Wednesday, 5 April

Well, after all the ranting and raving furiously about me YET AGAIN being the one who either has to call in favours or take yet more annual leave, along with outrage about why I am always the one who has to arrange the childcare, after frantic googling and phoning round, I managed to get the children booked into an all-day sports camp for the first week of the holidays – i.e., the week that BASTARDING SIMON was supposed to take off, and since he had fucked off to sunny Singapore, instead of entertaining my precious moppets for the second week of the holidays that I had so carefully booked off months ago, I decided that when it came to the rage and stress, I would simply chuck it in the fuck-it bucket and I have booked a last-minute trip to Lanzarote for the children and me, which to be honest costs about the same as a week’s worth of cinema/Laser Quest/McDonald’s trips to keep them happy.

Also, we are even staying in a hotel, which Simon will never countenance because People and also because he apparently ‘has enough’ of hotels because he stays in them for work all the time. Oh, to be given the chance to ‘have enough’ of hotels! I can but dream. Not only that, but I just booked the hotel because it looked nice and didn’t even consult TripAdvisor. Simon worships obsessively at the Oracle that is TripAdvisor – we are not allowed to go anywhere with less than a five-star rating. And even if a place has five stars, and eleventy fucking billion good reviews, woe betide them if in 2013 one person left them a two-star review. That is the establishment immediately crossed off Simon’s list as sub-par. It is very fucking annoying.

In the meantime, in his absence, we are happily living on pasta (not considered by Simon to be a Proper Dinner, unless it is bastarding lasagne) and my (never very high) standards have become somewhat lax – the children were quite delighted to be permitted to eat their pesto pasta (pesto carefully blitzed to within an inch of its life so there were no offending ‘bits’, because they will only eat bits in Juliette’s cooking – my ‘bits’ taste funny, apparently) and bought-in garlic bread (Simon will only eat homemade garlic bread) in front of their tablets tonight, which is something they are NEVER allowed to do when Simon is at home. Although the main reason for this is that it meant if they were slumped in front of mind-numbing electronics, then I too could pleasantly pass the time with a glass of Pinot Noir and a spot of Facebook stalking, instead of refereeing World War III, explaining yet again to Peter that really, it would be nice if he could refrain from cramming his food into his mouth so fast that he managed to bite his own finger, and listening to Jane wittering like a demented budgie about how Tilly lent Milly her Smiggle ruler and Milly lost it, and then Milly said Tilly had never lent it to her anyway and so Tilly said Milly, etc., etc., etc. Also, in Simon’s absence there are no rows about whether the dog can or cannot sleep on the bed.

I feel bad sometimes that life seems to be easier without Simon, and I know it’s just a temporary sensation, and that if I were on my own with the children full-time it would be very, very different to coping without him for a week or two, or likewise if he were away doing something dangerous in Afghanistan or somewhere that he might not come back from, instead of titting around the world being bored with hotel rooms. And I will probably miss him eventually, of course I will, but we have been married for so long now that actually, other than the massive bastarding childcare issue, it’s quite nice when he goes away and then when he comes back it’s like things are a bit more exciting again, instead of him just lolling on the sofa in front of Wheeler Fucking Dealers (I swear to God that I thought he was going to cry when Edd China left, and now he refuses to watch any of the newer episodes that don’t have Edd, which means I have now seen every single wretched episode at least five times, even though there are ELEVENTY FUCKING BILLION of them).

I wonder if I should tell Simon we are going on holiday while he is away?

Thursday, 6 April

Hmmmm. I have not entirely thought through this ‘going on holiday’ thing. Firstly, the children will need shorts and T-shirts and sandals and such like, all of which they have inconsiderately outgrown since last summer. Since I only just came to this realisation today, and I have no time to visit actual shops, I have had to spend an absolute bastarding fortune panic-buying them stuff online, and paying through the nose to have next-day delivery, as we are leaving on Saturday morning, so my splendid bargain holiday is rapidly becoming somewhat less bargainacious! Astonishingly, I have also had to buy myself a new and rather slinky swimming costume for the occasion, as it turns out that those HIIT classes and disgusting salads have made a difference and while I would not exactly call myself skinny, I am definitely less chunky. I still have hopes of one day inventing the Pie Yourself Thin diet, but in the meantime it is jolly nice not to feel like a beached whale in my swimming costume, anxiously scanning the horizon lest Greenpeace appear and try to refloat me.

