I smelled a Man Scent that I really liked a few days ago: in Korres, that wonderful shop full of toiletries from Greece that look and smell incredible.
Ian has never been an aftershave man, for which I am terribly grateful. All men's scents remind me of cheap drunken secondary-school fumbles in 1988. But this, this smells of saffron and amber and cardamom and agarwood. Like incense, but not in a Camden Market way: a tall, dark, interesting way. I put some on my arm while I was waiting at the counter, and ten minutes down the road I couldn't stop smelling my arm. I went back and got some for Ian. Who never wears scent.
It sat on my shelf for three days, then I decided the Time Had Come.
"This is for you," I say, putting the box on his desk. "I got it from that nice Greek place. It's the one I had on my arm."
"Oh!" says Ian, and peers at it. "It's in a box! All unopened."
"Yes. It's for you."
"Gosh," he says.
"I know you don't really do smelly things, but I thought, in case there's ever an occasion when you want to smell nice, you might like it."
Ian turns the box over curiously, then pulls away the cellophane wrapper. (Here's a photo I stole from the Internets that shows the way it's packaged.)
"Look," says Ian, "it's in Thick Cardboard. This is a Thing for a Man."
"Yes. Pour Homme."
Ian reads the ingredients.
"It has cardamom! Extracted from CARS AND BOMBS."
"Yes! It's terribly manly."
"And amber, which is of course extracted from GUNS."
"Hot!"
"It also has saffron, which is squeezed from the AGGRESSION GLANDS of TIGERS!!"
"Only a real man could possibly wear this."
"It's got a child-proof cap, too," Ian grunts.
"Yes, I asked for that especially, in light of That Time With The Calpol."
There is a little more grunting. "How do I get this off?"
"Man not take lid off. Man grunt at bottle, bottle open. Man beat chest, spray come out of bottle. Man is master of bottle. Bottle respect Man."
There is a victorious pop as the lid comes off. Ian sits the bottle on his desk. They face each other squarely in silent contemplation. Neither has ever seen the like of the other before.
Then he fiddles with it a bit more.
"Oh shit. That's the spraying bit. That's not meant to come off, is it."
The Spraying Bit is put back on.
"What - what do I do with this?"
"I find the best way is to hold it at arm's length, spray a tiny cloud of it and then walk quickly through the cloud."
Ian sprays his wrist with it, like an old lady. Then he shoves his nose to his wrist.
"NO don't smell it YET. Give it time to settle."
It settles. Idly, Ian assembles a car with his right hand. Several scantily clad young ladies drape themselves over his feet, handing him spanners. Ian sniffs his arm again.
"Hm! It's quite nice."
Man smell Quite Nice. Man go back to Peering at Bicycle Parts and Welding Equipment on Internet, also Scratching Beard.
So that was that.
Now. I am, of course, Going Away, and while I am away, this is what you should be reading.
If the thought of 123 miles to Norfolk with a whiny toddler turns your hair white, read this amazing, funny, golden-hearted, foul-mouthed and wonderful lady from the Deep Deep South, who drove one thousand miles home to Alabama with just her and her 80-something Alzheimer's mother in the car. On her other journeys, she's had guns pointed at her by Russian border guards and as a child, she was chased by a crazy drunk aunt with a gun. However, she has never shat a baby's arm. Her blog is quite unlike any other I've found on the Internet: she's my latest online hero. The day I started reading her blog, I put everything on hold and sat and read the whole archive in one go. It's not for the faint of heart, and it's fantastic.
Vague Plans are being made in the Cornwell household: these are to Go Away, this weekend, to a green and pleasant corner of The English Countryside. Those vague plans involve driving 123 miles to farthest Norfolk, in a car as old as me that will eventually get up to 60mph if gently coaxed with a shitty stick over a series of days. And then driving 123 miles back.
However, we have forgotten a Crucial Detail.
"Len says he's around this weekend, so yes, it's a good time to visit," Ian reports. Then, reading more of Len's email, the Crucial Detail occurs to him: "Oh! ... It's the long Bank Holiday weekend, isn't it."
There is a pause. Before Esme, it would have been a silence. We look long and hard at one another. Ian's eyebrows are pulled quite far up his forehead. Mine look like %.
