“How long have you got left? I’m on thirty-seven minutes,” I will say, anxiously checking the stats.
“I’m down to seventeen,” my husband replies. “I’ve turned the ‘Screen Brightness’ down so low, it looks like a window onto eternal night.”
It is like an episode of 24 centered on Jack Bauer sending a single, very important email.
Of course, to complain about this would be to suffer a gigantic loss of perspective. We are, by no stretch of the imagination, the most stressed parents this summer. We aren’t even the most stressed parents on Brighton seafront—earlier, I had passed a child jack-knifing on the floor, wailing, “I don’t WANT Nanna to be dead forever!”
At least, I tell myself, cheerfully, we’re dandy, teleworking media nobs who can bring our work to a giant inflatable paddling pool in Brighton.
“Imagine having to bring your lathe down here,” I keep thinking. “Or your furnace. Or the mountain you had to climb—because you are a professional mountaineer, like Chris Bonham. We are the lucky ones.”
If you’re working parents, the fact is simple: the holiday math doesn’t add up. You, the parents, have four weeks of holiday a year. Your children, on the other hand, have thirteen. Ergo, you are about to lose your mind. It’s not a system anyone would come up with now. It’s a vexing remnant of the patriarchy—a society in complete denial that both a) MUMMY IS ON A DEADLINE TOO, NOW, and b) MOST CHILDREN DISLIKE GOING TO A THREE-WEEK-LONG DRAMA WORKSHOP WITH A LOAD OF RANDOMS AS MUCH AS YOU WOULD. The solution to two-parent-working families is not to get thousands of kids to learn the Bugsy Malone songbook—although, as I write that, I do realize how much my core beliefs have changed since I was twelve, and wanted to be Blousey Brown.
Two weeks later, it is the first day of autumn term. The school gates resemble the first assembly point after a plane crash. Slightly stunned parents stand around, waving goodbye to their children, with the auras of people who’ve recently spent so much money, and begged so many favors from Grandma and Grandpa, that they might now have to go home and lie very, very still for five days, before they can feel normal again.
“You got through, then?” one says.
“Yeah. Don’t quite remember how, though. I appear to have spent over £6,000 on Doctor Who DVD box sets and bags of Mini Cheddars.”
They then get on their mobiles, and start wearily arranging the transportation of their lathes, back from Polperro.
But you know what? Secretly, this is why I love the summer holidays. Unlike my husband, I get off on an emergency. In the summer, you can basically pretend it’s the Second World War—running out into the street in your rollers, clutching a kettle, screaming, “THE GERMANS ARE COMING!”, smoking black market fags.
Now it’s autumn, however, you can’t get away with that kind of stuff anymore. There’s no more putting the kids to sleep in a cardboard box under the patio table. No more gin on the lawn at 2 AM. No more giving everyone Kit Kats and apples for breakfast. You just have to retrieve your shoes—from the lavendar bush, where you threw them, in July—put them back on, and go back to being normal, and sensible, again.
Until Christmas, anyway.
Here is pretty much my entire life story in 830 words. Note a return to the justification of not going abroad. I don’t know who I’m aiming all this “I will not travel” ranting at, really. Maybe the Thomas Cook in my head.
TIME TRAVEL IN THE SAME FOUR PLACES
I’m not a great believer in “traveling.” Every holiday I’ve ever had somewhere “novel” seemed to consist of repeatedly walking past much nicer restaurants than the one we’d just eaten in, while crying, “Oh! That place looks delightful! There’s no feral one-eyed cats under the table there.”
And that’s ignoring the actual travel of “travel”: a thing so awful it warrants its own insurance, sickness, and tiny hairdryers. Every time I think of some distant wonder I might quite like to see—Sydney Harbour at night, for instance; or Venice from a bridge—I ask myself, “Do I want to see it so much that I would take my shoes off at Heathrow security at 6:55 AM?”
And every time the answer comes back, “No. I would rather keep my shoes on and watch a documentary about them instead, thank you.”
So instead of travelling, I just . . . go to places, instead. The same four places, for the last twenty years: Aberystwyth, Brighton, Gower, Ullapool. That’s it. Nowhere else. Over and over, repeat and return. Like a casting-on stitch done over and over in the same spot—but at slightly different angles. When I go back to these places, I can see my ghosts from every previous visit. When I go to these places, I don’t travel in space—but in time, instead.
So when I go to Ullapool, in the Highlands, I walk the main street seeing flickery, analogue broadcasts from earlier parts of my life. The timecode on the oldest ghost is 1986. August—the August we bought a campervan. We’ve been driven off every other campsite in the area, as the owners think—what with my seven siblings, and rainbow-colored wellies—that we are travelers, displaced from Stonehenge. It’s a miserable holiday: the rain is solid, cold. All we can do is eat sausage soup and read Kidnapped aloud to each other in increasingly risible Scottish accents. Everyone is angry. The dog nearly drowns. I want us to climb a mountain or swim in the sea, but we spend five days in a space the size of a wardrobe, staring at running windows, and then go home.
A decade later, and the ghosts from 1995 are of better quality—a brighter picture. I am nineteen, now. I’ve convinced a friend who has a car to drive me back to Ullapool, so I can finally see it in the sunshine—or at least through the rainy windows of somewhere more spacious, like a hotel. In the day, we both climb a mountain and swim in the sea, because I’m in charge of me now. At night, after drinking the most expensive wine we have ever ordered—£22!—we realize we’re probably in love, and walk to the same bedroom without saying a word. Four years later we come back on our honeymoon, and spend the first night crying, even though we love each other, because. . . .
Here I am on the seafront in Brighton, in 1994. I have just told my best friend that we shouldn’t go out with each other.
“We were meant to be just friends,” I am saying. I have read about love in novels, and am sure I know all about it. This is one of the cleverest things I have ever done. I am eighteen. I exhale my cigarette, like a grown-up.
Here I am four years later, on the same stretch of seafront, with the same friend. We are on a bench. My head is in his lap. We are talking about what to call our baby in my belly. My wedding dress is in a bag at our feet. We get married in three days. Since we were last here, I have learned that I knew nothing at the age of eighteen. I know now that love can be a quiet, sure thing—like the first April sun on your arms—and not the pycroclastic blast I was waiting for.
In nineteen hours, we will find out the baby is dead. The grief that is coming for us has five blades on each hand: it will fall on us like a blizzard, and leave us on the floor.
We will weep on our honeymoon in Ullapool—so lost I could not tell you if it did rain at all, that time. At the time, I thought the deep sea pressure of sorrow was so great, it would crush my heart smaller, forever. I was sure I knew everything about it.
This morning, at the start of my holiday in Brighton, I watched our two daughters—eight and ten—on the beach.
“My heart is even bigger now,” I thought. “And I know what love is, and I don’t smoke, and the grief did not kill me, and I know I still no nothing, and I’m in charge of me, now.”
A casting-on stitch done in the same place, over and over again, gets stronger. In Ullapool, Gower, Aberystwyth and Brighton, I don’t travel to broaden the mind.
I return—something completely different.
Part Four
ENTHUSIASMS, ADVICES, AND DEATHS
In which I meet Paul McCartney FROM THE BEATLES and ask him what would happen if—“Heaven forf
end, Sir Paul”—his face got smashed up in an horrific car accident, mourn the deaths of Amy Winehouse and Elizabeth Taylor, open the “Nutters Letter Box,” and offer a blow-by-blow of the Royal Wedding. But, first: back to a small domestic misunderstanding.
MY FRENCH DRESS
It is 7:48 PM. I am just about to leave the house for a night out with friends. I have checked I have a spare pair of tights in my handbag, ensured that the working remote is actually in the oldest child’s hand—no more panicked, 10 PM “WE CANT FID [sic] THE CONTROLLS!!!” texts for me—and now, the last thing that needs to be done is to bid my husband adieu.
I walk into his “study,” where he is listening to a reggae compilation while contemplating his new Fotheringay mug, which is full of tea. He has a happy look on his face.
“I’m off now, love,” I say.
