Jax and I had a tiff. The result of eight straight weekends of packing bags and galloping off to various corners of the kingdom on social errands- a wedding, the cricket-and-ale shindig in Shropshire, a book festival etc - had taken their toll. Like a weary married couple we longed for 48 hours in the comfort, or lack thereof, of the new flat, to sort out books and dust and the rest of the building work. Instead we had signed up for a friend’s Austrian-and-ski themed birthday party at his parents’ house in Berkhampstead. I was charged with sourcing costumes, a duty which I had completely ignored until last thing on Friday afternoon, and which had sent Jax, never a fancy-dresser at the best of times, into a tailspin. I had managed to steal a corset and skirt for myself from a theatrical costume cupboard at the final moment, but Jax was staring down the barrel of wearing her salopettes and a pair of sunglasses, distinctly sub-par for the amount of email preparations and reminders we had been given. We had trudged wearily off to the Mad World fancy dress shop on Old Street first thing on Saturday morning, where she had been forced to hand over fifty pounds for a child’s Bavarian dirndl and matching socks. Her luncheon plans had been cancelled and she demanded that we leave London earlier than the 6pm we had originally agreed. I had scheduled in a nap, which I was not prepared to sacrifice. She grumpily left the flat to watch the footie with Arty so that I could sleep and we were to meet at Euston station at the original designated time. Upon waking I saw that she had defiantly left two sleeping bags, the pop-up tent and the evening’s booze supply in the hallway. I called her on her mobile.
“Are you expecting me to carry all of this, plus my overnight bag to Euston station?”
“I couldn’t take all of that into a pub could I?” she retorted.
I hung up, guilty that I had let her down on the costumes and resentful that I was being punished. I lugged our portable accommodation onto the Tube and up to Euston. She met me at the escalators, all big eyes and silent apologies. She had already bought the tickets, plus two mini bottles of wine from Marks and Spencer. I silently apologised back and all was forgiven. If one of us were a man we’d have the perfect relationship. Although I suppose if I were a man I wouldn’t have wanted an afternoon nap and if she were a man she would have stayed to the end of the footie and been late in meeting me.
We changed on the train and laughed at each other’s outfits and drank the wine, excited again to be leaving London for a night. We got lost on the way to the house and ended up in Tesco Local in Berkhampstead, dressed as milkmaids, asking for directions. A lovely girl in a Corsa with her boss’ s dog in the back drove us up the hill and we arrived to find a huge Austrian themed marquee in the back of the garden, complete with a fake chalet frontage erected in the corner, and an Austrian bell-ringing society providing entertainment through the hog roast dinner. Everyone had made an effort with the costumes (with the exception of Sam who tried to pass off a green boiler suit as a bottle of Jagermeister) and I was thankful for Jax that she had spent the fifty quid. The family became the Von Trapps and played some traditional, and rather alarming Austrian music, mum on the accordion, dad on the fiddle, our friend Alex on trumpet and his sister on the saxophone. We all applauded, and drank the homemade punch rather too quickly. Harry had gone completely off brief and hired a Bungle costume (as in, from Rainbow). The DJ came on and proceeded to work his way relentlessly through Party Hits 1997 with classics such as Always Look on the Bright Side of Life, the Conga and the Macarena. We drank more punch and hit the dancefloor. Harry got caught up in his fake furry Bungle head and, temporarily blinded, fell backwards into the chalet frontage, bringing half of the guests and the chalet crashing to the floor. The DJ, quick off the mark, shouted down the microphone,
“Look! He’s literally brought the house down!”
And so it went until the last shot of Jagermeister had been drunk and the DJ played himself out with Ronan Keating’s When You Say Nothing at All. We abandoned the tent and hitched a lift back to London in a taxi with Sam and Harry. Bellies full of hog roast and punch we snuggled up in the cab and dozed to the ballads on Radio 2 as the first strains of sunlight appeared over the Berkhampstead skyline, tiff and effort having thoroughly paid off.