"The traffic's going to be terrible," I augur.
"No, it isn't," says Ian cheerfully from Planet Bollocks. "Anyway, it's not one of those Bank Holidays."
"You mean those Bank Holidays that are closest to midsummer, when the whole country says Oh! This is the last Bank Holiday until August. Let's all 60 million of us get in our cars and go somewhere else? No, it's not one of those Bank Holidays at all."
"We'll set off early," Ian lies. Even Esme hasn't woken up before 09.30 since That Time With The Calpol gave us all jet lag.
Another pause. I feel the Zen peace of resignation settle over my shoulders.
The Divine Comedy wrote a song called 'National Express' that perfectly captures how I feel about situations like these. It is one of my very favourite songs, and I should have included it on that post about the music I can't live without.
(The word "arse" is muted in verse 2, by the way, because it makes Auntie BBC drop her knitting and faint.)
Any poor fule who has been on a National Express coach journey from A to B in England knows never to do so again. Eleven slow-moving hours of your head going d-d-d-d-d-d-d against the shaking window of a hermetically sealed lager fart on wheels, your feet baked by the raging malfunctioning floor-level heating and your knees gripped with early arthritis, your arm shrinking away from the beer-scented plumber trying to fall asleep on it and your glazed, sad eyes staring at motionless Luton traffic, are surely the most convincing argument that there's no place like home, so stay there.
And the Divine Comedy know this, and wrote the most joyful, celebratory fanfare about it, and every time it comes on the radio I turn the volume ALL the way up. I love this song as joyful as a coach is shit. I love the Blitz Spirit of taking a grinding rectal ache of a sodding long journey and choosing to celebrate it.
You love it too, don't you, honey.
Which is why, traffic or no traffic, I look forward to this weekend with enthusiastic masochism. I love our road trips, even though - and especially because - the car is 38 this year and you have to shout to make conversation inside. The traffic will be fucking awful, Ian will bitch and moan about it with his special brand of eloquence, it WILL rain, Esme will whine and want and need things and make us all sticky, and my arse is going to be numb from 1971 suspension - mine and the car's - before we've even left London and entered Little Chef territory. This is the birthplace of humour. BRING IT ON.
And of course there are things to genuinely love: the B-roads; the pretty scenery; the funny village names; the stops in one-eyed backwaters for rusty tea served by orcs in hairnets. And we might even get to see the sea!
It ought to make for a halfway decent blog post. Let's wait until after the weekend to find out. Maybe this was it.
So. Sorry for being boring, last post. Thank you for being lovely in response. Bragging is a terrible faux pas in this country, but I have the nicest fucking readers on the whole Interwebs! I hope you know I prefer trying to make you laugh than churning out that kind of thing, but sometimes I like you to know what it looks like on the inside of my head, too, because it's just so exciting in there. I'm having a foam party later just inside my left ear, if that's your bag.
Obviously, having wondered aloud about whether to write about parenting and Esme, I am back already with a tale of parenting and Esme. Because that's how these things go.
Oh, and this has turned into a long post, so if that isn't your thing, you can just look at the pictures. I can't help but think in long posts at the moment.
I have some excellent parenting tips for you today.
Tip the First: Do not leave a near-full bottle of Calpol where your child can reach it, you twat. No, not even at 0400, when you've had a monstrous night of failing to get any sleep at all beside your hot, itching, griping, chickenpoxy child whose body language says: HELLOOO I NEED TO BE STUCK TO YOUR FAAACE HELLOOO. When you give her Calpol at 0400, have the presence of mind not to put the bottle down on the bedside table, but put it back in the bathroom cabinet.
2: If you do leave a near-full bottle of Calpol on the nightstand, make sure you wake up before your child wakes up and starts pottering around the room with its tiny, inquisitive hands. That way, your child won't discover the bottle and help itself while you're asleep.
3: If you're going to notice an empty bottle of Calpol on your nightstand, do it the next morning. Otherwise, you may not notice it until bedtime, just after your child has settled peacefully in its cot for the night. Because you're going to be in A&E for HOURS, and you don't want those hours to be overnight.
