Why Mummy Doesn’t Give a ****!

It seems like people have been telling me ‘It’s just a phase’ for the last fifteen bloody years. Not sleeping through the night is ‘just a phase’. Potty training and the associated accidents are ‘just a phase’. The tantrums of the terrible twos – ‘just a phase’. The picky eating, the back chat, the obsessions. The toddler refusals to nap, the teenage inability to leave their beds before 1 pm without a rocket being put up their arse, the endless singing of Frozen songs, the dabbing, the weeks where apparently making them wear pants was akin to child torture. All ‘just phases’. When do the ‘phases’ end, though? WHEN? I’m surprised, when every man and his dog was sticking their nose in and giving me unsolicited advice about what to do about my marriage (‘Leave the bastard,’ ‘Make it work for the children,’ ‘You have to try and forgive him,’ ‘Screw him for every penny he has,’ ‘You have to understand that it’s different for men,’ ‘Cut his bollocks off’), that no one told me that shagging random women in Madrid was obviously ‘just a phase’, and I just had to wait for Simon to grow out of it.

‘MOTHER,’ shouted Jane, bringing me back to earth with a bump. ‘You still haven’t found me a towel.’

‘Jane,’ I said as calmly as possible. ‘If you want a bath that badly, you’ll have to find your own towel. I’ve other things to do.’

Peter mumbled something unintelligible through a mouthful of Doritos, spraying orange crumbs all over Jane.

‘OH MY GOD! HE’S DISGUSTING! MOTHER, DO SOMETHING ABOUT HIM!’ screamed Jane. ‘Can’t he, like, live in the shed or something?’

Peter swallowed, and in the brief window before eating something else shouted, ‘YOU live in the shed! Live with the CHICKENS! Ha ha ha!’

Jane screamed more and Peter continued to snigger through his mouthful of salty preservatives and flavourings, and I left the room in despair. I decided to unpack my books. That would be a nice, calming activity. And also, once the books were on the bookcase, they’d hide the large and extremely dubious stain on the floral wallpaper that had looked so charmingly faded and vintage a few months ago, and now just looked like something from the ‘before’ shots on Changing Rooms. Maybe, I mused, as I stacked the books, I could strip off all the paper and do something cunning with bits of baton to give the impression of wood panelling, à la Handy Andy …? Then I found Riders and decided to cheer myself up with a few pages, for surely there’s no situation so dire, especially not when it comes to cheating men and revolting teenagers, that has not been faced up to by one of Jilly Cooper’s characters with a large vodka and tonic and an excellent pun. Jake was just shagging Tory in the stable for the first time, and I was wondering if I too looked a lot less fat without my clothes on – I suspected not, though the horrible realisation was dawning on me that if I were ever going to have sex again, I would HAVE to take my clothes off in front of a strange man, although to be honest, the thought of just never having sex again was preferable to doing that – when a drenched and furious Jane shot into the room, making noises like a scalded cat. The problem, it quickly turned out was quite the opposite – she was very far indeed from being scalded, because having run herself a nice deep bath, she’d plunged in to find that it was freezing cold, because there was no hot water.

‘Oh, I expect they’ve maybe just turned it off, in case the pipes freeze or something,’ I said vaguely.

‘It’s APRIL, Mother,’ said Jane. ‘The pipes won’t freeze in April! And anyway, they only moved out yesterday, you said. Why would they turn off the hot water for the twenty-four hours before we moved in?’

I’d no idea, but I wasn’t giving Jane the satisfaction of saying so. I poked vaguely at the boiler, hindered rather than helped by Peter, who insisted that if I’d just let him look at it, he could probably fix it. I wasn’t sure if he was trying to be helpful or just taking after his father, who always claimed he could fix things and refused to call a professional in until after he’d broken it even more.

‘What’s for dinner?’ demanded Jane, as I hopefully pressed all the switches and turned the boiler on and off several times.

‘Oh God, I don’t know, I’m trying to fix the boiler,’ I snapped.