All this obviously then led to a hissy fit from Jane because she had not been allowed to choose her own clothes, because there wasn’t time if I wanted everything to arrive tomorrow, and also because shopping online with Jane is no less soul-destroying than shopping in shops with Jane (well, OK, it is slightly less infuriating because you can at least drink wine while you are doing it), as she spends hours deliberating over exactly which of what appear to be six identical T-shirts is the one that takes her fancy. In fairness, she gets this helpful trait from Simon, who is equally impossible to shop with, which means I am always astounded by women who remark that they buy all their husband’s clothes. I do buy him socks sometimes. When he’s not being annoying.

I still haven’t actually told Simon that we are going away. This is definitely not a problem though, as he is not due back until after us. I could always leave a note, like Shirley Valentine, in case he comes home early: ‘Gone to the Canaries – see you in a week!’

Sunday, 9 April

Well, this is actually jolly nice! I am sitting most happily by a pool in the sunshine with a lovely cocktail, reading my book, while my precious moppets put the obscene amount of money spent on their swimming lessons to good use by splashing and frolicking merrily, and I’m actually feeling really rather chilled out! I even cleared all my emails and, under orders from Ed, who said I was looking very stressed out (couldn’t really tell him that was more to do with my watbag husband than work) switched on my out of office before I left, as he insisted that there is nothing currently happening at work that was so crucial that it couldn’t wait till I got back.

We arrived mid-afternoon yesterday, after an incident-free journey, largely because Simon wasn’t with us to turn Checking-In and Finding the Gate into a piece of dramatic performance art. The children, who had never travelled without their father, were astonished to find how many things there are to do/look at/eat/buy in airports when they are not being hustled rapidly to the gate.

Freed from Simon’s Gate Tyranny, we browsed Duty Free. Well, I say browsed, Jane and I browsed while I kept a firm grip on Peter and promised to buy him a giant bar of Toblerone if he refrained from trying to touch anything. This bribery worked for just long enough for me to purchase one of the magical make-up kits that you only get in the airports that contain everything you could ever need, yet are small enough to pop in your handbag, thus making me feel like a jet-setting cosmopolitan traveller. Perhaps next I will invest in one of those ‘holiday capsule wardrobes’ they always witter on about in magazines, where all you need to take on holiday is a bikini, two small scarves and a pair of sparkly flip-flops, and somehow you magically knit them together into a variety of cunning ‘night and day’ outfits. Possibly not. I suspected that the travel writers who recommend these ‘packing essentials’ might be talking bollocks when I saw one who recommended taking a nice sponge bag on holiday because it could ‘easily double up as a glamorous evening clutch bag’. I am sorry, but I have never, EVER seen a sponge bag that you could pass off as an evening bag. It was telling that there was no photo of her magic sponge/clutch bag.

Against my better judgement, I also bought Jane some mascara, which she insisted on putting on at once, which led to me having to explain to the startled flight attendant as we were boarding that she wasn’t sporting two black eyes, she’d just got a bit carried away!

In another fit of rebellion against Simon’s holiday strictures, I’d gone mad and booked us all-inclusive. I’ve always fancied the idea of all-inclusive. Just the very name is joyous – all you can eat and drink, what’s not to love? Simon contends that it means you are restricted to eating in the hotel, and that you should go out and enjoy the local culture and restaurants, and all-inclusive is for people who want to go to Spain and eat egg and chips. I would agree he has a small point about supporting the local businesses as well as the big hotels, but I must say I am also loving the bliss that is all-inclusive, though I fear Peter may burst before the week is out, as he is taking his commitment to getting my money’s worth out of the all-inclusiveness extremely seriously. I have never seen such joy on his face as last night, faced with the dinner buffet, when he turned to me and whispered, quite overwhelmed, ‘You mean, I can have as much of everything as I want? Every day? Anything? And I can keep going back? Even for pudding? And it doesn’t finish at 3 p.m.?’

I don’t think I have seen Peter this happy since the first time I took to him to a Pizza Hut buffet, whereby he proceeded to demolish everything in sight until a frosty-faced waitress declared the buffet now closed, as Peter reached for one last slice of deep-pan pepperoni.