4: If you do end up having to lift your sleeping child from its cot, wrap it in a blanket and drive it to A&E at 10pm, be sure to tell the reception staff that your child has chicken pox. You get a room to yourself, and a bell to ring, and a cardboard notice to hang around your neck that says UNCLEAN.
5: If you then have to spend FIIIIVE HOOOUURS OH MY GOD I HATE THIS in that room, entertaining a small, impatient child, remember that latex hand gloves make excellent impromptu balloons.
The room we were in for most of last night was of exactly the same cramped size and strip-light, ceiling-vent ambience as a York University college bedroom.
The first time Ian and I sat together in a York University bedroom, we both had hair down to our elbows and acid in our brains. My then boyfriend was there too, a tall, rangy thing of few words who drank too much, sang lead vocals in a band and occasionally passed the time by listening to sine waves.
Ian patched his rotting jeans with Liberty silk hankies in those days, but they were still gone through where his skinny, hairy knees gnawed them away. In those days he weighed nothing at all (if you wanted to have fun on a York University No-FunTM college bed, it helped to be thin). He wore at least two t-shirts, two open shirts over the t-shirts, and a long cardigan over the open shirts, jewellery in his nose and in his ears, and a smattering of jingly bangles on his arms. And, of course, DMs. I loved the way he dressed, because I thought that's how I would dress too in those days if I were a boy. I thought he got it just right. And I was so envious of his hair.
That night, Ian was brooding over the failure of his relationship with Salli, the love of his life and breaker of his heart, and while smoking, flicking his hair out of the way, and flailing his arms around for emphasis* while talking about Where It All Went Wrong, he was also going through his record collection.
*In this house, we pronounce it em-PHAR-sis
He put a record on for about ten seconds, then sighed with heavy dismay, said "Nope, that one's shit too," and dismissively threw it, Frisbee-like, through the open window and into the night. If you peered through the window at the ground far below you could see 12" records lying at odd angles in the bushes, catching the moonlight.
That night, when I could see straight again and it was starting to get light, I walked back home with my tall, rangy, sine-wave boyfriend, past the records in the bushes, past the University lake and all its wildfowl. I had been listening to Ian talk for so many hours that every time a goose honked, it sounded to me just like him.
I thought about that night as we sat in the small, overheated hospital room, middle-aged parents with tired faces and grey hairs shining in the strip lights, comforting our little daughter in her all-in-one pyjamas with the little pink spots. How things change.
Christ, I'm tired today. Staying awake until dawn was a piece of piss, sixteen years ago.
St Thomas' Hospital is warm, very warm, too warm, "to let the MRSA bug spread more effectively," Ian explained. Its children's ward has weird books, too. A story about a stressed-out little girl with a bag full of worries that looked like monsters. A badly illustrated story of Rob Roy. A modern-day cartoon book of the Prodigal Son story. A Ladybird book on counting that I remembered from my own childhood. Esme kept asking for the book about the bag of worries that looked like monsters, although it clearly worried her.
Dear NHS: HOW ABOUT SOME STRAIGHTFORWARD HAPPY BOOKS. Thank you.
(Dear Antonia: HOW ABOUT NOT LEAVING THE CALPOL WHERE ESME CAN REACH IT, YOU TOOL.)
And, of course, the children's ward is one of the most harrowing things you can spend a night listening to. What are they doing to that child in there? Leeches? Open heart surgery? And that's what croup sounds like! HOUGH BARK BARK HROUGH fuck is that contagious? (Google search: Yes.) What are they doing to THAT child? And that one?
At fuck knows what time in the morning, they finally gave Esme a blood test. Sat her on my lap, facing me, with her arm sticking out of the side, and gave Ian some bubbles to blow to distract her. She gave a delighted "Ooo!" at the bubbles, in the cutest little squeaky voice she has, and was so incredibly good about the test. I'd forewarned her that the lady was going to put something on her hand for a bit.
Since the first few weeks of her life, Esme has been extraordinarily stoic. She always tries new things without fuss. She puts up and shuts up when you least expect it: I often forget this about her, especially now she is two and the wrong shoes can lead to une crise de nerfs. She didn't cry at all about her blood test. I did. I am rubbish at blood tests: they make me want to pass out, and after Esme's was done I put her on Ian's lap and stuck my head between my knees, feeling utterly humbled by Esme's bravery, and by my incompetence in leaving a bottle of Calpol on the fucking nightstand. Also, feeling like I might pass out. My ribcage was evaporating.
