burnt turnip' not 'swede' just then. That was because the other special thing about swedes in our house was that they were called turnips. And they weren't turnips, they were swedes. I know that now because I'm almost grown-up and do my own food shopping. But mam insisted they were turnips, and we all called them turnips and I didn't realise they were called anything but turnips until I went away to university aged 18. Imagine my embarrassment! Actually, there wasn't any because the subject never came up, as we never ate any vegetables. I'm assuming all the middle class students knew the difference between a swede and a turnip because a middle class person simply would not make that sort of mistake. But they probably don't get to make handbags out of root vegetables either, not even at Halloween.

I should probably try harder at school...

When you're from Middlesbrough, and have learned everything you know about the middle and upper classes from the collection of paperback Agatha Christies in the spare bedroom, your first real exposure to our modern class structure comes as something of a surprise. Indeed, the whole of the outside world has been coming as something of a surprise to me since I left home, as it no doubt still does to people who spend their teenage years reading PG Wodehouse and eating peanut m&ms in their bedroom.

It's a hoary old cliche now to drone on about the Yummies in their Chelsea tractors, so I won't bother, except to say that on the day you turn up in the playground of a new school with your poor nervous kids in tow, it usually takes about five seconds to work out where you'll have most luck fitting in. Mums are gathered in groups, according to species, and there is little overlap, apart from in one crucial area, but let's not get ahead of ourselves.

The Triathletes.

The further south you go, the more of these you see. They are instantly recognisable, clad as they are from head to toe in North Face breathables to reduce chafing, have mud all over their calves, and a three-wheel baby housing that looks like a sidecar but isn't, attached to the back of their mountain bikes so training doesn't have to suffer just because they've popped another one out during the summer holidays. Unless you're also in running gear, don't even try to approach this group. They are alpha females, full to bursting with green vegetables and would never, ever, understand a fat northerner trying to make jokes about Jossy's Giants. Actually, they can't even see you. Their eyes have been so damaged by years of squinting against driving rain on their daily pounding of the bypass, that they now only recognise fellow athletes, or, at a push, the dim silhouette of a Land Rover 'Disco'. (As long as it's green.)

The Lovelies.

Wherever you live, these girls are blonde. They are the proud possessors of magnificent heads of hair, comprised of warm honey and caramel shades, a bit like a lion's mane, but tidier. They are also very young, and the few that aren't young, look young, so don't get cocky and think you can tell the difference. And oh, they're just so lovely! They speak in tiny, tinkly voices like the silver bells on fairies' shoes, voices they've been using to great effect since they were six.

They went straight from My Little Pony to Cath Kidston, with a brief gap to have three beautiful children, and their husbands either sell Volvos, or are high-end plumbers who fit hot tubs. They are very slim and pretty, and wear floral print blouses with skinny jeans, and Ugg boots or ballet pumps, depending on the weather. They hate you. They don't understand how you could have let yourself go like that, and they don't appreciate sarcastic remarks, thank you very much. Their world is lovely and filled with sunshine, their children are gorgeous, their 'hubbies' tall and manly, their downstairs loo smells of peaches and it's grim up north which they've only seen on Coronation Street and it makes them feel sick to even think about it. So go away.

The Workers

This is a small group, only glimpsed intermittently and so not a real group at all. Naturally, if you're dressed in a power suit and six-inch stilletoes as worn by Melanie Griffiths circa 1988 you're bound to feel more comfortable standing with someone similarly attired. So I don't blame these women for sticking together. I'm just saying that they do look down on the rest of us a bit, and not just because they're wearing six-inch heels.

The workers are naturally in direct opposition to all other groups, because, although they're not the only ones with jobs, they are the only ones whose office jobs are important enough to require them to look like Stepford fembots with a John Galliano fetish. Appearances though can be deceptive and it turns out they are not in fact Karl Lagerfeld's PA, but work on the council switchboard, as you discover when you ring up about your wheelie bin and recognise their voice. 

However, these women do at least try to live in the real world, and this group, more than any other in the playground, will accept advances from a scruffy, overweight newcomer, because they are at heart project managers, and think that all you lack is some administrative focus. Which is true.

The Bakers

A terrifying group this, and one which in terms of physical appearance alone, I ought to slot easily into. Because this is where the fatties hang out, the menopausal, older mums who left it too late to start and now are knackered, spotty, and have to shave twice a day to avoid looking like Fatima Whitbread. But boy can they bake! These stern, ample-breasted women arrive at school in the afternoon red-faced and covered in flour. They definitely know the business end of a madeleine and the most committed of them still use Tupperware.

Unfortunately they are also the most fanatical of all the groups. No smiling Ma Larkins these - they take the job of providing carbohydrates for the family very seriously. They have absolutely no time for any modern nonsense whatsoever, have never watched the X-Factor because they're always kneading pastry, and consequently their unfortunate kids are set to be the school misfits, the ones who look like they've slipped through a wormhole from the 1950s, wearing grey pinafores and baggy tights.

They regard all other groups with equal disdain, and any poor soul hoping to be accepted within their innner circle must bring a plate of home-wrought patisserie to be sampled and judged before the bell goes. Good luck with that. Every one of them thinks their own chocolate brownies are the best, and when comes that call to arms from the PTA, all bloody hell breaks loose...


A Fete accomplit?

..... which brings me to that great leveller and brief bringer of accord - the school fete. Organised by the might of the PTA, the school fete unites all groups for one transitory but glorious moment, or at least it would, if it weren't for the fact that the same ten women run the show every year, as did their mothers before them. At our school, any recently arrived mum has more chance of becoming the new face of L'Oreal, than of securing a seat on the organising committee of the Christmas 'Fayre'.

The committee to end all committees, this makes the Yalta Conference of 1945 look like a group-hug. Did Sir Winston Churchill have to arrange flapjack on a trestle table according to the perishability of its component ingredients? He did not. And even if he had, the table would not have had one leg shorter than the other seven. On that you may count.

However, in a surprisingly democratic way, the PTA does allow members from all groups to participate. This can lead to some refreshing, almost invigorating clashes of ideology which are a joy to behold. For example, the Bakers might hold all the aces skills-wise but the Triathletes have very firm views on carbohydrates, and fail to see why the cake stall should not seize the opportunity to showcase Miranda Smethwyck-Pratt's  fat-free muffins and forty-seven-seed raisin-buns with prune icing.

This is all very well, say the Lovelies, but must the organic wares be displayed on those hideously ugly hemp plates with hairs sticking out of them? What about some Kirsty Allsop cupcake cases on a faux-Victoriana tiered stand? If this group had their way of course, the entire school would be permanently decorated in the style of a Beatrix Potter tribute band's dressing room.

But all is not lost because the Workers eventually save the day and make sense of the chaos by organising a staffing rota dividing the fete's three hours into manageable shifts. This allows plenty of time for the Bakers to give advice on the correct use of icing nozzles, exercise breaks for the Triathletes, and the Lovelies get to colour it in...

Now, if I owned a listed building...

 

.... Of course, there are many ways to become middle class, but one of the most effective and soul destroying is surely to buy a listed house in a conservation area. If your heart's desire is to become the proud and self-satisfied type of bastard who owns a listed building, the following tale should put you off.

It's several months now since we arrived in hell, and there are many stories to relate - non more exciting surely than the infamous debacle of the vermin and insect-infested living room, whose culminating orgasm of despair was the much-photographed, un-matching, shocking pink floorboard incident, courtesy of Odd Rod, the colour blind carpenter. But that is for another time, when, fortified by strong drink, I feel man enough to relate the saga. For now, at least, picture the scene as I and my beloved family sit huddled, sans radiator, sans hope, round our cold, empty hearth. I remember the telephone conversation which resulted in this unfortunate state of affairs very clearly, occurring as it did, one week before we moved in...
 

'Hello, Mrs Halls, it's Dwayne from Bellend and Cockwhiskers in the High Street'

'Hello Dwayne'

'Just a quick one Mrs Hays, the vendors want to know if you would like to buy their companion set?'

'Er, no thanks Dwayne, we already have one thank you.''

'OK Mrs Haines, it's just, well, it cost them £200 and they said you can have it for £75!'

'Yes, very generous, but as I said, we don't need it thank you, we have one already.'

'Right-ho Mrs Haymes, it's one of those things you poke fires with, you know?'

'Yes, I do know, thank you Dwayne, but we already have one, and so we don't need to buy another one.'

'Oh, OK Mrs Ayles. So, shall I tell them to just take it with them then?'

'Yes, I think that would be best Dwayne'

'Right-ho  then Mrs Aimes, thanks anyway, bye for now.'