I meanwhile have resolved to take my money’s worth in a more liquid form. I dutifully waited till 6 p.m. last night, as my mother has always drummed into me that drinking before then was Bad and Wrong (a rule I frequently break at home, but for some reason I felt Standards must be maintained when Abroad, perhaps feeling one should Set a Good Example to the Foreigners instead of conforming to the stereotypes about Boozed-Up, Broken Britain), only to discover this morning by the pool that most people start on the gin about 11 a.m., and go for a steady drip-feed throughout the day.

I had been slightly worried that going away on my own with the children might lead to other holidaymakers taking pity on me, Shirley Valentine-style (though with Peter and Jane in tow, it was at least unlikely that I would be receiving any offers to make fuck on anyone’s brother’s boat), but actually, there are lots of women here on their own with kids, and I have already bonded with a nice lady from Bolton called Joanna, when she asked if I wanted to read her copy of Heat magazine because she had finished with it, and we agreed that clearly it wasn’t because we were getting old that we didn’t know who anyone was in it anymore, and then we reminisced about More and the Position of the Fortnight and realised that neither of us could remember anything about More apart from the Position of the Fortnight, and then we decided that 11.30 a.m. definitely wasn’t too early for one’s second cocktail of the day!

Wednesday, 12 April

I have been being very childish, I must admit, and ignoring Simon’s calls and texts – mainly because his first text upon arriving in Singapore last week had read, ‘Here safe. Went to great restaurant tonight, I think you’d have loved it!’ I received this while I was refereeing a screaming match with Peter and Jane over whether or not I had added celery to their shepherd’s pie (I had, chopped so finely that it was invisible to the naked eye, and I KNEW they couldn’t taste it, because I always add it and they’ve never tasted it before. They had just suspected it was there because they saw me putting the rest of the celery back in the fridge), culminating in me screaming that they could both fucking starve if they wouldn’t eat what I had cooked and them threatening to phone Childline, before Jane fed hers to the dog, who gobbled it down and then promptly puked it up again, leading to screams from Jane that I had poisoned the dog with my toxic celery slop, while I responded he had only been sick because he had eaten it so fast he had choked. So I wasn’t exactly overjoyed by Simon’s message, and decided that I was probably better off ignoring it rather than texting what I wanted to text, which was ‘Fuck off you smug wanker.’

It turned out ignoring him was actually rather satisfying, and so I didn’t tell him we were going away either, until I got a very irate text today demanding to know where I was as he hadn’t been able to get me on my mobile or the house phone and so had called Tim across the road, who had said that he thought that Katie had said something about me going on holiday, and so where the fuck was I, because he was about to call the police if he didn’t hear from me, and report me and the children as missing.

I texted back ‘Lanzarote’ and ten seconds later my phone rang.

‘What the FUCK are you doing in Lanzarote?’ he bellowed. ‘It’s fucking midnight here, and I’m going out of my mind trying to find my wife and kids, thinking they’ve been abducted and are dead in a FUCKING DITCH, and you’re sitting on a beach in LANZAROTE.’

‘By the pool, actually,’ I said calmly. ‘I don’t like the beaches here. The sand is black, which is not very aesthetically pleasing. Because of the volcanoes, you know.’

‘What? Why the hell have you taken my children and gone there? How dare you not tell me?’

‘Why shouldn’t I take MY children on holiday? You made it very clear before you went away that all responsibility for childcare falls on me and is nothing to do with you, because you have much more important things to concern yourself with than piddling little matters like how your children are looked after in the holidays, and that such things are beneath you. So, I am sorting the childcare once again, like I ALWAYS do, only I’m doing it in Lanzarote, because why the fuck not? Am I just supposed to sit at home, twiddling my thumbs, thinking up one hundred and one things to do with fucking mince for dinner while you send me photos of the fucking Michelin-starred meals you are dining on each night? Hmmm?’

‘I am here for WORK, Ellen. WORK! WORK that I do to keep a roof over YOUR head, and food on YOUR table –’

‘Fuck off, Simon,’ I interrupted. ‘Firstly, your work is not keeping a roof over my head, because MY app paid off our fucking mortgage, remember, so you can drop that shit. You’re having a fucking ball in Singapore, a couple of meetings, a couple of hours on site, and then you’re out at nice bars and restaurants every evening and you’re just pissed off that I might be having some fun too. So fuck you! I’m not discussing this any further. We’ll talk about it when you get home.’