“Have a great night,” he says, taking his headphones off, and beaming.
There is a pause. I kind of . . . stand at him a bit. Loom, maybe.
“I’m off now,” I say, again, more purposefully. “Off into London. To see people.”
“Make sure you’ve got your keys!” he says, cheerfully. “Have a great night. Send my love to . . . whichever bunch of arch, chain-smoking homosexuals you’re on loan to tonight.”
There is another pause. I stare at him quite intently. He stares back, confused. Pete can tell there is some manner of urgent business left unattended here—but he does not know what. I can sense his heart rate accelerating, like a panicked lab rat on sighting a speculum. The rat does not know exactly what is going to happen next—but it knows it’s going to be bad.
“Do you . . . want a lift to Finsbury Park?” he asks, eventually.
“HOW DO YOU THINK I LOOK?” I shout.
Pete is immediately both contrite—“Sorry!”—but also back in charted territory again.
Twelve years ago, shortly before our wedding, I told him—with the kind of fearless honesty that lovers can afford—that I would only ever impose two rules on our marriage. 1) That he must never, ever throw me a surprise birthday party in our living room again. And 2) that every time I appear in front of him in a new outfit, he must say, without hesitation: “You look so thin in that!”
“You look so thin in that!” Pete says—delighted to be back on firm ground. He puts his headphones back on. He clearly thinks all the business has been concluded.
“Phew. Have a great night out,” he says—going back to staring at his Fotheringay mug, which depicts the whole band as fifteenth-century minstrels. “I’ll see you in the morning.”
Unfortunately for Pete, “You look so thin in that” is not the droids I am looking for in this particular conversation. The dress I am in is a bit of a new development, in terms of my “fashion range.” It’s a 1950s tea-dress in shape—but in pattern, it’s got an African-textile theme going on. I’m wearing it with zebra skin sandals, and a snakeskin clutch. Basically, I need to know if I look like some manner of “Lady Ace Ventura—Pet Detective” in it. I don’t know if this “lysergic safari” thing is working.
Were I with any of my female friends or relationships, they would have understood this instantly. My sister Weena, for instance, would have greeted me with “You’re perverting the assumed prejudices of post-war chicks, with some kind of ‘demented gay Ghanian disco’ vibe. It’s Mad Men vs. Brixton Market. You’re essentially saying you’re a liberal—but with big tits. Nice. Catch that bus with confidence.”
This is what women do—tell each other what story their outfits are projecting, by way of confirming that the wearer has got it right. The women who love you recite back to you the aspiration and impact of your “look”—hence a group of eight of us being able to greet our friend Hughes with, “Post-divorce slutty secretary—but with unexpected neon rave stilletos! You’re a sexy lady who will not cling to one man tonight, but seek the communal ecstactic uprising of a room full of partygoers instead. In this Pizza Express we are having dinner in.”
Women speak the language of clothes. Everything we wear is a sentence, a paragraph, a chapter—or, sometimes, just an exclamation mark.
Unfortunately, however, Pete does not speak the language of clothes. My dress and zebra sandals are essentially shouting at him in French. Unable to make out a word they are saying, he panics.
“It’s a top-notch item,” he says, staring at it. “Unusual. It’s, ah, amazing that ‘they’ keep coming up with innovative things—even in 2012. That’s . . . got to be good news for the fashion industry!”
There is a small pause—then he starts laughing so hysterically at the desperation of what he has just said that he slides off his chair, headphones still in hand, and kneels on the floor, red-faced, and weeping.
He’s still there when I leave the house. Which is a bit annoying, because I did actually want a lift to Finsbury Park. My zebra skin sandals are chafing.
SPOILER ALERT: there are many, many plot details in the following review—so LOOK AWAY NOW if you’ve still not seen it, you baffling Holmes-hater.
SHERLOCK REVIEW 3: AS GOOD AS TELEVISION GETS
In many ways, Sherlock doesn’t really come across as a TV show. The levels of fandom it inspires in the UK are what you’d more readily associate with a pop star, or a rock band. People queued at 5:30 AM to get tickets for the premiere screening at the BFI. There are whole websites devoted to fans’ imagining of sexual encounters between Holmes and Dr Watson. There are women who cry when you say the words “Benedict Cumberbatch”—and not simply because they are trying to spell it in their heads, and failing.
