desperate house of commons wives

I bumped into Ffion just the other day. She and I have so much in common, Two women, both married to a William who’s very important and spends a lot of time in London, Both far from home. The politics might come between us, her husband is more interested in matters of high diplomacy but we Labour chaps like to deal with the grass roots, because, after all, the roots are all that's left of the grass after the napalm has finally burned itself out but if she wasn’t a Tory and I wasn’t so jolly well working class I’m sure we’d get on very well. Actually, I’m not quite sure what class Ffion is from as she’s welsh and they probably have their own devolved class system in Wales now so perhaps we can be chums after all.

Anyway, the reason I mention it of course is that as the jetlag finally starts to get to David Attenborough who sadly reportedly now so is identified with that gorilla scene that he starts crouching down and whispering whenever anyone so much as opens a packet of peanuts in his earshot the BBC has done a series on the rare and exotic within our own shores and in their search for working class people their researchers even visited my own village although they didn’t find anyone to be in the show as the whole population had just been moved out to make way for filming a gritty but heart warming northern drama for ITV. Milly rather reduced my chances of being interviewed on TV though as when she answered the door to the BBC she told them her mother neither worked, nor had any class, sigh.

This isn’t the first time the girl has hurt my feelings like this. Just the other day she came home from school very pleased with herself. ‘I got an A in science mummy!’ she proclaimed proudly. ‘And the teacher said I could be an engineer at Wilton or Corus when I’m older’ . My heart sank. My own daughter, going into trade, in the North! I fought back the tears. This had been a Labour Party family as far back as I could remember. We’d always stood up for the poor and powerless like Lord Sainsbury, Rupert Murdoch, Roman Abramovich (even my neighbour says poor old Roman must be feeling hard done by at the moment: I'll make a socialist out of him yet) Our family had always done proper jobs that made you proud to go to conference, jobs that were tough and dirty but had to be done; public relations civil servants, left wing playwrights, Sunday Times columnists. My daughter's announcement of an interest in commerce felt like my fountain pen being pushed through my heart.

‘But darling’ I said, choking, ‘don’t you want to write a blog like mummy when you grow up?’. Milly just didn’t understand. ‘I can still write a blog even if I have a job can't I?’, she said, quizzically. Oh, her youthful innocence! What would she write about, I wanted to ask her, Today I went to work and came home watched a bit of telly before going to bed? Tears welled up in my eyes. Didn’t she know that a really successful blog was one about other people doing stuff. My God, providing your own material for your blog? Whatever next? ‘But Milly, think of your family!’ I cried. ‘Think of your Grandfather who fought in the war!’ Milly raised her eyebrows. ‘Grandfather was born in 1947’, she said. ‘But think of your Great Grandmother who threw herself in front of the king’s horse!’ Milly sighed. ‘But it was beating the favourite Mummy, which Great Granny had bet the house on without telling Great Grandaddy’, she retorted. ‘Anyway’ continued my heart breaking daughter, ‘If I got a job I could get dooced and then my blog would be even bigger than your’s!’ I sighed a big sigh. That’s my girl...I think….and I wondered if Ffion had the kettle on...

voyage of the fairly depressed

Well, I'm pleased to report Natalia's safe return from her rendez vous with the local party treasurer. She said when she first arrived she did receive some rather morally disapproving glances from the doggers at the other end of the lay-by but fortunately others turned up quite soon, in fact the darling girl told me so many Labour supporters sent their nannies and au pairs in disguise to give donations the whole event began to resemble the stoning scene in The Life of Brian. I asked her where she saw that awfully disrespectful movie and she said it was shown to the students in her citizenship class so I feel a stern letter to The Times coming up.

I was talking to my neighbour this morning about the most interesting case of the chap in the canoe. My neighbour says this is the most notorious case of someone disappearing from Hartlepool to start a new life on his ill gotten gains since Peter Mandelson left to join the European Commision. Actually, between you and me I'm beginning to suspect my neighbour might be a bit of a tory you know. Our Peter was somewhat cleverer than this Darwin chap of course because he shaved off his moustache and so it was years before anyone in Brussels recognised him. The poor missing kayaking chap nearly got away with it as well apparently because when the police asked for the canoe as evidence they found out Able UK had already dismantled it while they were waiting for permission for the ghost ships but sadly it seems as if although he'd been told Panama was just like The North; lots of canals and everybody still wears a a hat it just somehow wasn't home. I know how he feels, and if I wasn't thirty miles from the sea and completely out of sea sickness tablets, well, who knows what I might do, sigh...