‘I only asked. Don’t we even get fed now?’

‘Jane, you’re fifteen, you can make yourself something to eat. I’m trying to fix the fucking boiler right now.’

‘Can I go to Dad’s? I hate it here, I want you to drive me to Dad’s.’

‘I’m not driving you to your father’s because I’m trying to fix the boiler and if you want to go there so badly, call him to come and get you.’

‘He didn’t pick up. So you need to take me.’

‘I don’t need to do anything, except fix the boiler.’

‘You NEVER do ANYTHING for me. I bet if Peter wanted to go to Dad’s you’d take him.’

‘I’m not taking anyone anywhere. This is our first night in our new home and it would be nice if we spent it together. Now please give me peace while I try to fix the fucking boiler. PLEASE!’

‘Mum, when will the Wi-Fi be connected? Can you call them and find out?’ said Peter.

‘I’M TRYING TO FIX THE BOILER!’

‘When can you call them, then?’

I kicked the scullery door closed and leant my head against the piece of shit broken boiler. I was only one person, trying to do the job of two. At least if Simon had been here, he could have been the one swearing at the boiler while I dealt with the children’s incessant demands for food, lifts and internet access. But Simon wasn’t here, I reminded myself, as those tears threatened again, and I wasn’t going to be beaten by a bloody boiler. I could do this. I gave the boiler a tentative whack with a wrench. It had not responded to me hitting it with a pair of pliers, but I was working on the basis that boilers came under plumbing and wrenches were plumbing tools and therefore it might work better. I was quite proud of my logic, but the boiler remained stubbornly lifeless. Finally, I had one last idea before I spent the GDP of Luxembourg on an emergency plumber. I stumbled out to the oil tank (too country for gas) and, by the light of my phone torch, found a valve on the tank that looked suspiciously like it was pointing to ‘closed’.

‘Nothing ventured, nothing gained,’ I muttered, as I barked my shin on a stupidly placed piece of wall, and turned it to open. Either the boiler would burst into life, or I’d burn the house down. I went back inside, stubbing my toe on an abandoned plant pot and surveyed the boiler once more. It still sat there lifeless. I went through the process of pressing all the buttons again, and miraculously, on pressing the reset button, it finally roared into life. I’D DONE IT! I’D FIXED THE FUCKING BOILER!

‘MUUUUM!’ yelled Peter.

‘MOTHER!’ howled Jane.

I flung open the scullery door in triumph.

‘I’VE FIXED THE BOILER!’ I announced, expecting at least a fanfare of trumpets and a twelve-gun salute. ‘I was right, Jane. They had turned it off. Outside!’

Jane snorted. ‘I bet Dad would have known that hours ago.’

‘I didn’t need a man, I fixed it myself.’

‘Whatever. Can I go to Millie’s?’

‘NO! We’re going to have a lovely night together. I’ll light the fire and we’ll have a picnic dinner in front of it.’

‘Isn’t this fun?’ I said brightly later on, sitting with Judgy Dog before the rather smoky fire.

Jane snorted from beside the window, where she’d discovered an intermittent 4G signal.

‘It’s quite fun, Mum,’ said Peter carefully. ‘But it would be more fun with Wi-Fi, if you could phone them in the morning and see when we’ll get the broadband connected?’

The fire went out.

Judgy made a snorting noise rather akin to Jane’s, and something scratched suspiciously behind the skirting boards.

‘It’s fun,’ I said firmly. After all, as the saying goes, sometimes you just have to fake it till you make it.