Sunday, 10 May 2009
Monday, 2 February 2009
Half a foot of snow today so the entire nation shuts down. I decide to join the day of enforced rest, despite the fact that I work from home. An air of wartime-cameraderie-meets-Christmas atmosphere is pervading the neighbourhood and I want a piece of it. The elements have spoken and the corporate machine falls as mute as the soft white snow outside our window. Except for Jax, who is finally confronted by the one negative aspect of living opposite her workplace and trudges sullenly across the road while the rest of London whoops and cheers in a ‘school’s out’ fashion.
I wave her off in my dressing gown and decide to take the day for myself. I realise that, off the back of a weekend and not really working in the first place this could seem indulgent, but I figure when I have children I’m going to spend at least 10 straight years thinking and doing for others, so I give myself a break. My plan is a day of personal productivity, a reduction of the perennial to-do list that saunters around the back of my head. First of all though, a shower. I have the shower, and discover a pot of rose and mint organic face mask in the bathroom cupboard. The pot asks me if I have stressed out skin. I do, I reply. And, it asks, do I expose my skin to free radicals such as pollution, cigarette smoke and the general wear and tear of city living? I do, I reply. Well then, the pot tells me, you’d better slap a thick layer of this on and lie down for ten minutes otherwise the impurities in your skin will fester and breed and you’ll look like ET by the time you’re 35. I do as instructed and stretch out on the new sofa. I flick on the new TV to pass the time and discover that ITV3, oh glorious channel that it is, is playing an early Nineties feature-length Poirot. And it’s just started.
I wake up two hours later to discover that the rose and mint has dried into a curd on my face. I have effectively sealed free radicals into my pores. I panic. My left cheek is bare, and I realise that a large lump of the curd is now smeared across the new sofa. I wash my face and notice a blackhead on my nose. I heat the kettle. I pour the boiling water into the sink and steam my face. Dizzy from sleep and the home made sauna, I squeeze at my face until the dot of black, followed by a small worm of yellow jumps out of my skin. It feels good. I carry on until the water in the basin is cold and my face is a series of red lumps. It doesn’t feel so good. It looks terrible. I re-heat the kettle and spend the next twenty minutes trying to wash and grind the curd out of the sofa. I give up and put a cushion over the offending patch.
I make a cup of tea and think about writing a to-do list. Instead I think about the Incredibly Fit, Slightly Older man that I met the previous night at Jax’s work drinks. He was hot, I was hysterically funny and suitably coquettish. I wonder if he’ll ask Jax for my number. I text Jax and ask her if he’s asked for my number. She texts back no. I sip my tea and re-enact the conversation in my head. He seemed keen. Maybe he has a girlfriend. He didn’t act like he had a girlfriend. Maybe he’s a womanizer. He didn’t seem like a womanizer. I text Jax to ask if she thinks he’s a womanizer. She texts back no. I'm now convinced he is a womanizer and text Jax to instruct her not to give him my number if he asks for it. I have a look in the fridge and find half a banana , a Kit Kat and two bottles of white wine. I eat the banana and the Kit Kat. I decide to look up the Incredibly Fit, Slightly Older Womanizer on the internet. Jax doesn’t believe in Facebook but Marky does and he’s got about 800 friends so the Womanizer is bound to be one of them. Bingo. There’s a whole album from a company cycling trip in France that summer. He is Incredibly Fit. I text Jax and tell her that she can give out my number if he asks for it. She texts back to say that she and the Arty Alpha were the only ones who made it into work and have spent the past half hour snogging on her desk.
I go for a wee. I notice that the bikini waxer missed two hairs and that they are waving about like flags in a storm. I spend twenty minutes looking for the scissors with no luck. I can’t pull them out. I stare at them for a while. I search for the scissors a bit more and give up. It is now 4pm and I haven’t even written the to-do list yet. I glance out of the window and see the children of Shoreditch having a snowball fight. Then I realise they are throwing snowballs at cars and passers-by. Then I realise that they are not snowballs at all, but parcels of dog shit from the curb covered in snow. They are playing Turdball. There seems to be an older kid as leader, the youngest one is the poo-collector (he has plastic bags tied on over his gloves), a couple of girls prepare the balls and the fat one with the good arm takes aim and lobs them at the unwitting public. It’s pretty funny actually. I’m quite impressed with the ingenuity. I wonder if Turdball could be Britain’s new sport in the 2012 Olympics - it is demonstrative of the East London youth community after all.