On the subject of ghost ships, I know this blog has had something of the Mary Celeste about it lately, well, the fairly depressed more like, so thanks awfully for being so very understanding. It's just that it's so grim up north, sometimes I can hardly bear to talk about it, sob...

strife on mars

My name is Rill Super. In 2007 I had a terrible accident, I took a wrong turn off the Edgeware Road and when I ran out of petrol I found myself back in 1973. Am I in the North, in a coma, or did I go back in time? The bakelite telephone in the dusty corridor rang. I picked it up. ‘Rill’, said my agent, ‘we’re trying to get you back’, he continued, ‘but there’s been a code twelve at the old factory.’ ‘Trouble at mill?’ I replied. ‘What’s a code twelve anyway?’ ‘Theft of the introduction to a spoof 1970s TV show that was on telly last night’, he said. ‘You mean All Creatures Great and Small?’ I asked. ‘No, All Creatures Great And Small was a real 1970s series, not a send-up’ he corrected me, ‘and it wasn’t on TV yesterday’. ‘It was up here’, I pointed out ‘It’s shown on a continuous loop, only interrupted by broadcasts from President Botham.’ ‘My God, it’s grim up north’ said my agent. ‘So what do you want me to do?' I asked. ‘You have to solve the case Rill, get all the facts’. ‘Facts?’ I said, ‘but I’m a journalist’. ‘Looks like you're buggered then love’ said my agent and hung up. Would I ever get back to 2007? Would people stop pointing at my haircut from 30 years in the future and laughing? Would everything be hunky dory? Could I send a distress signal to the outside world, it was still the seventies here in the north, surely I could find some flares? One thing I did know for certain though: cue apt contemporary music clip and roll credits…

hell's bells

Sunday morning and, back in the north, I sit in bed, missing my husband who has returned to London. We passed, like ships in the night, exchanging a wistful glance across the central reservation of the A1, he on his way back to London’s fair city, I on my lonely return into exile. I am banish-ed, there is no life without Islington’s walls. From the village church comes the bells' toll, do they toll for me? I hope not, they’ve got no bloody business tolling on a Sunday morning when people are trying to have a lay in. Church bells, like other people's children, should be seen lovingly described in the pages of Joanna Trollope novels but not heard. I should go and storm into the church and give them a piece of my mind, but I don’t want to cause a scene, at least not a scene from the end of the The Graduate anyway . The pen is mightier than the sword, or rather my new Aga laptop is mightier than the sword and uses more metal in the construction too. Some people sniff that a laptop that requires your nanny to help you carry it and which runs on burning woodchips and ramblers' trousers collected from barbed wire fences is nothing but a status symbol and something from PC World is just as practical for writing to the environmental health officer about noise from people doing things that you don’t do and at inconvenient times. They’re just jealous because they haven’t got a car with adequate suspension to transport it. They're absolutely essential when you live in the country and everyone has them you know. It looks like that letter means my Sunday is spoken for. It’s a good thing I don’t do anything on Monday to Saturday or that would really be a bother. Oh, for the peace and tranquility of home, but wait, the bells have ceased, now a glooming peace this morning with it brings, and a chance to work on more subtle shakespearean allusions for the blog. A woman's work is never done, sigh...

Tilly Elliot

Tilly, charming and delightful as always, was ever so excited as she rushed into the kitchen just as I was taking the scones out of the oven. I knew why of course, but I still pretended not to have heard the news that today was the day the film crew arrived to begin shooting the new film version of the stage musical version of Billy Elliot. ‘Whatever is it dear?’ I asked feigning lack of knowledge that Easington had now become so gentrified with all the Londoners turning the old terraced miners’ houses into weekend places because they loved the north so much they had started to shun the more picturesque villages because they kept finding everything they did reported on the internet by the many bloggers who had moved to such places in search of fresh air, fields and film deals, that the film company had to look elsewhere for their backdrop and had decided upon our village. ‘Mummy, mummy!’ began Tilly, excited, charming and delightful, ‘there are lots of men with black faces all over the village!’ Gosh, I said smiling, I’m sure it’s nothing to be concerned about dear.’ ‘But Mummy, isn't that why you and daddy wanted to move away from London?’ 'Oh silly Tilly', I reassured her ‘There's no need to worry, they’re miners!’ ‘What’s a miner?’ quizzed my daughter in her typically charming and delightful manner. ‘Well, in the olden days before you were born there were lots of miners, but they didn’t vote conservative so Maggie Thatcher had to sack them all, because that’s what happens if you’re naughty’. I beckoned Tilly to come outside with me to see that these frightening working class people were really nice and from the south like us, just like everyone else I allowed the children to speak to in our village.