Saturday, 14 April

My first weekend here without the children. In fairness, Simon had offered to take them last weekend so they were out of the way while I moved, but foolishly I’d laboured under the impression that they were old enough and big enough to make themselves useful – I’m nothing if not an eternal optimist …

Last week passed in a blur of desperate attempts to find work clothes from the general jumble of boxes, days at work mainly spent lining everything up on my desk in beautiful straight lines and appreciating the general tidiness and order of the office, before returning home to demand what the children had been doing all day (lounging around, eating and making a mess – such are the joys of teenagers in the school holidays), stomping round shouting about the mess the children had made, hurling the trail of plates and glasses left around the house in the dishwasher, and bellowing about who had drunk all the milk again, before spending the evenings in a whirl of unpacking boxes, wishing I could go to bed because I was knackered, feeling somewhat overwhelmed by the sheer number of boxes needing to be unpacked and wondering why the fuck I’ve so much stuff.

When Simon and I first moved in together, every single thing we owned in the entire world BETWEEN US fitted in his rusting Ford Fiesta, with room left over. Over twenty years later, and it took two vast removal lorries to distribute our possessions, not to mention the skip full of crap, the innumerable bags to the charity shops and several runs to the local dump. I’d packed everything up in a tremendous hurry, flinging things into boxes and promising myself I’d sort it all out at the other end (this rushed packing also led to some raised eyebrows from the removal men as they looked askance at my boxes labelled with things like ‘kitchen crap’, ‘general crap’ and – this was one of the last boxes I packed – ‘more fucking shit’), but this was proving harder than I thought, as I pulled out Jane’s first baby-gro – so tiny, and rather faded and yellowing now, but even so, I couldn’t possibly get rid of it.

I had rather a lump in my throat, when I found a box of photos of me in hospital holding a newborn Jane in the same baby-gro, Simon beaming proudly beside me. These must have been some of the last actual photos we ever took, before we got a digital camera. Beneath the box of photos were red books filled with their vaccination records. Did I need them? What if at some point they needed to prove they had been vaccinated? Would that ever happen? I set them to one side in the ‘maybe keep’ pile, and then I found Peter’s first shoes. So tiny! I remembered the day we bought them. There should be a photo of that too – I dug through the box, and there it was, a Polaroid taken by Clarks of a small, furious and scowling Peter, clutching his blanky, who had been unimpressed with this momentous day. Did he still have his blanky, I wondered? We’d gone to the park after he got his shoes and he’d been so pleased with himself as he tottered across the playground on his own for the first time, me hovering anxiously by his side, ready to catch him if he fell. The shoes were definitely for the ‘keep’ pile. And what was this? A box full of tiny human teeth? Well, of course I was keeping that, even if at some point the children’s teeth had got jumbled up and I no longer knew whose were whose.

Jane wandered in at that point. She looked at my little box of teeth that I was gazing at fondly and said, ‘You do know, Mother, that one day you’re going to be dead and we’re going to have to clear your house out and it’s going to be like totally gross if we have to come across things like boxes of human teeth.’

‘But they’re your teeth,’ I protested. ‘It’s not like I’m a serial killer and I’ve kept the teeth of my victims as a souvenir. They are keepsakes from your childhood.’

Jane gave another one of her snorts. ‘It’s still gross,’ she insisted. ‘In fact, it would be less weird if you had killed people for their teeth. Why do you have them?’

Once upon a time, that special moment had been quite magical, when Simon and I first tiptoed into Jane’s room, as she lay there, all flushed and rosy-cheeked in her White Company pyjamas, sleeping innocently, dreaming of the Tooth Fairy and the spoils she’d wake up to. We slid a little pearly tooth out from under her pillow and popped a (shiny shiny) pound coin in its place. We stood hand in hand and gazed down at her, still slightly in awe of this perfect little person we’d made together. We put that tiny little tooth into the special box I’d bought for it, and marvelled at how grown up our baby girl was getting. I wondered if Simon and I would ever do anything together again like that for the children?

Of course, the standards slipped in later years – any old pound coin would do – and quite often I’d forget, and when an angry child burst into my bedroom complaining the Tooth Fairy hadn’t been I’d have to hastily rustle up a pound coin and pretend to ‘look’ under their pillow before triumphantly ‘finding’ it, and accusing them of just not looking properly. Luckily they fell for this every time, and I still constantly complain about them never looking for anything properly. Now though, looking into the box filled with yellowing little teeth, several of them still bearing traces of dried blood where, the sooner to get his hands on the booty, Peter had forcibly yanked them out, it did seem a rather macabre thing to keep. But on the other hand, a) I wasn’t actually going to admit that to Jane, and b) I’d really gone to rather a lot of effort to collect those teeth and so I wasn’t quite ready to part with them just yet. Anyway, they might come in useful for something.

