Crazy boots.

I really hate winter. “But you get to wear boots!” said my friend Julie, when I said this to her recently. “Boots,” I replied, “are no compensation.” Winter makes me depressed. Give me a summer’s day any day, a thin dress, a pair of open-toed wedges. Wedges give you a bit of height, add shape to the leg, show off pretty painted toes. You can skip down the road to the Tube in a dress and a pair of wedges and feel like the cat's pyjamas. By comparison, boots are dull.

The problem with boots is they are flat, or, if they are not flat, they risk making you look like a goose-stepping Nazi or a hooker - or both. For the longest time I've been on the look out for the perfect winter boot/shoe. Something to replace the summer wedge, something that is not black or grey or brown, that is not boring and flat, like these...

Or does not make you look like a prostitute, like these...

or these...

And is that hard? I hear you ask. You betcha. I calculate I have been searching for three years, but it could be longer. Last week I found them.

I was on my way to the hairdressers before pre-theatre dinner with mates and I spotted a crazy pair of ankle boots in the window of a high street store. Wow, I thought. I went in, I tried them on, they were perfect, and bonkers, and made out of psychedelic carpet bag material. Mary Poppins boots. 

Mary in the sky with a carpet bag.

The assistant serving me was wearing a pair. “I’ve even had compliments from men about these boots,” she said, and that clinched it. I strolled over to the mirror and the boots looked even better in the reflection than they did from above. They were not black or grey or brown, they had a small block heel but not too much, they were something between a shoe and a boot and they did not make me look like a prostitute. When I asked the price I almost died. Never in my life have I paid such a sum for footwear. “Fuck it,” I said, “I'm having them,” and the shop assistant laughed and then relieved me of my money. I put my new boots on and sauntered off to the hairdressers.

Sergio nearly fainted. “But they’re so gay!” I said to Sergio, my hairdresser. “Darling, darling, darling,” replied Sergio, “they are beyond gay,” and I took that as a compliment. I took a photograph of my boots and entitled it “crazy boots” and sent it to Husband. “Very crazy,” came back the reply, and I took that as a compliment as well.

I went to the restaurant after the hairdressers, which involved a long walk and traversing Waterloo bridge in the wind, which totally screwed up my new post-salon hair, but I didn’t care: I was wearing new boots. People stared, a woman pointed, small children laughed, and I was walking on air. Or rather, on very expensive leather soles, made in Spain.

At the restaurant I showed my friends. “How much?” they said. “I cannot tell you," I said. “But here’s my thinking: I'm making a little film at the moment, for which I will receive payment to pay for my boots, and I have been looking for these boots for years. So right here you are looking at many years' worth of boot, all in one piece of footwear.”

O-kaaaay, they said, and then, when we had to wait too long for the food, I looked down at my boots again, perched on the end of my legs there under the table, and I didn’t care. And when the waiter came over to give us each a shot glass of Limoncello, by way of an apology, I drank it and cared even less. And later, when we went to see Glenda Jackson being King Lear at the Old Vic on a stage full of famous actors, and the actor playing Edmond suddenly showed off his spectacular bare arse, and the actor playing Edgar suddenly showed off his unspectacular bare cock, (it was a modern production) I went to the loo in the much-too-short interval and queued up in a very long line, and a woman behind me said, “the queue for the men's is almost as long as the queue for the women's.” And I said, “well, I guess that’s equality for you.” And she said, “also, do you mind if I just say..." And I said, "yes?" And she said, "I love those boots!" 

One hell of a Lear.

And once in the loos, precisely two more women said, “where did you get those boots?” and I laughed. And when I went back to my seat after the interval, at the very back of the stalls, and rested my head against the sound stage behind and briefly nodded off because of the Limoncello, I dreamt I was wearing the most marvellous pair of carpet bag boots and the best bit of the evening was that when I woke up, it was true.

Love E x

@DOESNOTDOIT

P.S. So maybe winter isn't that bad after all.