At 0330, the nurse came in to tell us Esme was okay. Again, I lifted a sleeping Esme, wrapped her in a blanket and carried her to the car. She didn't wake up until lunchtime today, when she must have wondered if it was all a dream, before spotting the bright orange sticking-plaster on the back of her hand. "Oh!"
Parenting tip 6, by the way, is that when you leave St Thomas' Hospital car park, you can avoid paying the parking fine by approaching the car-park exit barrier from a 45° angle to its right, then steering niftily around it. Ian, you're my hero. Again. Even though you wouldn't let me go out for a cigarette after the blood test and I really hated you for about ten minutes, you grown-up pious douchebag.
Tip 7 is that I will only be buying Calpol sachets from now on, taking a safe dose or two out of the box, locking the box away and keeping those two sachets on a high shelf in the bedroom for emergencies, so the worst thing I can leave within Esme's reach at 0400 is a couple of empty paper envelopes.
And yes, 16 years ago, Ian went out and got his records back out of the bushes. I doubt they ever sounded the same again.
Esme has chicken pox! Esme has not had chicken pox for the many, many days since I last posted, no, that's not my excuse. I was away in New York for four of those days, and cleaning the house before that, because Ian drafted his parents in to look after Esme in my absence. They live in a spotless house, and I always feel a bit sorry for them when they come here and are too polite to mention that their feet are sticking to the floor.
Plus, once the to-do list was annhilated in time for Esme's party, I had no idea what to do with myself. I can't relax unless I'm sawing something in half: I'm always getting thrown out of day spas for it. So I wrote a NEW to-do list and started on that. There is always more to do to this house.
I'm sticking a funny film clip in here, because this post is about to get boring, and you probably aren't in the mood for boring today. Instead, watch this, then have an ice cream, and I'll see you next blog post. I'm just going to go off on one for a bit while you do that.
I've reached a sort of Whoopee hiatus lately. No shit Antonia, where have you been the last two weeks? Well, I ground to a halt. I'm more conscious of what I feel I can't write about than I am overflowing with things that I can.
For example, I can't write about family. Everyone in my family reads this blog. Hi, gang!
I have an extraordinarily complicated extended family, made up of more divorces, surnames and wonderful people than you can shake a stick at. I'm not inwardly seething with family gripes that I need to get off my chest: I'm too old and tired to feel that way. But some family stuff cropped up recently when my stepfather, my half-sister's father, reappeared in her life (for the first time since 1984) and it reminded me, with surprising and unwelcome clarity, of the stress and arguments that happened when he left us, stress and arguments I had thoroughly buried away under 25 years of other stuff. There's an awful lot I could write about it, and would love to, but I can't. Not here. I seem to have thought it out of my system, mostly, and had some interesting dreams that explained an awful lot about choices I've made in adult life, but it can't go on this blog. So that's one thing. That was clogging up my head for ages and I couldn't put it here, and it made anything I did write here seem trite and irrelevant, and I didn't like that.
And Esme. I don't know where to draw the line in writing about Esme, so I hesitate to write about her at all now. Am I sharing too much about her? Will she hate me for any of this later? I don't know and I don't want to risk it.
I haven't finished being boring yet, but we're nearly there.
It's not just what I write about Esme, but how I write about her. Last time I wrote a serious-ish parenting post, someone left a comment to tell me they were upset by it, and I thought Bang! Stop! I don't write this blog to upset people and provoke that voice of the Internet that gets cross. The main reason I write this is to put a smile on people's faces and if I upset someone, then I've fucked up. Sorry.
No one's still reading this far but I'll carry on talking among myself anyway. I just want to get back to my old way of thinking about this website, which was simple: something funny occurs to me and puts a smile on my face, and I share it with other people. I think I've had too much serious shit cluttering up my brain to let the funny get through for a while, and I'm hoping that by writing this post it'll get some of the boring out of the way and let the funny out again. Think of this post as an anal suppository, and let's see what sort of shit I come up with next time. POIP.