‘Useful for what?’ said Jane in horror. ‘Seriously, Mother, what exactly do you think a box full of human teeth might be useful for? Are you going to become a witch or something? Eye of newt and tooth of child? Is that why you’re getting chickens – you claimed it was because they were chatty, but actually you’re planning on sacrificing them and reading the portents in their entrails while daubed in their blood? I’m not having any part of that. I’m going to go and live with Dad if you do that. That’s just going too far, Mother.’

‘What?’ I said in confusion. ‘How did you get from your baby teeth to me becoming some sort of chicken-murdering devil worshipper? I’m not going to sacrifice the chatty chickens. The chickens aren’t even here yet and you’re accusing me of secretly wanting to kill them!’

Simon chose that moment to arrive and collect his darling children.

‘Dad, if Mum becomes a Satanist and kills the chickens, I’m coming to live with you, OK,’ Jane informed him by way of a greeting.

‘Errr, hello darling,’ said Simon. ‘Why is your mother becoming a Satanist?’

‘I’m NOT,’ I said crossly.

‘She collects human body parts,’ said Jane darkly.

‘I BLOODY WELL DON’T!’ I shouted.

This wasn’t the scene I’d envisioned for Simon seeing me in my new home for the first time. I’d lost track of time, and instead of being elegantly yet casually clad in a cashmere sweater and sexy boots, perhaps with some sort of flirty little mini skirt to remind him that actually my legs really weren’t bad still, while reclining on a sofa in my Gracious Drawing Room, I was in my scabbiest jeans, covered in mud from walking Judgy earlier, with no make-up, dirty hair and clutching a box of teeth, with the house looking like a bomb had gone off and boxes everywhere. Simon meanwhile appeared to have finally cast aside his scabby fleeces in favour of tasteful knitwear and seemed to be attempting to cultivate some sort of designer stubble. Or maybe he just hadn’t bothered to shave. Either way, it suited him. Bastard. I glared at him.

‘Right …,’ he said, wisely deciding the best thing to do would be to ignore this whole conversation and pretend it had never happened. ‘Jane, are you ready? And where’s your brother?’

Jane looked surprised. ‘Ready? What, now? Like, NO, I need to pack. How should I know where Peter is? I’m not his mother!’

I sighed. ‘I suppose you’d better come in then, Simon. Would you like a cup of tea?’

‘Could I get some coffee?’

‘Fine.’

At least the kitchen was unpacked and relatively tidy. I reached for the jar of Nescafé, as Simon said, ‘Don’t you have any proper coffee? You know I don’t like instant coffee.’

I gritted my teeth. ‘No, Simon. I don’t have any proper coffee, because I don’t have a coffee maker, because I don’t drink coffee, and so I only have a jar of instant as a courtesy for guests, and I only offered you a cup of tea in the first place because I’m trying VERY HARD to keep things between us on an amicable footing, at least on the surface, so we don’t mentally scar and traumatise our children and condemn them to a lifetime of therapy because we weren’t adult enough to be civil to each other, but I must say, you’re doing an extraordinarily good job of making it difficult for me to FUCKING WELL DO THIS!’

‘You don’t drink coffee?’ said Simon. ‘Since when don’t you drink coffee?’

‘I haven’t drunk coffee in the house since I was pregnant with Jane,’ I said. ‘I occasionally, VERY occasionally have a latte when I’m out, but other than that, I barely touch the stuff, because it made me puke like something out The Exorcist when I was pregnant. How have you never noticed me not drinking coffee over the last FIFTEEN YEARS?’