I start the to-do list. I have to get some more light bulbs, pay my National Insurance, put a wash on, call the Council about removing building waste from the flat, call my bank about switching my contents insurance. I give up, the boringness outweighs the productiveness tenfold. Instead I think about what animals all of my friends look like. Jax would be a rat, for example. Lots of people look like bears, and I can think of one who would be a rhino. I decide it’s best not to tell them that. I think about cleaning the bathroom and decide not to. Instead I spend a fruitful twenty minutes reading the TV guide and scraping dirt from under my nails. I decide to make some fairy cakes but then realise we have no flour. It’s too snowy to go to the corner shop.
Jax texts me and says the Incredibly Fit, Slightly Older Possible Womanizer texted her to ask for my number, which she gave him. I make sure my phone is charged and on and wander around it for a while. It’s still snowing. Jegs appears in the street wearing a dayglo 1980s one-piece ski suit. The kids go to throw a turdball at him, but he’s way ahead of them and threatens to chop off their hands if they do. He looks pretty scary in the one-piece and the kids turn their attention to the postal van skidding down the road.
I go into the art trunk with the aim of creating a collage and find the missing scissors. I go into the bathroom and lop off the two offending hairs, it is a relief. My phone beeps. It is the Womanizer with a quip about the snow and an invitation for drinks in Primrose Hill the following evening. The suggestion of waywardly caddish, old-school-cool Primrose Hill grabs my attention. I reply in the affirmative. Bikini line trimmed and date secured I am feeling terribly productive. Jax comes home, glowing and giggling from a day of office heavy petting. ITV3 are showing a repeat of the earlier Poirot so we take one of the bottles of white from the fridge and settle down with David Suchet, surely the coolest cad of them all.
I wave her off in my dressing gown and decide to take the day for myself. I realise that, off the back of a weekend and not really working in the first place this could seem indulgent, but I figure when I have children I’m going to spend at least 10 straight years thinking and doing for others, so I give myself a break. My plan is a day of personal productivity, a reduction of the perennial to-do list that saunters around the back of my head. First of all though, a shower. I have the shower, and discover a pot of rose and mint organic face mask in the bathroom cupboard. The pot asks me if I have stressed out skin. I do, I reply. And, it asks, do I expose my skin to free radicals such as pollution, cigarette smoke and the general wear and tear of city living? I do, I reply. Well then, the pot tells me, you’d better slap a thick layer of this on and lie down for ten minutes otherwise the impurities in your skin will fester and breed and you’ll look like ET by the time you’re 35. I do as instructed and stretch out on the new sofa. I flick on the new TV to pass the time and discover that ITV3, oh glorious channel that it is, is playing an early Nineties feature-length Poirot. And it’s just started.
I wake up two hours later to discover that the rose and mint has dried into a curd on my face. I have effectively sealed free radicals into my pores. I panic. My left cheek is bare, and I realise that a large lump of the curd is now smeared across the new sofa. I wash my face and notice a blackhead on my nose. I heat the kettle. I pour the boiling water into the sink and steam my face. Dizzy from sleep and the home made sauna, I squeeze at my face until the dot of black, followed by a small worm of yellow jumps out of my skin. It feels good. I carry on until the water in the basin is cold and my face is a series of red lumps. It doesn’t feel so good. It looks terrible. I re-heat the kettle and spend the next twenty minutes trying to wash and grind the curd out of the sofa. I give up and put a cushion over the offending patch.
I make a cup of tea and think about writing a to-do list. Instead I think about the Incredibly Fit, Slightly Older man that I met the previous night at Jax’s work drinks. He was hot, I was hysterically funny and suitably coquettish. I wonder if he’ll ask Jax for my number. I text Jax and ask her if he’s asked for my number. She texts back no. I sip my tea and re-enact the conversation in my head. He seemed keen. Maybe he has a girlfriend. He didn’t act like he had a girlfriend. Maybe he’s a womanizer. He didn’t seem like a womanizer. I text Jax to ask if she thinks he’s a womanizer. She texts back no. I'm now convinced he is a womanizer and text Jax to instruct her not to give him my number if he asks for it. I have a look in the fridge and find half a banana , a Kit Kat and two bottles of white wine. I eat the banana and the Kit Kat. I decide to look up the Incredibly Fit, Slightly Older Womanizer on the internet. Jax doesn’t believe in Facebook but Marky does and he’s got about 800 friends so the Womanizer is bound to be one of them. Bingo. There’s a whole album from a company cycling trip in France that summer. He is Incredibly Fit. I text Jax and tell her that she can give out my number if he asks for it. She texts back to say that she and the Arty Alpha were the only ones who made it into work and have spent the past half hour snogging on her desk.
I go for a wee. I notice that the bikini waxer missed two hairs and that they are waving about like flags in a storm. I spend twenty minutes looking for the scissors with no luck. I can’t pull them out. I stare at them for a while. I search for the scissors a bit more and give up. It is now 4pm and I haven’t even written the to-do list yet. I glance out of the window and see the children of Shoreditch having a snowball fight. Then I realise they are throwing snowballs at cars and passers-by. Then I realise that they are not snowballs at all, but parcels of dog shit from the curb covered in snow. They are playing Turdball. There seems to be an older kid as leader, the youngest one is the poo-collector (he has plastic bags tied on over his gloves), a couple of girls prepare the balls and the fat one with the good arm takes aim and lobs them at the unwitting public. It’s pretty funny actually. I’m quite impressed with the ingenuity. I wonder if Turdball could be Britain’s new sport in the 2012 Olympics - it is demonstrative of the East London youth community after all.
I start the to-do list. I have to get some more light bulbs, pay my National Insurance, put a wash on, call the Council about removing building waste from the flat, call my bank about switching my contents insurance. I give up, the boringness outweighs the productiveness tenfold. Instead I think about what animals all of my friends look like. Jax would be a rat, for example. Lots of people look like bears, and I can think of one who would be a rhino. I decide it’s best not to tell them that. I think about cleaning the bathroom and decide not to. Instead I spend a fruitful twenty minutes reading the TV guide and scraping dirt from under my nails. I decide to make some fairy cakes but then realise we have no flour. It’s too snowy to go to the corner shop.
Jax texts me and says the Incredibly Fit, Slightly Older Possible Womanizer texted her to ask for my number, which she gave him. I make sure my phone is charged and on and wander around it for a while. It’s still snowing. Jegs appears in the street wearing a dayglo 1980s one-piece ski suit. The kids go to throw a turdball at him, but he’s way ahead of them and threatens to chop off their hands if they do. He looks pretty scary in the one-piece and the kids turn their attention to the postal van skidding down the road.
I go into the art trunk with the aim of creating a collage and find the missing scissors. I go into the bathroom and lop off the two offending hairs, it is a relief. My phone beeps. It is the Womanizer with a quip about the snow and an invitation for drinks in Primrose Hill the following evening. The suggestion of waywardly caddish, old-school-cool Primrose Hill grabs my attention. I reply in the affirmative. Bikini line trimmed and date secured I am feeling terribly productive. Jax comes home, glowing and giggling from a day of office heavy petting. ITV3 are showing a repeat of the earlier Poirot so we take one of the bottles of white from the fridge and settle down with David Suchet, surely the coolest cad of them all.
Sunday, 4 January 2009
You Got Wheels And I Wanna Go For A Ride
With neither Jax nor myself in ownership of a car, we have had to take a lot of taxis since upping sticks from my friend Sam’s Brixton attic over to the new flat in Shoreditch. For the big move we managed to fit our entire portable property into an Addison Lee 6-seater (for out-of-towners Addison Lee is a taxi service that behaves in the same way that your mum did when you were 15. When you’ve had a bad date and you’re pissed and lost and stuck inside a lukewarm kebab shop at 3am you call them up, tell them what you can see from the greasy window and they come and get you. The primary benefit of Addison Lee over mothers is that you pay them in money instead of guilty penance and they never tell you that you were a fool to have gone out with that boy in the first place). And since doing up the flat we have regularly called upon them when laden down with lampshades, tiles, paint, and everything we thought would fit onto Jax’s bike. Which brings me to Jax’s bike. I am not a cyclist. I can’t get on with the things. The seat hurts my lady bits and I constantly feel as if I am going to topple into the gutter. Also I’m not good when responsible for determining the navigation and speed of a vehicle. I think it goes back to when I was 10 years old and the park ranger at summer camp let us all have a little go at driving the 4x4 round the field. I hit the accelerator instead of the brake, mowed down a fence and landed us in the sailing pond. Nowadays I can’t go above 5mph on a pair of skis, 50 in a car, and I’m not even going to mention the time I was allowed to steer my friend Aitch’s family yacht. The only positive thing from that incident was that the canoeist was young and had no family to support.
I am therefore primarily a walker. I like walking. You get your bearings and a sense of place, you see interesting sights, you don’t miss a turning because you’re going too fast to see the name of the road and it doesn’t matter which way you go down a one way street. Walking is for smart people. Of course it means that I am at least thirty minutes late for every appointment, social or professional, in my daily life but that’s by the by. Jax is a bike fanatic and she insists on turning up everywhere piously sweating with her plum coloured jodhpurs on, displaying an array of flashing lights and hi-vis vests and banging on about how she’s carbon neutral. I tell her, after the broccoli soup she made in our new kitchen last week I don’t think she’ll ever be carbon neutral again, she’s practically bovine if the aromas wafting from our bathroom are any kind of indicator. Seriously, never blend 10 flowers of broccoli with water, heat it and eat it. That’s not soup, it ‘s organic nuclear waste. Anyway, I’m not sure that cycling is environmentally friendly at all because it a) raises the blood pressure of every bus and car driver in Central London, who then take out their stress on their partners, who in turn get stressed and burn the dinner, which wastes food and uses up excess fuel, b) it uses up more C02 than necessary because every cyclist I’ve ever met dodges red lights and nips round vehicles, which causes motor drivers to have to slam on their brakes which uses up carbon. Or makes them carbon un-neutral or whatever the phrase is. And c) you have to oil a bike, that’s using up natural resources. And d) now I’ve got into this, cyclists bore the crap out of everyone in the pub by relaying their journeys, routes, the time they skidded on a grate in front of a number 73 bus and how much their tyres cost, which makes us all drink ourselves stupid which makes them drink themselves stupid until they’re too drunk to cycle home and end up having to put the thing in the back of a taxi to get home. And so it goes on in a vicious, self-righteous circle. Anyway, Jax loves her bike, I do not.
We had to visit Ikea in Edmonton to go and get those things for the flat that only Ikea seems to sell now that Woolworths has gone bust. Well, John Lewis sells them too but at three times the price and as we’d already gone way over the non-existent budget, we were looking for a cheap and easy fix. We had a lengthy conversation about transport for this epic, Zone 5 excursion, and decided to compromise with a bus there, followed by the mandatory Addison Lee back if we had too much to carry. At 5pm on a Thursday from Liverpool Street out to North London, public transport is misery. Awash with grey and forlorn commuters reading London Lite on their way home from the City, I wanted to throw myself under the number 45 bus rather than get on it. Oyster Cards, they’re depressing as well, from the fake cheery blueness of the packaging to the sad little bleep it makes when you swipe it to pay your fare; the succession of passengers getting on and touching the screen sounded to me like a hospital heart monitor. Bleep, bleep, bleep, went the heart and soul of London, until the number of commuters trying to get on increased to such numbers that I panicked the city was going to flatline. Anyway, we wrenched ourselves onto a seat and passed the time by talking about sex, which is always amusing in confined public spaces. It rained outside as we rode for 40 minutes and then the bus stopped and the driver shouted ‘everyone off.’ We could not see the big blue and yellow sign that promised unwaveringly to Make Our House a Home. The driver was non-committal. They’d changed his route over the radio and the bus was now out of service. We could wait for the next one in twenty minutes or walk a mile over the bridge and up the embankment, cut through the car park and get there on foot. We opted for the latter, then immediately regretted it as we crossed the bridge and found ourselves essentially in the middle of a very busy dual carriageway. The warehouse of cheap and easy home treats was beckoning us like a siren on the rocks and we could not reach her.
We stood for twenty minutes on the central reservation, and watched the next in-service number 45 go past and swing into the car park and drop off a load of middle-aged, heavy-weight women to the front door of the store. Finally we spotted a gap in the road and, now soaked through from the rain and promising ourselves a large plate of meatballs from the canteen, we sprinted like we were 14 years old in the county finals of the 50 yard dash. We made it and ran for cover into the lobby. The canteen was closed for refurbishment. We pushed on.
Jax got over-excited and started trying to buy plastic cutlery drainers that sit over the sink, and a bath rail. I reminded her that we don’t even have a bath. She then veered emotionally in the opposite direction when we hit the crockery department. She had had her heart set on Cath Kidston and Emma Bridgewater mugs and bowls and plates, but at 15 quid a pop, and bearing in mind we are struggling to finance toilet paper (those £50 light switches look great but they have a lot to answer for) we had decided against it, for now. Jax threw a tantrum. Ikea was shit. She wanted Bridgewater and she wanted it now. I walked away from her like a parent with a hysterical toddler, but then thought she might start trashing the display of sixties themed swirly plates, so I went back to calm her down. We managed to settle on plain white, and only 4 of everything, as they would be temporary until my plan to win the Lottery came to fruition. Then, in the living room department we struck gold with the most comfortable big fat armchair in the world, with a blue and white candy striped cover, the last on the shelf, to finish it off. We were over the moon, it would sit directly in the living room bay window, We would read our books in it while sipping tea and having the occasional nap, it looked Christmassy and Summery in equal measures and it came whole, not flat-packed. Jackpot. We hauled it onto a giant trolley and swerved it over to the checkout . Definitely too much treasure to carry on to a bus in the rain. I called our surrogate mother and they promised to send someone straight over.
The Addison Lee driver met us with a smile and a roll of the eyes.
“What on earth have you got here girls? We’ll never get that armchair in the back of this motor.”
We grinned at him like errant teenagers. The armchair fitted in, just, with a lot of panting and puffing from the driver. We told him our woes with public transport and how hungry we were with the lack of Swedish meatballs. He didn’t tell us for not eating before we left, he simply informed us that the Subway in the nearby retail park had Meatball Marinara sandwiches as their special of the day. How he knew this, I did not even care. To Subway we went and the three of us lined up Meatball Marinaras with Diet Cokes on the side. Back in Shoreditch the driver jumped out, opened the boot and took the armchair all the way up three flights of stairs and proudly into our living room. We tipped him handsomely and off he drove away into the night.
“Thanks Mum,” I whispered as I closed the front door.
I am therefore primarily a walker. I like walking. You get your bearings and a sense of place, you see interesting sights, you don’t miss a turning because you’re going too fast to see the name of the road and it doesn’t matter which way you go down a one way street. Walking is for smart people. Of course it means that I am at least thirty minutes late for every appointment, social or professional, in my daily life but that’s by the by. Jax is a bike fanatic and she insists on turning up everywhere piously sweating with her plum coloured jodhpurs on, displaying an array of flashing lights and hi-vis vests and banging on about how she’s carbon neutral. I tell her, after the broccoli soup she made in our new kitchen last week I don’t think she’ll ever be carbon neutral again, she’s practically bovine if the aromas wafting from our bathroom are any kind of indicator. Seriously, never blend 10 flowers of broccoli with water, heat it and eat it. That’s not soup, it ‘s organic nuclear waste. Anyway, I’m not sure that cycling is environmentally friendly at all because it a) raises the blood pressure of every bus and car driver in Central London, who then take out their stress on their partners, who in turn get stressed and burn the dinner, which wastes food and uses up excess fuel, b) it uses up more C02 than necessary because every cyclist I’ve ever met dodges red lights and nips round vehicles, which causes motor drivers to have to slam on their brakes which uses up carbon. Or makes them carbon un-neutral or whatever the phrase is. And c) you have to oil a bike, that’s using up natural resources. And d) now I’ve got into this, cyclists bore the crap out of everyone in the pub by relaying their journeys, routes, the time they skidded on a grate in front of a number 73 bus and how much their tyres cost, which makes us all drink ourselves stupid which makes them drink themselves stupid until they’re too drunk to cycle home and end up having to put the thing in the back of a taxi to get home. And so it goes on in a vicious, self-righteous circle. Anyway, Jax loves her bike, I do not.
We had to visit Ikea in Edmonton to go and get those things for the flat that only Ikea seems to sell now that Woolworths has gone bust. Well, John Lewis sells them too but at three times the price and as we’d already gone way over the non-existent budget, we were looking for a cheap and easy fix. We had a lengthy conversation about transport for this epic, Zone 5 excursion, and decided to compromise with a bus there, followed by the mandatory Addison Lee back if we had too much to carry. At 5pm on a Thursday from Liverpool Street out to North London, public transport is misery. Awash with grey and forlorn commuters reading London Lite on their way home from the City, I wanted to throw myself under the number 45 bus rather than get on it. Oyster Cards, they’re depressing as well, from the fake cheery blueness of the packaging to the sad little bleep it makes when you swipe it to pay your fare; the succession of passengers getting on and touching the screen sounded to me like a hospital heart monitor. Bleep, bleep, bleep, went the heart and soul of London, until the number of commuters trying to get on increased to such numbers that I panicked the city was going to flatline. Anyway, we wrenched ourselves onto a seat and passed the time by talking about sex, which is always amusing in confined public spaces. It rained outside as we rode for 40 minutes and then the bus stopped and the driver shouted ‘everyone off.’ We could not see the big blue and yellow sign that promised unwaveringly to Make Our House a Home. The driver was non-committal. They’d changed his route over the radio and the bus was now out of service. We could wait for the next one in twenty minutes or walk a mile over the bridge and up the embankment, cut through the car park and get there on foot. We opted for the latter, then immediately regretted it as we crossed the bridge and found ourselves essentially in the middle of a very busy dual carriageway. The warehouse of cheap and easy home treats was beckoning us like a siren on the rocks and we could not reach her.
We stood for twenty minutes on the central reservation, and watched the next in-service number 45 go past and swing into the car park and drop off a load of middle-aged, heavy-weight women to the front door of the store. Finally we spotted a gap in the road and, now soaked through from the rain and promising ourselves a large plate of meatballs from the canteen, we sprinted like we were 14 years old in the county finals of the 50 yard dash. We made it and ran for cover into the lobby. The canteen was closed for refurbishment. We pushed on.
Jax got over-excited and started trying to buy plastic cutlery drainers that sit over the sink, and a bath rail. I reminded her that we don’t even have a bath. She then veered emotionally in the opposite direction when we hit the crockery department. She had had her heart set on Cath Kidston and Emma Bridgewater mugs and bowls and plates, but at 15 quid a pop, and bearing in mind we are struggling to finance toilet paper (those £50 light switches look great but they have a lot to answer for) we had decided against it, for now. Jax threw a tantrum. Ikea was shit. She wanted Bridgewater and she wanted it now. I walked away from her like a parent with a hysterical toddler, but then thought she might start trashing the display of sixties themed swirly plates, so I went back to calm her down. We managed to settle on plain white, and only 4 of everything, as they would be temporary until my plan to win the Lottery came to fruition. Then, in the living room department we struck gold with the most comfortable big fat armchair in the world, with a blue and white candy striped cover, the last on the shelf, to finish it off. We were over the moon, it would sit directly in the living room bay window, We would read our books in it while sipping tea and having the occasional nap, it looked Christmassy and Summery in equal measures and it came whole, not flat-packed. Jackpot. We hauled it onto a giant trolley and swerved it over to the checkout . Definitely too much treasure to carry on to a bus in the rain. I called our surrogate mother and they promised to send someone straight over.
The Addison Lee driver met us with a smile and a roll of the eyes.
“What on earth have you got here girls? We’ll never get that armchair in the back of this motor.”
We grinned at him like errant teenagers. The armchair fitted in, just, with a lot of panting and puffing from the driver. We told him our woes with public transport and how hungry we were with the lack of Swedish meatballs. He didn’t tell us for not eating before we left, he simply informed us that the Subway in the nearby retail park had Meatball Marinara sandwiches as their special of the day. How he knew this, I did not even care. To Subway we went and the three of us lined up Meatball Marinaras with Diet Cokes on the side. Back in Shoreditch the driver jumped out, opened the boot and took the armchair all the way up three flights of stairs and proudly into our living room. We tipped him handsomely and off he drove away into the night.
“Thanks Mum,” I whispered as I closed the front door.
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