You'd think, wouldn't you, that someone with a blog would WRITE in it now and then. The service around here is terrible, quite frankly. Let's get our coats now and go to McDonald's.
Hello! HERE I AM. I have been here the whole time! Well, not here, in my chair. I have been over there, and just over there, and just up there, out of sight. Antonia what the fuck are you talking about? Well, I'm throwing Esme a party tomorrow (she is two and a half, and she never got a 2nd birthday party because it was cold and dark and I couldn't be arsed). Party! Tomorrow! This means people, actual people, coming to our house, not just peering into it from the Internet, but coming in, with their feet, and looking at it with their eyes, and smelling it with their noses, and falling over unfinished DIY jobs and power tools left lying around; swearing as six-foot lengths of wood, propped against walls, topple sideways onto their heads. And not just people! Their children, too! Small, soft-headed children, just waiting to trip over the hose coiled lethally at the top of the flight of concrete garden steps or lose their tiny fingers in the circular saw that's lived in the corner all winter.
So we've been tidying up.
That's putting it SO mildly. What's actually happened is that one of us has held down our to-do list while the other one has fucked it roughly up the arse with a series of power tools, morning, noon and night. The to-do list is a shadow of its former self, having nothing better to threaten me with than 20 minutes' light tidying-up, and is calling weakly for a proctologist to mend what remains of its ringpiece. NOTHING, to-do list. NOTHING IS LEFT OF YOUR ARSE. I HAVE A BLOWTORCH.
We are exhausted. The bathroom is finally renovated. The grotty wooden kitchen-sink surround is replaced. The banisters are replaced. The lawn is mowed. The grotty low white walls outside the kitchen door have been repainted. The outside of the kitchen door has been stripped of 170 years of paint (white, green, brown and blue). Two years' leaf fall has been burned in a series of outdoor fires whose woodsmoke made me nostalgic for the youthful idealism that allowed me to enjoy three-day middle-class music festivals, once upon a time. The garden railway is finished! The strip of bare plaster in the ceiling, where we knocked down a dividing wall 18 months ago, is finally papered over. The tool shelves are organised. We have shagged our to-do list into the middle of next YEAR.
Ian took Wednesday and Thursday off this week. Esme goes to nursery all day Wednesday and on Thursday afternoon, so Ian and I got to spend incredibly rare time together without her. Better still, we got to spend time together sorting the house out, wielding blowtorches, sanders, drills and chisels. I love it so much when we work on stuff together. That man has worked so hard this week and I am so in love with him for it. Ian, you're my hero.
All Ian stipulated about his time off work was that at some point, he wanted us to go for Proper Tea. Tea in town, tea without two tiny, sticky hands stealing all the butter, tea the way we used to have tea when we were younger and in love.
So at 3pm on Wednesday, when the house looked like it had thrown up
and we only had two hours' real time to get anything done that afternoon,
we downed tools and dashed up to Piccadilly.
At Green Park tube, there are two UP escalators. Ian ran to the middle one, shouting "Race you", and we stood motionless on parallel escalators all the way to the top.
We went to Richoux, which we have walked past many times over the years while saying "We must go in there."
Richoux is 100 years old and frightfully lovely. It has Art Deco furnishings and Oriental carpets.
We ate soft, freshly baked scones with our dusty, plaster-coated, paint-stained, barnacled hands,
and then we went home and upset our to-do list for another hour.
There really ought to be a hundred and one before and after photos to go with this post, but I am very, very, very, very, very tired and I am not going to upload them now. All you need to know is that for the last week, I have mostly been looking at this,
and now everything looks better.
Tomorrow, the weather will be nice and the party should be great, and under all the grot and dirt, behind all those unfinished jobs, it turns out we have a really nice house. I had no idea! You can all come and visit now. Bring biscuits. And hand cream. Lots of hand cream.
I have a heart of gold and a wrong sense of humour. I live with my moustachioed lover, Ian, and our little daughter Esme, both of whom own real lederhosen. I often go back to old posts and rewrite bits of them. Sorry about that.
"Look," says Ian, "it's in Thick Cardboard. This is a Thing for a Man."