‘But what about the coffee maker I gave you for your birthday a few years ago?’

‘Would that be the coffee maker when I said, “Well, this is a lovely present for you, because I DON’T DRINK COFFEE?”’

‘I thought you were joking. Is that why you let me keep it?’

‘Yes, Simon. Because there’s no point in me having a shiny fuck-off coffee machine cluttering up my kitchen when I DON’T DRINK COFFEE! Are you starting to perhaps grasp why we’re getting divorced?’

‘Because of coffee?’

‘No, the coffee is a METAPHOR!’

‘Are you sure you mean metaphor?’

‘No, no I’m not. Anyway, the fucking COFFEE is symbolic of the vast chasm and divide between us.’

‘Oh,’ said Simon. ‘Should I just have a cup of tea then?’

‘Oh FFS! I don’t CARE what you have. I’m going to see if your children are ready.’

Upstairs, I knocked tentatively on Peter’s door, then left a few seconds and knocked again. I’m too afraid to enter unbidden in case I witness something that means I can no longer look at my baby boy in QUITE the same way again. While I was standing there, I mentally added more Mansize tissues to the shopping list. Eventually I shouted, ‘Peter? Peter, Dad is here! Are you ready?’

Peter finally opened his door and looked at me blankly. ‘Dad?’

‘Yes, Dad is here.’

‘Dad? Here? Why?’

‘To pick you up. You’re going to his house this weekend.’

‘THIS weekend?’

‘Yes.’

‘What, like TODAY?’

‘YES.’

‘But I can’t go yet.’

‘Why not?’

‘Because I’m at a really good part in my game and I haven’t got a proper computer at Dad’s.’

‘I don’t care, you’re going to his house. Now.’

‘Can I take my computer?’

‘NO! Just pack some pants or something.’

‘Pants? Why?’

‘SO YOU CAN CHANGE THEM. OMG. JUST PACK SOME CLOTHES.’

‘OK.’

I banged on Jane’s door.

‘Are you ready?’ I demanded.

‘I’m doing my make-up,’ Jane shouted. ‘My eyebrows aren’t done.’

Eventually, after an HOUR of toing and froing and shouting and bellowing (during which Simon sat placidly at MY kitchen table, eating MY chocolate HobNobs and playing no part whatsoever in getting HIS children ready to spend the weekend with HIM), I finally waved them all off.

Two days. Two whole days. All to myself. What to do? I could go for a run (ha ha, NO!). Read an Improving Book? Or, first things first, I could finally finish the unpacking and get the house straight.

It was very quiet. I unpacked another box, and found the DVD of Jane’s nursery graduation. So then I had to find a laptop with a DVD drive so I could watch it. And then I cried all over again like I had on the day she left nursery and I thought my baby was all grown up now she was ready to start school. She was so little. In those dark days when they were babies and toddlers, I never thought they’d grow up. I thought they’d be little forever, and God knows, some of those long, long days certainly felt like forever. But all of a sudden, they went and grew up when I wasn’t looking.

I checked my watch. 2.41 pm. Gosh. Was that all? Doesn’t time … drag when you’re not running round like a blue-arsed fly. I’ve spent years longing for this moment – to not be constantly chasing my tail, to have some time to myself, to have some SPACE to myself, to have a room of one’s own, or at least an hour with the house to myself with nobody fighting or complaining they were hungry or demanding I magically increase the broadband speed or provide my credit card to buy something on the internet that they’d definitely pay me back for but hardly ever do. And now I had it – I wasn’t quite sure what to do with myself.

A nap, I decided. A lovely nap. When was the last time I had time for a nap? Probably … pre-children. I know, I know, we’re all told that you’re supposed to nap when the baby naps, but then when are you supposed to have a shower, make the dinner, put the laundry on, pay the bills, stare hopelessly into a mirror wondering who this hollow-eyed stranger is staring back at you that bears a vague resemblance to your mother? Exactly. When the baby naps. So, FINALLY, after fifteen years of feeling permanently sleep-deprived, I could start catching up. A nap!