I led her up to one burly blackened miner. ‘Way ay lass!’ he said by way of greeting. ‘Mummy, it’s Gandalf from Lord of the Rings!' shouted Tilly, in her charming and delightful innocence of Sir Ian Mckellen's true status, and of his ability to bring more magic to the screen in his acting than even Gandalf with all his powers. ‘Hello darlings’ said Sir Ian, ‘are you here to watch the filming?’ ‘Oh yes please!' exclaimed Tilly. Just then the director called out over the megaphone ‘CAN ALL THE SINGING MINERS PLEASE LEAVE THE SET, I JUST WANT THE DANCING MINERS!' Obviously the same director as The Producers, I thought. ‘Oh, that’s me!' said Sir Ian, ‘got to go and shoot the big tap number! See you later darlings!’and with a flourish and a ‘don’t start without me boys!' he turned to the gathered synchronised bobbing miners lamps and tap danced over to the MDF colliery wheel illuminated in the beam of the film lights. ‘Is he the star of the film mummy?’ asked Tilly, as Sir Ian theatrically tripped over a cable in his rush to begin the scene and landed in a heap next to Renee Zellweger, Billy's dance teacher in the film. 'No', I replied, smiling at my amazing ability for wry observations and dry wit, ‘it’s just a miner roll’. I must remember that one for the blog, I thought, and we all went back home and gathered around the aga for tea and scones with strawberry jam and lashings of Joanna Trollope

maybe it's because I'm a liberal

...that I love London so, although I'm stuck up here in the north now unfortunately and I don't know if I mentioned it before but it's grim. I also love wife in the north of course, who seems to have had an uncannily similar weekend to my own. On Saturday my husband and I both went down to the cottage so we could feel good about helping the village by combining two houses into one and reducing the village's carbon footprint by displacing an entire family from the community. While we were down there I’m afraid I got rather annoyed with the builder fellow who's doing the knock through. Now I’m a liberal, and this family occupies four houses at present and you can't get much more liberal than that, and being a liberal means that everyone should speak like I do wherever I go because a liberal is the only thing to be. As far as I'm concerned it’s no more acceptable for someone up here in the North East to call me pet than it is for a waiter in some foreign clime to give me a dirty look when I order the polenta slowly and loudly in Cheltenham Ladies College english. That's just pure prejudice on his part and we all know what a jolly bad thing prejuduce and condescending stereotypes are, don't we boys and girls! I've decided that when my husband moves up north we will reclaim the north for the God, Harry and received pronunciation! I'm sure if those Gideon chaps started putting Forster in hotel bedrooms instead of the bible that would be a start in showing people how to behave. We may no longer have the empire but now the north has become the white man's burden and with my huband at my side we'll jolly well re-colour the north pink just like in the good old days!

But for now though, Sunday has arrived and as I write this my husband and Fabio are on the sleeper back to London, making the sacrifice of sharing a berth to help reduce carbon dioxide emissions. As I close the front door after them I contemplate that he's left me again with nothing but the children, my veet squeezed in the middle (men!), the joint account chequebook and an aga catalogue mysteriously stuck together at the centrefold. Just as I gather my thoughts, my new mission to achieve universal radio 4 pronunciation receives it's first impetus as Milly asks me 'mummy, do we own some seaside all for ourselves now?' 'Whatever do you mean dearest?' 'Well mummy, when Fabio had left with daddy, Natalia asked us what we thought now we'd seen daddy's beach'. So many people not like me, so little time to change them, sigh..

