If only I could swear in another language.

Or maybe two, or three..you know if I really needed to let rip. To let it all out. To vent my spleen.

Con­stant craving.

Con­stant frustration.

It’s bad form to tell you what, in colour­ful lurid detail. So it would be help­ful to explode in flu­ent French (for exam­ple). I don’t know any­one in France who would be offended.

Suf­fice to say .…

STUFF!

In BIG cap­i­tal let­ters with excla­ma­tion marks, maybe even a  cou­ple of aster­isks, and a few inti­mated read-between-the-lines f words.

Where the hell did the time go?

I sat with you as you ably dis­cussed your col­lege course with your tutor today. You were polite, and qui­etly con­fi­dent.  I couldn’t help remem­ber­ing your first day at school. As I remem­bered that day all those years ago, you changed before me. Before my eyes your legs shrunk back to the those lit­tle podgy calves, the bris­tles on your chin replaced by a five year old’s freck­les, your man’s hands back to the fin­gers that strug­gled to hold the wrig­gly pen­cil.

I’ve been think­ing a great deal about decorum.

Maybe that’s because some­one recently inti­mated I don’t have any. I think I do, but obvi­ously my def­i­n­i­tion may be dif­fer­ent from my elderly par­ents or parents-in-law, or at the other extreme, my children’s.

Miss Man­ners where are you in the social media age?

Exactly what is the appro­pri­ate way for some­one — a blog­ger, a writer, a wife, a mother — to behave online and offline?

The anx­i­ety hit as we left the motor­way at Newbury.

We had only been away for two days. We’d had a fab­u­lous time in Strat­ford Upon Avon but now it was time to go home. I didn’t really want to go home. Sure, I wanted to see the kids. I just didn’t want to see the mess, the house­work, the dishes, the piles of laundry…assuming of course there was a house still stand­ing, con­sid­er­ing.….

For me it is a cru­cial lit­mus test.

More impor­tant than the mar­mite, veg­emite thing.

I need cof­fee like desert needs the rain

Far more reveal­ing than the lemon ver­sus choco­late debate. I can even see the mer­its of both sides and argue both sides mag­nan­i­mously, when it comes to the hol­i­day in the snow ver­sus the beach argument.

But there is one thing I can­not con­sider from the oppo­site point of view.

One cru­cial thing that comes between us.

I didn’t used to get spam on this blog, and hon­estly I felt spurned. Looked over, ignored.

What did I have to do to get me some spam?

Was I not ‘suc­cess­ful’ enough as a blog­ger to attract the atten­tion of the spam­mers. For as any­one will tell you like Life Insur­ance bro­kers only tar­get peo­ple who have absolutely no sus­cep­ti­bil­ity to sud­den, ran­dom death, spam­mers only tar­get the hope­lessly suc­cess­ful who do not need their link­age, traf­fic or libido enhance­ment materials.

OMG is the clue in that last sen­tence?

When I was a kid we typ­i­cally didn’t take fam­ily holidays. vegemitevix holiday success

Not because we couldn’t afford it, but because my father could not take time off his busy exec­u­tive role. If we did go on hol­i­day it was always just my Mum, my sis­ter and me. We were for­tu­nate to travel to Aus­tralia, and Fiji, and to US. Typ­i­cally we lazed about the house and lay by the pool. When we were lit­tle Mum would take us down to the beach where we’d have damper on a stick and roast marsh­mel­lows.

The guy ahead of me in the shop­ping queue obvi­ously takes a lot of pride with his appear­ance. So why does he allow it to happen?

His hair is care­fully full of gel. Per­son­ally I think gel in men’s hair is a lit­tle 1980s and is up there with pink polo shirts and white ‘slacks’ but hey it’s his hair, what there is left of it.

I’ve recently been watch­ing the BBC series Tribal Wives, and it got me to think­ing. If I was to instruct a woman com­ing into our cul­ture, here in the UK, what instruc­tions would I give them? Trbal Wives in Britain

In Tribal Wives a British woman is trans­ported from her home in the west­ern world to an indig­i­neous tribal soci­ety some­where where there’s a dirth of Coca Cola bill­boards and run­ning water. Inevitably she dis­cov­ers how to cope with­out her eye­lash curlers, and comes to terms with the ‘shared human­ity’ of wom­enkind around the world.

I’m out vis­it­ing the lovely wee shop­ping mecca of New­bury, lick­ing my wounds and hiding.

When things get tough, the tough get shop­ping! I just needed out to process some stuff and I find wan­der­ing the shops sooth­ing. It doesn’t frus­trate me that I can­not buy any­thing.