I arranged Judgy Dog and myself on the sofa with a snuggly blanky (Jesus, will I ever be able to say ‘blanket’ again, or are certain words condemned to be forever ingrained in my mind in baby talk – the same way I seem unable to shake off the urge to shout ‘LOOK! COW! HORSEY! WHAT DO COWS SAY? DO COWS SAY “MOOOOOO”? WHAT DO HORSEYS SAY? HORSEYS SAY “NEEEEEIIIIGHHHH!”’ every time I pass a field with animals in?) and we cosied down for a lovely nap.

The more I tried to sleep, the more wide awake I became. I stared at the ceiling, wondering what would happen if I died right now. Who would find me? Would Judgy have started eating me by the time the children came home on Sunday night? Would they then be so appalled and disgusted by his cannibalistic ways that they got rid of him and then he died alone in a shelter, even though it’s not actually cannibalism for a dog to eat a human? The thought of Judgy’s lonely death, all by himself in a cold concrete pen, was almost too much for me to bear.

I gave up hope of sleep and scrolled through Instagram instead. Maybe the children were having a horrible time at Simon’s and their feed would reflect this and I could feel smug. Except Jane had blocked me and Peter had not posted anything in months apart from photos of gaming scores. WHY HAD MY OWN DAUGHTER BLOCKED ME ON INSTAGRAM? I looked at Perfect Lucy Atkinson’s Perfect Mummy’s page instead. She was on a girly spa weekend. Why was I not on a girly spa weekend, drinking champagne in a hot tub? Even though champagne makes me belch and I haven’t been in a hot tub since I read an article that said they’re basically just heaving cauldrons of bacteria soup. But even so!

What about Fiona Montague? Oh, look, she was training for a triathlon and posting lots of photos of her looking great in skin-tight Lycra with ‘inspirational’ captions. Fuck off, Fiona, you husband-stealing slut. But despite her wanton ways, even Fiona was out and about having fun, and oooh, she’d just posted a new photo – her toes in the bath with a glass of wine because apparently she was about to head out on a ‘date night’. Bitch.

Who else to stalk? What about Debbie from HR? Debbie had been out for ‘brunch with good friends’ and finished her caption with #lovelaughlive. I might have to have Debbie killed. Christina, my erstwhile relationship counsellor, only posted wanky quotes about being true to yourself. That made me feel a little bit better, and I had a bijou judge of Christina.

I searched for Simon’s name again, although he’d always been staunchly anti-Instagram, and lo and behold, there he was! @SimonRussell30 (imaginative, Simon – I assume the ‘30’ refers to a random number, and you weren’t hoping people would think you were actually thirty). Why did he have an account now, after being so scathing about it for all these years? Not many photos yet, obviously, but there was one last night of two beers clinking, just titled ‘#Friyay!’ FFS. Firstly, who even still says ‘Friyay’? Even I know that is totally lame. Secondly, why does he get to go out for beers on Friday night when I spent my Friday night cooking dinner for his children, doing all his children’s laundry so they had clean clothes to take to his house for the weekend and then just as I was about to finally have a glass of wine, having to go and pick Jane up from the cinema because apparently the ‘bus hadn’t come’ – the same bus I assume that passed me heading out of town as I was heading in, as Jane seems to think if she misses the bus that is clearly the bus’s fault and it must have just not come and so I need to solve the problem. All while Simon was quaffing his ‘Friyay’ beer. And thirdly, who did the other beer belong to? Who? It could have been a work colleague, of course, but it was a wanky little bottle of foreign lager, not a Manly Pint, so equally could have been a girl’s. I realised I’d gnawed off what remained of my nails while scrolling through Simon’s photos. #SweetNewPad was another, with an arty shot of what must be his new sitting room (I couldn’t see the sideboard. Where was it? After all the fuss he made about me painting it, had he just got rid of it? RUDE). It looked very nice, and considerably more elegant than my own scruffy sitting room. But ‘#Sweet New Pad’? What was wrong with him? And he did realise you don’t have to hashtag every caption, didn’t he? Twat.

