DIARY OF A BAD HOUSEWIFE FIRST ENTRY - ME AND THE KNEE FAIRY
Friday September 27th 2013
I hate my f***ing knees! Where is that bloody knee fairy when you need her? I need a new pair of knees, like, now, not in ten years’ time. Preferably along Cara Delevigne lines, or perhaps Sophia Loren, more age appropriate.
The tooth fairy was pretty reliable I seem to remember. Bang on time, sixpence under the pillow the next morning, or if you were lucky, a shilling. Enough for a liquorice sherbet. (In those days sweets were like drugs and your local confectioner was your local dealer.) But the Knee Fairy is very flaky and I have decided to stop believing in her. So there. That’ll teach her.
By the way hello! I am a bad housewife for many reasons, which will become apparent.
And here’s one of them.
Yes, this week the knees have been giving me extra gyp. Just when you need them to function at max. I’ve just started this fantastic course in Creative Writing at Kingston University. After 30 years of making a living at it, I’ve decided to learn how to do it properly. I’m really excited about it, it is simultaneously scaring me and thrilling me to death. We’re going to be challenged, stretched, jerked out of our writing ruts and comfort zones and ingrained habits and (in my case), smug white middle class assumptions and preconceptions about what we should be doing. And we’re hitting the ground running! Which is not good with bad knees.
I’m going in three times a week. There’s a bit of travelling on trains, up and down stairs, rucksack on back. And there I am, yesterday morning, going down the stairs at Surbiton station and feeling the paaaain and there’s a woman in front of me, also with a heavy rucksack, and a stick. And there’s that nice Film Studies lecturer I met the other day, also walking to the university, with a limp. And later, I’m catching the bus back to Surbiton station with my lovely new bezzie fellow student Alison, discussing what we’re going to write for our first assignments. Suddenly the bus screeches to a stop, and there’s a girl on foot, and with her a girl in a motorised wheelchair, and the ramp is lowered for her, and she zooms onto the bus, and it looks like she hasn’t even got knees. She’s smiling, really brave, just getting on with her life. At least I have knees. And I can walk.
SO STOP MOANING BITCH!
There’s always someone worse off than you and you have to be thankful for what you’ve got.
Talking of walking, I have a dog to walk. She can talk the talk. Did you know border collies have a massive vocabulary? They understand over 240 words of their native language, more than the ape. Hence they seem, spookily, to understand what you’re saying and when you’re talking about them. They are very, very intelligent. And I am hoping she might help me with my assignments. She will no doubt start her own Dog Blog soon, working in Woof for Windows.
She can also walk the walk. She is now glaring at me balefully with that look of doggy reproach, so in a minute I will take her up to the post box. Not to post her in it you understand, to post An Important Letter about cashing in an ancient savings account to help pay for my course.
I went to pilates this morning, a stroll of bucolic splendour up the footpath to my friend’s studio. Everyone in the class has some problem. Neck, knee (that’s me), shoulder, arm, hip, tendonitis, arthritis. But Chris has got cancer and she’s being really brave about it. Yet another reason to feel humbled.
Did I mention that I live in the country? 33 years ago we bought a derelict bungalow in the middle of 10 acres of wasteland, for like, NO MONEY, and we’ve transformed it into a paradise. I say ‘we’ advisedly, since my husband did most of the building work, I just do the housework, laundry, shopping, cooking – oh and gardening. I grow flowers, mostly Mediterranean style, in pots, on top of china elephants and in anything I can find, like old sewage pipes. The herbaceous thing is a bit difficult in heavy clay and everything except shrubby stuff just gives up and slinks away when you’re not looking. I have statues of Buddhas and Greek gods and goddesses all over the place. Why are you not surprised? I am an old hippie. I also grow vegetables now, not very successfully this year, as I forgot to mulch the garden. Loads of runner beans though, so if you’re interested, apply here.
Gardening is a great counterpoint to writing and terribly good for the soul apparently. We farmed sheep for a while, and my daughter watched me deliver twin lambs once from her pushchair. (The lambs came out of the sheep’s bum not the pushchair.) She is now nearly 25, graduated and living mostly near work in London, although she keeps coming home with her laundry. Her place is a bus ride from the university, so I plan to turn up on her doorstep demanding hot meals and sympathy. Payback time! And I do miss her. Anyway, hence the empty nester decision to do this course. She doesn’t remember the woolly nativity scene, but I christened the lambs after her. Annoyingly they were boys, so it had to be Isambard and Florian. Pretentious? Moi?
Do not ask me how we farmed the sheep. Especially if you’re a vegetarian. We did sell the wool however.
Now we have our local farmer friends put their cattle on the fields. They look dead picturesque against that lush green background and they moo a lot when they’re hungry and bash their hooves against the water troughs. At night we hear of lot of murders going on around us, of the wildlife variety. And you get attuned to things like astronomy and birdsong. It’s all very earthy and spiritual. And we’re only an hour or so from London and Brighton.
So yes, I like it here. A lot. It’s the best of all worlds, everything on your doorstep. But a lot to look after.
I am now going to ewalk my dog. That was a spelling mistake but I’ve decided to keep it in. It would be nice to take my dog for e walks, rather than real ones.
So I’m signing off now to stride purposefully around the fields and up the footpath, being brave about my knees because I’m lucky to have them and there’s always someone worse off than you, and post that Important Letter.
This is my first writing assignment on this course. It’s good to be writing again after a self imposed summer Sabbatical and I hope I have hit the ground running, or at least stumbling, in the right direction. I hope I can talk the talk and walk the walk.