These boots make me laugh.

Not drunk, just drinking.

Somewhere along the line turning 18 has turned into a drinking thing. On Eldest's 18th birthday his father met him at a local pub on his way home from work to buy him a celebratory pint, which was a bit of a farce because of course he’d been drinking in pubs for ages, ever since he destroyed the iron and the ironing board attempting to ‘laminate' a fake ID card. Middle One is to be treated to the same ritual on Friday night, except he’s going to the pub with both his father and his older brother, who is coming home for the weekend to celebrate.

I don’t remember this legal drinking thing being a big deal, way back when I turned 18. I drank in the back room at the Black Bull in the village of Escrick from the age of 14. It wasn’t until I won a national writing competition and my photograph was in the local paper with my age underneath that there was a problem with this. Unfortunately the landlord saw it. After that I drank lemonade that my friends spiked with booze when his back was turned. Our gateway alcohol was cider, although there was the unforgettable Malibu debacle of New Year’s Eve 1982 when I was taken to a party by a boy who lived two doors down from us, who was a medic at The Royal Free Hospital in London, and briefly home for Christmas. He plied me with Malibu and then named all my body parts for me, slowly, one by one, using the correct medical terminology (class), with some help from his hands. I haven't touched the stuff since. Not once.

On Saturday night, for Middle One’s birthday, there's a family dinner at a central London restaurant, with cocktails, for four, because now we can.

“I love this bar," I say, as the five of us perch on bar stools like birds on wire. "And I’m definitely having a pina colada like last time. I don’t care if it’s uncool. I like it."

"Don’t get drunk, Mummy," says Youngest. "I don’t like it when you’ve been drinking."

What he means is he doesn’t like it when I’ve had a couple of beers and a glass of wine and I get a bit over-confident and cheerful.

"You’ve never seen me drunk," I say. "In any case, I’m a nice drunk, affectionate, not like Daddy, who turns belligerent."

"I do not turn belligerent," says Husband.

Middle One ponders the cocktail menu. "Have a pina colada," I say, "they’re great."

"Bit gay, though," he says.

"That’s sexist," says Youngest.

"There’s no such thing as a girl’s drink or a boy's drink these days," I say. "It's all gone non-binary and gender fluid."

"I’m definitely not having a cocktail of gender fluid," he says. So we order two pina coladas.

I like pina coladas.

Eldest orders an old fashioned, which is whiskey - I think - and Mr Bartender asks for his ID, and not Middle One's, which everyone thinks is hilarious except for Eldest who has to whip out his student card. But at least it's the real thing, at last. He's keen to 'preload' at our expense before hitting a party with some LSE mates, in Angel; and to use the brand new all-night service on the Northern Line to get home. He needs to eat a lot in the restaurant first, though, because he doesn’t do a lot of that at university.

"It's like Viking heaven," he says, tucking into a mountain of steak with a side order of bone marrow, and a beer.

"Van Halen," I say.

"Valhalla," says Middle One.

"That’s the one."

"You’re drunk, Mummy," says Youngest.

"I'm really not," I say, "I only get drunk if I'm drinking wine, I’ve had one cocktail."

"I’m ordering a bottle of red wine," says Husband.

"Are you sure we need that as well?" I say. "Let's just have a glass each."

"No." He says. "I am ordering a bottle."

"I’ll have some," says Middle One.

"And me," says Eldest.

I think about their fresh little livers (near the diaphragm, not far from the mammary glands), about to be pumped full of alcohol. But what can I say? I was drinking at 14.

"I'm bored," says Youngest.

"You need to discover the art of conversation," I tell him.

"Yeah," says Eldest. "So you can talk to girls, and say, Oh really? Tell me more, that’s so fascinating…"

"Until you marry them," I add. Cheerfully.

At the end of the meal we part company outside in the street, in the rain - Eldest off to the party, the rest of us for home.