I went to my own page to see what Simon might think if he looked at it. It was less than inspiring. The last photo I’d posted was a pile of boxes, simply captioned ‘Moving Day!’ I must try harder. I wanted Simon to seethe with jealousy at my sheer fabulousness every time he looked at it. Assuming he looked at it. Why wouldn’t he look at it? Apart from because he was too busy having mindblowing #Friyay sex with a wanky, beer-drinking twenty-three-year-old with gravity-defying tits and no stretch marks in his #SweetNewPad, of course. Oh God! That was obviously what he was doing, while I lay slumped on a sagging sofa, trying not to cry because me and my cannibalistic dog were both going to die alone and unloved.

In the end, in case Simon did find a minute out of his filthy shag timetable to look at my page and gloat he’d escaped the nagging witch of an ex-wife and remind himself of how much he was #lovinglife with his lithe sex bomb (who could probably contort herself into improbable positions without shrieking, ‘Wait, stop, I’ve done something to my hip’), I went and had a bath and posted a Fiona Montague-style shot with a glass of wine and about a million filters so it looked quite sexy, and put ‘The weekend starts here!’ It wasn’t much, but it was the best I could manage.

Duly bathed (it turns out a bath isn’t quite so decadent when there isn’t much else you’re supposed to be doing), I was bored out of my mind and quite alarmed at the prospect of the many empty hours stretching ahead of me. I’d been so sure I had Inner Resources at my disposal and would be happy with my own company, but it seems it has been so long since I’ve had the chance to experience my own company that my Inner Resources appear to have buggered off, along with the perkiness of my tits and my natural hair colour.

‘Bollocks!’ I thought, as I failed to log in to Netflix, Jane having ignored my pleading texts for the password – Peter claims not to know it as he only watches YouTube. I wished I’d had the wit to have arranged to go out or meet friends or do SOMETHING tonight, but I’d been so sure of those Inner Resources I’d not bothered. I vaguely wondered about being an Independent Modern Woman and going to the cinema by myself, but I wasn’t sure I could eat a whole tub of popcorn on my own, and obviously the popcorn is the only reason to go to the pictures. And also, I’d have to put my bra back on. I gave up and returned to reading Riders. Since I was clearly never going to have sex again, I might as well read about other people doing it.

But then – oh hallelujah – the doorbell rang. Who could it be? I positively skipped to the door, filled with excitement. I was pretty sure it was probably some passing hunky farmer, who had popped by to tell me off for some Terrible Countryside Transgression I’d unwittingly made, and although initially he’d be very cross with me and I’d think him arrogant and overbearing, I’d still notice his Cambridge blue eyes and rugged physique as he sprang onto his tractor, and he in turn would in fact have fallen hopelessly in love with me at first sight, and would only fall deeper over the coming weeks as he berated me further for my charmingly hopeless country faux pas, until he could contain himself no longer and declared his undying love for me, just as I was feeling gloomy over a misunderstanding that had led me to think he was marrying the icily beautiful Lady of the Manor, but it was OK, it was me all along. It didn’t even really matter that I was in my jammies with toast crumbs in my cleavage, because everyone knows in these scenarios that the more grubby, dishevelled and deranged you look, the MORE likely the hero is to fall in love with you …

It was a pair of Jehovah’s Witnesses. Judgy, who could at least have earned his keep by seeing them off, refused to move from the sofa.

I shuffled back, gloomy once more, to consider whether I could be arsed starting a seven-season American sitcom. The doorbell rang again. The Jehovah’s Witnesses were at least persistent in their desire to save my soul from eternal damnation, I reflected, but I still wasn’t really interested in hearing more about it. I flung open the door, ready to explain that it was all very well, but actually I was an atheist, and would THEY like to hear about MY beliefs about how there’s no God, THERE’S ONLY SCIENCE?