It's about time I wrote another blog post, isn't it

Here, look at this.

This is a Creative D100 "boombox", as I am led to believe young people call them. I don't expect for a second that young people use the word boombox: I expect it is used by people of my age who want to sell D100s to other people of my age who want to feel like they still know what's going on.

The D100 boombox is a Bluetooth device that talks magically and wirelesly to another Bluetooth device, like my laptop, and plays the laptop's music through its speakers. It is claimed that it works right out of the box. I do not believe this either, as the silence in this room is testament to the sad fact that it doesn't. Perhaps it would, if my laptop were not so old and set in its ways; but my laptop will not allow any other audio output than its tinny little speakers. It acknowledges that the D100 is in the house, but it will not speak to it. My laptop also mutters about the increasing number of foreign people in the neighbourhood, and gets tetchy when the keys to the back door are not returned to their specific hook.

When I was thirty-one, I took a job in the City, in the proofreading department of a law firm. It was a splendid department, and I was very, very happy there. Most of my colleagues were about fifty-five, closer to my parents' ages than to mine, and it was in that office that I realised my generation had become the capable one. Nothing defined this more sharply than information technology, with which my oldest colleagues struggled, becoming stressed when trying to open an email in Microsoft Word. This, of course, is the computing equivalent of trying to fry an egg in the fridge. The older generation were no longer people we looked to for help and guidance: they began to need our help, and we helped them, although not without giggling into our sleeves at their stupid questions.

Now, I have become what I used to mock: a parent defeated by modern technology. I will be forty in October. It is not twenty, but it is not old, and I am feeling all right about it; or I was, until this boombox turned up and my laptop refused to speak to it. No: I am still feeling all right about turning forty. After all, Ian is forty-one, and he says he will be able to fix the problem when he gets home tonight, by arguing with my laptop's subconscious. So I am not really frustrated by boomboxes or advancing age, just by incapability.

I bought the boombox so that I could listen to Shit FM during the day. I listen to Shit FM over the internet through the tinny speakers of my laptop, in the kitchen, the splendid new kitchen that is not finished, but finished enough to sit in while baking gingerbread and listening to Shit FM. Here it is:

Last time I wrote - I'm sorry it was so long ago - was the first weekend of July, which was also the most frustrating weekend in history. I had measured out our summer in weekends, found that there were nine of them, and, knowing how long it takes this family to get its act together on weekends to do anything, I felt an urgency to get on with the kitchen at once. I had measured out our time in weekends because weekends are when Ian is here, therefore the only time that things can get done.

I wrote a long post about that weekend, but won't paste it here. In summary: we went to B&Q; we went to B&Q AGAIN; we had a brief row; I left the house, bought cigarettes for the first time in six weeks and walked in a furious straight line for five miles out of London until the trees took over from the buildings; I smoked a cigarette on a bench, under a tree, beside a rushing stream and a squirrel going through a box of greasy chips; I caught the Tube home; Ian took a 10cm square out of the wall; we went to bed; Monday came; Ian went to work, and I knocked down a quarter of the wall with a hammer and chisel.

The thing I've found most frustrating about having children is the feeling that I cannot do anything any more. After the initial rush of childbirth, the triumph of squeezing out a human being that leads one to feel temporarily invincible, one finds that one cannot do the things one used to. I found I could not go and pee as often as I wanted to. I could not answer emails immediately. I could not sleep as long as I needed to, or remember words, or hold a thought for more than five seconds. I could not just nip upstairs, or just nip to the shops, without half an hour of preparation, and having done this full-time parenting thing for almost five years now, I have allowed a robust, fat-arsed, can't-do attitude to crush almost every idea I have had.

I have learned a lot about the inside of my head, this summer, and have been very happy to find that the only reason I cannot do things is that I tell myself I can't. It was an indescribable joy to knock the wall down, to prove to myself that I did not have to measure our time in weekends any more. I demolished over three quarters of that wall while Ian was at work that first week of July: he helped me in the evenings, when I ached everywhere, my hair was full of brick dust, and my hands were rigid claws from throwing a 7lb sledgehammer repeatedly over my head. At the end of the week we took the last bits down together, and shared a joyful, dusty, sweaty hug in celebration. For the remainder of July, we worked every free minute of the day that the children would allow. We worked so very, very hard: mixing cement; laying a floor; plumbing; sanding; sawing; swearing; and laughing, more than we have laughed in forever, because it was exhausting, but brilliant, back-breaking, fun.

There were moments at which I briefly questioned the sanity of rebuilding a kitchen with two little children in the house, but I banished these questions quickly and just got on with it. Twice a day, I cleared the rubble and cooked the children's meals. They had no bath for a month: I swabbed the dust from them with wet wipes. I taught Esme to crowbar bricks from a wall; Oscar treated the kitchen as a playground, and ran into it excitedly every day to climb over exposed water-pipes and drive toy trucks through the dust. It was lunacy, but it was exhilarating. Knocking down walls does wonders for the subconscious and the self-esteem. Do it today!

After six weeks, we were exhausted, the children were YouTube addicts, and we hadn't been anywhere out of the house together or seen any of our friends since June, so we spent time out of the house, played with the children, and went to a party. We still had the ceiling to do. We still have the ceiling to do as I write. It has a Tetris-block gash in it from the zigzag of the demolished wall. I rang a plasterer, who promised to come and assess it but never turned up. I rang another, who turned up, and who promised me a quote within two days, two weeks ago: he never rang back. Weeks can go by if you wait for some man to turn up and fix things. Then Ian's car ran up a £650 bill, and we decided we will have to do the ceiling ourselves. We have had a break, now, and proved we can do anything: we can do this.

And that's why I feel good about turning 40 in October. I meant to learn a Chopin piano piece this summer, in time for my birthday, so that I could enter a new decade with new skills. I have not learned the Chopin, and I cannot get this boombox to work, but I have demolished a thick wall of brick and mortar, and repointed another one, and plastered yet another one, and done a splendid carpentry job on a fiddly plate rack, and lifted floorboards and re-wired mains electrical circuits, and my hands are so stiff from all this that I shall probably never play Chopin again, but I probably won't care until I'm about to turn 50 and having another crisis linked to the onset of a new birthday decade, for which there is probably an elegant, eighteen-syllable German word.