"Filthy weather," I say. "Let's get a cab!"

"Oh for God's sake," says Husband. But then he suddenly sticks his arm out to hail one.

Three cheers to that.


Love E x


@DOESNOTDOIT

P.S. Sunday morning we're regaled with tales from the night before, when everyone at the LSE party talked about The Communist Manifesto, apparently, like some sort of cliche. "And was everyone pissed at 3am on the Northern Line?" I ask. "Oh yeah," says Eldest. "Plus there was this guy in my carriage smoking a spliff." 

"Of all the g... " you know the rest.

Eighteen.

Tomorrow Middle One turns eighteen which is strange because it seems like he’s been eighteen for ages, or at least since he was ten. He’s always been older than his years. The sensible one. The one who refused to swim in the sea that time in Crete when all the other kids did because he didn’t like the look of it, and it turned out there was a warning flag and rip tide alert we'd all missed. The sort of kid teachers ask to carry the register to the school office.

When it was his time to be born, at home, as Youngest was too, I spent the following few days in bed with him. Our toddler still didn't sleep through, the new baby was awake all day and most of the night, so here was a rare excuse to excuse myself from life, and I took it. From the sanctuary of my bed I could see two trees across the road and I watched as their leaves turned yellow and fell to the ground and the evenings closed in around us earlier and earlier.

Just born.

On one of those precious, breast-feeding afternoons, I also - somewhat amazingly - found time to read. I'd paid our cleaner to take the toddler to the playground after morning nursery, so the house was unusually silent. Silent as a grave, you might say. The baby dozed between feeds, the November sun sank behind the terraced houses opposite, and I devoured Birdsong by Sebastian Faulks. Perhaps because I’d recently given birth or perhaps because Armistice Day had just passed or perhaps because it's a brilliant book - or perhaps for all three reasons - it had a profound effect on me.

Distant rest.

Boys were sent to that war, the one that book is about, to die long before their rightful time; and die they did in their millions, British, French, German and more. All began as babies at their mother’s breast, like the one I had at mine. No one will ever have this boy for their war, I remember thinking, or any boy of mine. Over my dead body. But of course there were mothers in 1914, 15, 16, 17 and 18, who must have thought the same, to no avail.

That late afternoon, with the toddler at the playground, the telephone off its hook, the infant replete with milk, the pages of the novel flying through my hands, the baby raised his head from my chest in a startlingly precocious manner and looked straight into my eyes and down into my heart. And he’s been there ever since.

Happy birthday my beautiful boy.

Love E x

@DOESNOTDOIT

P.S. And by the way, I forgive you about the K9 costume I made for Halloween that time when you were eight - the one that I took hours to make, with the red Quality Street paper eyes, the ears that swivelled, that you said was crap -  it's ok, really. No charge.

Yawn.

With a knackered - but extremely young-looking - Mummy.

Ok, so I found the K9 costume and he's right it was crap.

Das Beste!

'I’m only speaking German to impress my wife,' my husband tells the taxi driver, in German, on the way into Vienna from the airport. 

'That's very impressive,' I say, in English.

At the hotel, the guy behind the reception desk says, 'This is the best room in the hotel,' also in English, as he hands us a key card. 

After inspecting the best room in the hotel, I turn to my husband and say, 'There’s no bath,' (I do love a bath), then I watch my husband's eyebrows shoot up. 'Aber das ist das beste zimmer des hotels!' my husband says.

We look at another room that has a bath, but it's not nearly so nice as the best room so we stay in the best room. 'Why do we always have to have a thing about rooms?' my husband says, 'and tables in restaurants?' 

'Because I like das beste,' I tell him.

In the morning, from the shower, I shout: 'Sod the bath! This is das beste shower I ever had!' and my husband's eyebrows shoot up again (I don’t actually see this because I’m in the shower, but I know that they do).

Fruit and nut case.