And so to “A Scandal in Belgravia,” the first of three new feature-length Sherlocks, charged with the tricky task of topping one of the most triumphant debut seasons of all time.
Within the first two minutes, writer Steven Moffat made it clear he wasn’t intending to start things off quietly, while he found his feet: a pearly-arsed dominatrix known as “The Woman” entered a bedroom, holding a riding crop, asking: “Have you been wicked, Your Highness?”
“Yes, Miss Adler,” a posh voice replied.
And then the opening title sequence rolled. Yeah. That’s right. The first episode of the new season of Sherlock was about a Kate Middleton S&M blackmail scenario. In your face, Waterloo Road.
The next hour and a half were, to be scientific, as good as it’s possible for television to be: other program makers must have been biting their wrists in a combination of jealousy and awe. Not only does Sherlock have the embarrassment of riches that is a cast list that reads “Benedict Cumberbatch, Martin Freeman, Lara Pulver, Rupert Graves,” but its episode subject was the potent one of “Sherlock Holmes and love.”
Having spent the first season setting Holmes up as one of the foremost men of the twenty-first century, “a man with an achieveable super-power”—all milk and ice and billion-dollar synapse blinking—this season seems to be about examining his weaknesses, instead. They’ve built him up—now they’re going to knock him down. Or, in this case, blow up him, by throwing a fantastic pair of tits at him.
For Sherlock cannot fathom Irene Adler—“The Woman”—a high-class dominatrix with incriminating pictures of Middleton (it’s hinted, anyway, if never made obvious) on her phone.
Played by Lara True Blood Pulver, Irene Adler lives in a beautiful house of monochrome damask, and her lipstick is as red as damask roses. On the orders of the Palace, Holmes is sent to the monochrome house to retrieve the pictures, and Adler prepares for his arrival.
“What will you wear?” her lover/assistant, Kate, asks.
“The Battle Suit,” Adler replies.
When Holmes arrives—pretending to be a vicar, ridiculously; he’s already acting like an idiot—she greets him naked. The Business Suit. He’s pole-axed by her—not just by the quiet authority of her bare arse, swishing past him on the sofa; but her face, too. He cannot read her. Holmes, who can read everyone—he gl
ances at Watson, for reassurance: notes his shoes mean he has a date tonight, his stubble that he used an electric shaver—cannot decipher a single thing about Adler. She can hide herself wholly, even when naked. Particularly when naked. After all, as she reminds Holmes, “However hard you try [with a disguise], it’s always a self-portrait.”
Holmes is so stupefied by the novelty of being outsmarted that he doesn’t even realize he fancies her, at this point.
And Adler, against all her judgment and nature, fancies Holmes, too. Adler is as clever as Holmes, but also as damaged: she keeps blackmail material on her phone because she “makes her way in the world” with a series of deals and dodges; she has “friends” she regularly sedates with the syringes in her bedside cabinet. Nearly everything in the world bores her. Sex isn’t fun—it’s just a job. What really excites her is detectives, and detective stories. Despite being a lesbian, what ultimately excites her is Sherlock Holmes.
And so “A Scandal in Belgravia” was an hour and a half of two odd, fast, hot people being confused by each other: not quite knowing why they jangle when they’re around each other; not quite knowing what to do with their feelings. Both have jobs that involve crushing their emotions: should they continue doing that—or actually trust each other?
In the end, their cataclysmic meeting results in a plane full of corpses rotting on a runway as Mycroft, the British government and the American government despair. “Holmes and Adler” really aren’t the new “Hart to Hart.” She’s betrayed him, he’s betrayed her, and all Holmes’s suspicions about love—“The chemistry is terribly simple. And very destructive”—have been borne out. Love will never do for Holmes. He likes things to have conclusions, and endings. Love has no conclusion or ending at all. And, also, he fell in love with a mental. That was quite a big error.