'Goodbye Dwayne'

So you can imagine our surprise when we arrived at our new home seven days later during the worst floods Britain had seen since the last time it flooded, about a year earlier, and discovered not only that none of our furniture would fit up the staircase, but that the entire inner workings of the living room-fireplace had been removed. Obviously my first instinct was to tear open one of the 6,000 cardboard boxes labelled 'BOOKS- er- please put anywhere' in search of the Concise OED Vol I (A-M Markworthy) to look up the definition of the phrase 'companion set'. But common sense for once prevailed and I instead wandered about the freezing cold house weeping and clutching removal men by the lapels, screaming Oh 'God! - what have we done?'

 

 

 

Builders

 

 

If after this you don't immediately put the house back on the market and fill out an application form to buy a new flat off-plan on an exiting wharfeside development by award-winning architects, located near actual shops, you have to accept the inevitability of getting some work done to the house, so that it becomes habitable for something other than livestock.  At this point the world as you remember it changes and appears instead to divide into two types of workmen. There is a vague awareness that there used to be more to life than two types of workmen, but you soon learn to ignore this, roll up your sleeves and get on with categorising builders. And, as I said, there are two main groups.
 

Group One:

Builders whose advertisements appear in glossy publications like The Beautiful Buildings Owners Club, A life of Tweed, and Lime Wash: A history through the Ages. They have names like 'Woodcock and Daughters', 'Goodchilde and Spate', and 'Benjamin Beaufort, workers in oak'. Their ads are full colour and feature immense, fully restored, twelve-bedroom medieval manor houses with moats, gleaming in the Surrey sunshine. Lushly blonde children with very white teeth and wearing striped leggings in unvarying shades of taupe, gambol around the 50-acre gardens, clutching croquet mallets and organic carrot batons while smiling at their glittering parents in a way that only the public school-educated child can. These advertisements never refer to the cost of anything, apart from to hint at the social cost of owning a less than magnificent ancient home. They boast of years of adherence to traditional materials, endless and impressive qualifications in master-craftsmanship across all fields of expertise, and guarantee that their on-site employees will be dressed throughout in the garb of 11th century stonemasons, as featured in the Bayeux Tapestry.
 

Group Two:

Builders you can actually afford. Their adverts tend to appear in free newspapers like the Heartsink Gazette, next to the Star of Bengal's half-page Elvis Nite Special with unlimited poppadoms. To be fair, and in your defence, they do state that they have had 'experience of listed buildings'. It's only much later that you understand this means they've been to the King's Head in Great Wimsted for a carvery. The ensuing relationship is less than a symbiotic melding of vision and skill. These men do not take your dreams and gently mould them into the shape of a beautiful family home, filled with peace, laughter and bathed in the warm golden light of an open fire. They are called Trevor, have a large side-kick called Brian, and pretend to know the difference between oak and mdf, sharp sand and lime-mortar, but really they just like doing conservatories and their company motto is: 'Don't worry love - it's round the back so no-one will see it'. Conversations with them go like this:

'So, Trevor, you will be using traditional materials? I'd hate to get into trouble with English Heritage! (accompanied by nervous laugh - tra la!)

'Oh yeah, but you'll have to get them for us. I mean, we've used them a lot, and it's really easy, but I don't actually know where you'd buy them from.'

'Right. Ok. Well if perhaps if you could tell me what I need, I can get it online for you. We could have it delivered'

'Well now you're asking. I know it comes in a tub usually.'

One day I was hiding in the kitchen, pretending to wash up, but really listening for the reassuring sound of lovely big pieces of green oak being chiselled and planed by experienced craftsmen. Alas, I could only hear raucous laughter and the sounds of two middle-aged men arranging their social lives on their mobiles while dropping hammers on each other's feet. Suddenly the cry went up:

'Bleedin 'ell!' (we are, after all, in Essex.)

'Oh my God!, What's wrong?'

'Oh, Jesus I nearly ad an art attack there!'

'Why - what happened?'

'A bleeding great lorry wen parsst the winder an it went so dark in ere I fort I'd fucked the electrics!!'

Trevor, for all his cheery and relentless tea-drinking, never really got the hang of what to call me. As no workman ever has. In fact, the name 'Alison' to anyone outside my family is generally met with such blank incomprehension I may as well introduce myself as 'Queen Ethelburga, proud Abbess of Northumbria.' On his last morning Trevor excelled himself, as he came to look for me in the kitchen.

'Oh. There you are. Er, do you mind if I borrow your hoover, Alan?'

'Alan? My name is Alison!'

'Oh gawd, sorry - I knew it began wiv an L'