‘And that’s the other reason I was trying to get hold of you,’ yelled Simon. ‘I’ve actually managed to get things wrapped up sooner than expected, since you made such a fuss about me not being there to provide childcare, and I’ll be home on Friday, only you’re in fucking Lanzarote, so what’s the point in me coming home early so I can look after the children like you demanded?’

‘Well, we’ll be home on Saturday,’ I snapped. ‘Because they go back to school on Monday. So thank you for your grand gesture, but unfortunately it was pointless, because it was last week that I needed you to help out, not next week, but of course you can’t possibly be expected to know your own children’s term dates, can you? Now if you will excuse me, it’s time for my next cocktail, and I’ll see you on Saturday!’

Somehow pressing ‘end call’ just isn’t as satisfying as slamming an actual receiver down, but I jabbed the screen as hard as I could anyway. I considered lobbing my phone into the pool to prove some sort of point, but then I wouldn’t be able to post photos of my cocktails on Facebook, so I thought better of it. One must always consider what the priorities are.

‘Man trouble?’ said Joanna sympathetically from the next sun lounger. ‘Could be worse. I had to kick mine out for shagging the au pair. It wasn’t the cheating that was so upsetting, it was finding out he was such a fucking cliché! I thought he’d have had a bit more imagination than to go for the old midlife crisis, shag-the-au-pair chestnut!’

Simon better not shag Juliette. I’ll do a damn sight more than chuck him out!

Thursday, 13 April

It is astonishing, really, all the things one can do on holiday when one doesn’t have Simon sulking and twitching and moaning about ‘People’ beside you. We have gone to the hotel discos (Jane begged me to never dance publicly again, after my ‘spirited’ interpretation of ‘Uptown Girl’ after several gin and tonics), we went on a bus trip to the markets (oh my God, so much tat! Quite a lot of it too naff to even buy in an ironic or kitsch way. There was a slightly unfortunate moment when Peter had to be hastily steered away from the pornographic keyrings, and I actually quite missed Simon, if only because the look of horror on his face at All the People, and the Wares on offer, would have been absolutely priceless), and tonight we went to the karaoke session.

I love karaoke. I am not usually allowed to do karaoke, because apparently I am tone deaf and can’t sing, but I have to say I think Joanna’s and my duet of ‘Eternal Flame’ was extremely moving and will stay with those people fortunate enough to have watched it for some time. Jane said it most certainly would, at least until their ears stopped bleeding, and forbade me to ever sing again, either publicly or privately. I think Jane is biased, though. She has never liked my singing. When she was about ten months old I took her to a baby music class, where the nice lady who took the class solemnly told us all about the importance of singing to your ‘little person’ and insisted it didn’t matter what your voice was like, because, to your baby, it was the most beautiful sound in the world. I didn’t like to tell her that Jane already put her hands over her ears and screamed ‘NONONONONO!’ whenever I tried to sing to her.

It has been lovely having this week with the children, though, and actually spending time just with them, with no rushing here and there. Jane has not even mentioned getting an Instagram account once, and after the first day left her precious phone in the room and didn’t look at it. Even the fighting has died down, apart from the odd attempted drowning incident, which I laughed off to casual observers as ‘japes and frolics’. I’m almost sure they believed me.

I think I spend too much of the time thinking of the children as pieces on a board that need to be moved from A to B or of things to be ticked off on the endless list – feed them/make sure they eat some vegetables/take them to Cubs/Guides/jiu-jitsu/piano lessons/keep them safe from internet predators/make sure they do their homework/try to get them to read a book/teach them their times tables/make them change their pants (that’s mostly Peter)/try to make sure they grow up into well-rounded and decent individuals and not the sort of people who believe everything they read in the Daily Mail/stop them getting scurvy – that there is no time left over to just be with the children, and listen to what they are talking about, and actually talk back to them instead of chanting eat your broccoli/get in the car/what’s 9 × 8?/what’s the capital of Norway?/who did that?/no, find it yourself/why does no one else ever flush the fucking toilet?/put your shoes on/brush your teeth.

And while I’m doing all that, I’m also trying to read emails and think about what to make for dinner and keep up with Facebook and deal with Simon’s moods, and I’m just never really actually there in the moment.

We have spent lots of time this week just telling each other jokes, terrible cracker-style jokes involving groan-worthy puns, and just chatting about, well, nothing very much really. I am full of good resolutions that when we get home I will carry on like this – I will slow down, I will stop hustling the children from place to place and barking instructions at them, and instead will try to be more in the present with them. I know this almost certainly won’t happen, but fuck it, it’s nice to dream, even if dreams seem more like reality when one is sitting on a Spanish balcony clutching a glass of local wine and staring at the stars.

Thursday, 20 April

Juliette has not returned. She reunited with her French boyfriend Pascal when she was at home in Limoges, and has decided she cannot be parted from him ever again (Harry is apparently forgotten). I was tempted to text her and tell her not to be so stupid as to plan her life round a bastarding man. Things are, to say the least, rather frosty between Simon and me. In Juliette’s absence, and until the agency can find us another au pair who suits, he is sleeping in the spare room, which suits me fine, as it means Judgy can sleep on the bed with me. According to him, how can he trust me when I take the children out of the country without telling him? I have pointed out that taking them to Lanzarote for a week was hardly on a par with taking them to the Middle East forever. Also, apparently, going on holiday without telling him was irresponsible. Which possibly it was, but it was also irresponsible of him not to have booked his annual leave when I asked him to, leaving me high and dry. I am not sure what will happen when another au pair arrives. Maybe he will move into the shed, which would suit me even better. In the meantime, we are back to scrambling desperately to pick up the children from after-school clubs, etc., while communicating through terse texts and passive–aggressive snarlings.

I think extra salt was possibly rubbed in Simon’s wounds by both Peter and Jane excitedly babbling that it was the best holiday they had ever been on, much better than the usual boring holidays, and talking about it non-stop ever since we got back.

I have taken to mainly ignoring Simon, who keeps asking if I have told my work colleagues about the children yet, and keep pointing out to him that it is none of his fucking business actually. The only thing anyone at work in fact said was to admire my tan (which is rather good, as it happens. I know we aren’t supposed to tan anymore, and I am deeply irresponsible for doing so, but I can’t help it! I feel so much better when I am brown. It’s like the difference between a big lump of pallid, unbaked dough and a lovely golden, just-baked loaf. Of course, it is always problematic trying to explain to the children on holiday why I am slapping Factor 50 on them, and basting myself in sun oil like a rotisserie chicken, but luckily they are accustomed to my ‘Do as I say, not as I do strictures’).

Lydia did remark wistfully while we making coffee that she did envy my holiday, I had come back looking so brown and relaxed, whereas she had spent the best part of £2,000 on a week at Center Parcs with her family and felt anything but relaxed. I wished I could tell her that the reason I had had such an enjoyable holiday wasn’t actually because I was the carefree childless career woman she thought I was, but rather because I had just gone without my bloody husband, so I was already one child down and didn’t have to listen to him moaning and obsessively reading TripAdvisor while shouting at everybody not to drink the water. Actually, I was slightly disappointed that despite using the tap water to brush my teeth on several occasions when I forgot to use the bottled water, I had not come down with a fast-track weight-loss bout of the squits – though obviously, having the squits on holiday with two children would be less than ideal, though there was an unfortunate incident one night when I thought I was successfully working a rather chic little monochrome look, in a white shirt and black trousers, but when I left the children at the table to quickly pop up to the room because I had forgotten my phone, a rather angry German lady obviously mistook me for a waitress and starting shouting at me about something in German. All I could work out was that it was something to do with food, from the dramatic sign language she was forced to employ, because I did Latin at school, not Spanish, and so I was forced to fall back on my only German phrase of ‘Ich habe durchfall!’ On being informed I had diarrhoea, she did at least lose interest in whatever she had wanted me to tell her, and shooed me away with an expression of disgust.

Obviously I couldn’t tell Lydia about any of this, though. I wonder if maybe I could just suddenly announce I have adopted some children. People adopt children of all sorts of ages, don’t they? Angelina Jolie seems to, anyway. Maybe that would be the solution to my lies. Or I could invent a tragically deceased family member and claim they were orphans that I had taken in, like Oliver Twist. I fear both of these scenarios would involve a lot of questions, though. It must have been much easier for people to undo lying about not having children back in Victorian times, when you could just acquire orphans willy-nilly and no one thought anything of it. Look at Anne of Green Gables! Marilla and Matthew just go off and get an orphan and no one says a word apart from Mrs Rachel Lynde, and only then because she likes to look on the dark side and thinks the orphan might murder them! Fuck it, I’m sure I will think of something. I could use all the time I currently spend Not Talking to Simon to come up with a solution.