At breakfast, the muesli comes with ten different types of seed and dried fruit. 'This is das beste breakfast I ever had in a hotel!' I tell my husband. 'I need your phone.'

'Why?' he asks.

'To take a photograph of it,' I say, 'and to make a note for my blog. I left my phone upstairs.'

'You’re like Schubert,' my husband says, 'waking in the night with inspiration and then writing a song.'

'Yeah,' I say. 'I’m exactly like Schubert.'

'I never knew the old Vienna.'

'There are lots of big statues with men on horses,' I say to my husband as we walk across the city to the Belvedere.

'I think you mean equestrian,' my husband replies. 'There’s always a word.'

'I’m really looking forward to seeing The Three Ages of Woman,' I tell my husband.

'What’s The Three Ages of Woman?' he says.

'You know,' I say, 'the Klimt, called The Three Ages of Woman.'

My husband looks at me blankly.

'We have it in the house,' I say, in a gold frame. There’s a postcard of it by my desk. It's on my keyring.'

'Nope,' he says.

In the Belvedere, we see The Kiss. It hangs on a black wall. She has coloured circles with a few rectangles over gold. He has black rectangles with a few coloured circles over gold. They glow together inside a halo of... gold.

The Kiss.

A woman standing next to me isn’t looking at The Kiss, she's looking at my coat. 'I love your coat,' she says, in French.

'Thank you!' I say. 'It’s new and I like it because it’s colourful with a pattern and so many coats are sombre and dark and it’s from this shop in London called Joy and it's really not expensive and you might be able to get it online and it would be even cheaper for you because of the Euro!' All in English.

The woman stares at me, then my husband repeats everything I just said in French, then the woman smiles.

'I do that all the time now, too,' my husband says after the smiling French woman has walked away.

'Do what?' I say.

'Talk to complete strangers,' he says. 'It must be our age.'

Just off the gallery, there is a room with nothing in it except a full-size reproduction of The Kiss, expressly for tourists to take selfies in front of, kissing each other. 

'That's depressing,' I say to my husband.

'Why is it depressing?' he says.

'I don't know exactly,' I say. 'It just is.'

Rock me Amadeus.

Later, in the Mozarthaus, I trail behind my husband while he reads all the blurb on the walls. I want to see Mozart’s belongings: the bed he slept in, the desk he composed at, that sort of thing, but there’s nothing like that. I stare out of the window, trying to imagine Mozart composing The Magic Flute and getting stuck at a hard bit and staring out of this exact same window. Down in the street, a flotilla of Japanese people drifts past on a boundless sea of tourists.

'Is Mozart your John Lennon?' I ask my husband when I catch up with him again.

'No,' he says. 'That would be Josef Haydn.'

In the souvenir shop, they sell pasta shaped like musical notes. I find this depressing as well.

'If music be the food of love..'

In the evening, we see The Magic Flute at Die Volksoper. We wanted to see something at Die Staatsoper but all the tickets had gone. The Magic Flute is wunderbar but I forgot that the story is bonkers.

Next morning, we walk to The Leopold Museum in the rain. 'Es regnet katzen und hunde,' says my husband.

'I’m looking forward to seeing more Klimts,' I say, 'particularly The Three Ages of Woman.'

But we don’t see The Three Ages of Woman. We see a lot of Egon Schiele. 

'I don’t think I like these,' I say to my husband, as we're standing in front of one; this one actually...

'I know what you mean,' my husband says, tilting his head to one side, 'Schiele's paintings are kind of… a bit...'

'Gynaecological?' I say

'Genau,' says my husband. 

'There's always a word,' I say.

E x

P.S. It turns out The Three Ages of Woman is in Rome.

On the road.

My plan to go to New York at half-term is met with resistance. Middle One wants to be at home with his mates. Youngest wants to be at home with his computer. Husband wants to be at home. Husband says he’s not interested in going to the States but he supposes if he had to go he would choose New York.