Newcastle, New Title

I went to Newcastle, where they have the nearest working telephone to my village, to pick up a message from my agent in London today. 'Rilly, dear' he began, 'Ran your idea for the new title of your book about how grim it is in the north past Viking-Penguin earlier and they say The Satanic Mills really works for them dear, on so many levels. They had a big hit with something similar a few years ago as I recall, went down a bomb, and as well as that whole Salman Rushdie meets Chariots of Fire meets Jilly Cooper eighties nostalgia thing (you're a genius dear!) they reckon if they send a couple of their Australian lads up north to wind up the spiritual leader Geoffrey Boycott about The Ashes they can even get a fatwah out on you. Apparently Komeini asked for 5% last time and although they reckon it might cost a bit more this time around as we're dealing with those awful Northerners instead of the Iranians it doubled the sales back then so it's worth a shot. Anyway, got to go darling, I'm taking Wife in the North to Fifteen. The staff there all feel sorry for her with her grim life you know, being disadvantaged themselves, so we get extra helpings, talk soon dear..' and as the dial tone replaced my agent's enthusiasm over the handset I thought to myself, could I really be so successful as an author writing about how grim it is up north that I could afford to buy a bigger place down south? The truth really is stranger than fiction...

wringing the changes

Haven't much time to tell you how grim it is up north today I'm afraid but today is one of those days when I rilly think about how my life has changed. The washing machine is broken again, perhaps it was continuously having to wash the children’s clothes after they'd been brushed against by one of the local children coming out from their MMR injections and trying to pass their autism on to my own darlings, or perhaps it was my sitting on top during the spin cycle thinking about Colin Firth one too many times but nevertheless it was down to the river with the washboard today to hunker down amongst the local women and try and get those nasty northern germs off our southern clothes. 'Why do you all gather at this same spot to do the washing?' I enquired. 'because the outdoor privies all empty into the river just down there', it was explained. 'What kind of washing powder to you mostly use?' I asked. 'Serf', came the reply. I began to suspect then that not all of the local women had staggered down to the river laden with laundry simply because they had all been pestered by the au pair to let her have the range rover on her day off, nor that they had all been re-reading Bridget Jones Diary on the tumble dryer again so I tried to conceal the designer labels from my Primark pounding and Wilkinsons wringing fellow washers but alas it was inevitable that someone would notice eventually. ‘Shouldn’t you dry clean Lacroix pet? Said the hunched up old woman next to me on the cold foggy slippery muddy foggy cold muddy foggy slippery foggy bank, hardly visible behind her headscarf and layers of charity shop clothing. She was so old and haggard I asked how long she had lived in the village. 'I came up here last year when I left university' she said. I thought I could get an amusing book about northerners and their amusing northern ways out of it for people to read on the Picadilly line. They told me the americans would lap it up too'. I shivered as a northern cloud blew across the northern low winter sun and the cold northern river fell under a northern shadow, and also as my new friend told me that today was her 24th birthday. ‘where’s the nearest dry cleaners?’ I asked. ‘Copenhagen’ she said, and we both carried on scrubbing our washboards, like an all girl northern aquatic skiffle group, just as if it were 1956. Watford Gap, Watford Gap, Oh to be only fifteen miles from the Watford Gap…sigh

Of mozzarella and men

It’s so foggy today, I can hardly see the end of my little cottage’s garden only a quarter of a mile away. I’m so used to the weather in London, which is famous for it sunshine. On an afternoon like today I’d be strolling around the olive groves, Sun dried tomato farms and feta orchards of my native Islington in the warm early spring Mediterranean sun of those sun-blessed southerly latitudes, now becoming as distant in my memory as they had once became distant in the rear view mirror of our freelander as we passed under the M25 and into terra incognita, the AA road atlas no longer showing roads and towns but merely the warning 'here be dragons' as we passed the large motorway sign which said, simply and ominously 'THE NORTH' . Once, I would wander the streets of North London, as free as the single white cloud in an unfeasibly blue tuscan sky, perhaps stopping to pick a lemon to squeeze over my calamari, freshly caught from the Thames, perhaps exchanging a friendly smile and a ‘Ciao!’ with the famously good natured and handsome youth of inner city London. I’m so used to all that locally produced food living in London that I just can’t get used to eating such strange and foreign cuisine as beans on toast and bacon sandwiches that they eat up here in the north. I’ve tried to adapt some northern dishes to the more sophisticated southern palate, for example cuisses de grenouille, instead of toad, in the hole or steak and Nuits-Saint-Georges, instead of ale, pie, but it’s just not the same as the cucina italiana d'Islingtonia that mama used to make . Hoping to recapture those days of the good life in London I bought a mozarella tree recently from a stall in the farmers market, which I thought would do well on my sunny kitchen window. I have to say though that for a farmhouse it's jolly hard to grow anything in this place and my investment in self sufficiency has yet to produce a single morceau of cheese. 'I think that man sold you a lemon, mummy', said Tilly, finding me one day wistfully regarding my cheeseplant and it’s resolute, and frankly very northern and stubborn, failure to fruit. I could not help myself from wondering for a brief moment if I too were destined to live unblossoming on some northern window ledge, untouched by the hand of man, any man, growing old knitting, blogging and reading Wife in the North whilst struggling to drink in any weak ray of light that the watery northern sun of a social life consisting entirely of other mothers who only speak Viking and wear horns on their head could provide. I wanted to tell Tilly the truth, that lemon bushes had completely different leaves, and that I feared no harvest would be gathered this dark year, in this cold place, but instead I simply wept a single tear for the life I’d left behind, a tear of pure chardonnay, Côtes du Hampstead Heath 1993. That was a good year, sigh...

Oscar Night

My husband and I both watched the Oscars last night, although we live so far apart that if you rotated the A1 by 90 degrees he would actually be looking down Helen Mirren’s cleavage in Los Angeles. The A1 of course runs north to south and, in actual fact, there are no east-west roads in Yorkshire, which may be a legacy of the wars of the Roses but is probably because if you live in the north, why would you want to visit somewhere else that's equally north. Even though we are so many hours apart, even travelling in my publishers corporate jet, we felt very close last night and I’ll feel even closer when I read his own account on his blog Husband in the South. Unfortunately, Helen Mirren won the best actress award and I had put my money on Jan Ravens from Dead Ringers. I find gambling helps with my drink problem and with my attempts to stop smoking. 'Look Mummy!' Said young Tilly, 'It’s that woman who fixed the brakes on Diana’s car! Can I have some pocket money now I’ve given you something to write on your blog?' I remembered wistfully how I had stopped her pocket money until she said something which was childlike, charming and innocent and yet with an inadvertant hint of adult insight and sophistication that I could quote in my book, I mean on my blog about normal family life in the North, which this is, just like happens in any normal family, which we are. 'Oh, OK', I sighed, relenting. 'Sign this release and have your people call my people.' Of course last night was also the occasion of the less well reported but more widely followed up here Yorkshire Oscars, In which The Queen also did well, picking up the award for best foreign language film, but that story is for another day, and another dollar. Tootle pip, as they say up here!

Friends with money

We rented a DVD last night. The girls and I often watch films while we wait for the glacier on the A1 to melt in the spring so that my husband can visit from London... oh when, oh when will I have a man in the house again, I'm ever so lone-lone-lone-lone-la-lonely... We’re the first people in the village to have a DVD player (it records as well so I often spend an entire lonely weekend watching my favourite episodes of Location Location Location) or in fact a TV, or indeed electricity so often one finds a gaggle of open mouthed local children gathered around our window in amazement at the moving pictures. I often have to tell them to jolly well get back to work in the garden. How can one be expected to write a great novel with grass that long! The DVD was called friends with money, about a woman who cleans the houses of her richer friends. I used to have friends with money you know, now I am just money with no friends. I thought if they made a film about my life in the north it would be called friends with no money because everyone in my village is poor and they all have to clean my house! Hmm, I wonder who would play me in the film, Renee Zellweger perhaps, with some jobbing provincials who can ham it up as my down at heel northern friends, well, I say friends but how can they be real friends as none of even went to university never mind Oxford and it's such a struggle to reduce my conversation down to their base rural northern level, and Michael Praed as my riding instructor...now now Rilly, behave, you’re married!.. I often think during our ‘girls’ nights in’ that I’m sure to make a fortune selling the film rights to this blog some day soon, and that’ll be one in the eye for everyone who says this is a bit too patronising, a bit too London, and a bit too done already, and that I'm just Peter Mayle without the sunflowers. Rilly'll show 'em won't she, Milly and Tilly!