I’d go again tomorrow if it were up to me. I'd also go to Norway, Iceland, South America, Australia, China, more of Africa, Thailand, Japan, Sweden once again, India and most of all Canada, because I haven’t been since I was a girl. I have another plan: to go to Canada next summer whether they like it or not, and to San Francisco because from what I recall San Francisco is fantastic and incidentally the setting for the film Vertigo, which I love but not as much as I love Rear Window, which is set in New York, of course. 

When I was nine and we were living in Vancouver my parents blagged my brother and me several weeks off school, bought a trailer, hooked it up to our silver Chevrolet, and drove us to Mexico. The best teacher is experience, to quote a phrase, and my mother, being one, knew this. Plus she made us do school work on the trip and write diaries about it, just in case. I still have mine. It details the trivia captivating to a nine-year-old: a dog howling all night in a trailer park in Oregon; strange insects on the bottom of a swimming pool in Arizona; boiled crab we ate at Fisherman’s Wharf in San Francisco; and my favourite memory: my brother winning a fistful of dollars in Las Vegas. I say my brother but really it was my dad because it's illegal for a six-year-old to operate a one-armed bandit. We were crossing a busy casino to get to a restaurant and my brother wanted a go. “Gamblers never win,” asserted my dad, before inserting his dime, pulling the handle, and watching the filthy lucre rain down into his little son's hands. I still remember the grin on his face. My brother's, not my father's.

On the road to San Francisco, and then to Mexico.

To pass the long hours travelling in the back of the Chevrolet my brother and I devised complicated imaginary worlds and quizzed each other about them. One favourite was about an alien who'd landed from outer space. We took turns to be the alien. The other had to describe the world he'd landed in, except it wasn’t this world, it was a different one entirely. We were so engrossed in this that our parents struggled to interest us in the passing landscape. “Look, children!” my mother exclaimed, “the Grand Canyon!” and we barely looked up. We were travelling in a literal sense but we were also travelling in our minds.

I was reminded of this the other day when I read an account of a man who spent 28 years on death row before being pardoned. “I let my mind travel,” he said. “I visited the Queen; married Halle Berry.” And I remember Brian Keenan writing something similar in his extraordinary book An Evil Cradling. As a hostage in Beirut from 1986 to 1990 he was kept alone in darkness for much of the time, developing a way of accessing memories and whole passages from novels and poems he'd read long before. I hasten to add that I’m not equating travelling in the back of a Chevrolet as a kid with being a hostage in Beirut, or rotting on death row, just that there are parts of our minds we use as children and when put under extreme pressure (unimaginable pressure) that are otherwise left unexplored, except perhaps in dreams.

Here are two more memories from that West Coast trip - watching a koala up close in San Diego Zoo. “I’ve been coming here twenty years,” said the woman next to us, looking at the marsupial in disbelief, “and that koala has never come down from that tree before.” (I remember feeling especially honoured by this.) And our trailer tyre blowing out on a rocky road in Mexico. My dad had to leave us in the heat haze and drive off to find a garage. The three of us spent hours sitting next to that wonky trailer, my mother encouraging us to watch ants going round in circles in the dust, carrying our fallen cookie crumbs twice their body size, as she furtively kept one eye on the trailer and the other on the road until finally my father returned with a mechanic, and more importantly a new tyre.

In San Francisco - very funny. Spot the Rhoda headscarf, I aways preferred Brenda anyway.

Memories like these are gifts our parents gave us. I'd like to give similar ones to my children. Someday we'll look back and memories will be all we have. Who will recall an October half-term spent playing a computer game? Or hanging out with mates? But in the face of vociferous opposition and after working out the vast expense, I gave up on the New York plan. Okay, we'll just stay here, I thought, that's the way life goes. 

We’re off to Vienna in term time instead, when schools are back and it will be much cheaper. Just the two of us. Travelling light without the kids. Tomorrow.

Love E x

@DOESNOTDOIT

P.S. We land before sunset.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhoda