WI Fi

I have finally made it to a meeting of the new local WI set up by my friend J after no-showing at the first two.

I find the pub heaving with all sorts of women that I know a bit from various phases of my life in the suburb (play group, school, ballet), and lots that I don't. Apart from having a drink and chatting, we have all come to hear a talk and try to get our heads around what it means to be at the WI really and not ironically.

I tell a member of the committee, who are all wearing hand embroidered name badges, that I grow a lot of fruit on my allotment but don't have much idea how to make jam. She says "I will take your subscription but they have very nice jam in Tescos."

The speaker is semi-famous. She used to present one of those iconic property shows where couples are taken somewhere they've never been before but might just conceivably want to move their whole lives to, and shown a series of derelict barns on a hillside full of goats, or luxury villas with artificial grass depending on their budget. She was unlucky enough to relocate to the suburb rather than to a Tuscan palazzo, and to employ one of the committee's husbands as her painter and decorator. Her anecdotes mainly focus on the celebrity editions of the show which sound entirely rigged, including her mortification when a well-known "It girl" urinated in the open air at the top of the drive leading down to a luxury Greek villa outside which she was standing with the local estate agents. The semi-famous one declares she is so enraptured by the whole WI buzz that she is going to join at some point - but she will be away filming a new show for the next 3 months.

After the talk we have the judging of the funniest holiday snap competition, which is won by a snap of a pair of white ankle socks and sandals. We then have notices. Our first outing will be to a racecourse where Peter Andre is performing. I'm not sure whether there will be any horses around but I'm pleased that being married to Katie Price didn't put him off them altogether. I won't be going on that trip but I'll probably be back to hear how to make a hanging basket with free Pimms next month.

Jam and Jamiroquai

Last night my friend J announced that she is going to start up a branch (chapter?) of the Women's Institute and that we would all be receiving an invitation to join. She thinks a W.I. in our suburb would be fairly cool, though not quite up to the standard of urban W.I.'s such as "The Shoreditch Sisters" (average age 30) or "The Borough Belles". We are to meet upstairs in a pub, enjoy talks, bop about a bit, drink and go on outings.

J emphasised many times that it would be non-religious and "inclusive". She made a circular motion with both hands (or a semi-circular motion with each hand) everytime she said "inclusive". In our suburb "inclusive" means that women who don't have children will be invited, and, to show that she means this, J has already signed up a single lady called C who used to have a posh shoe shop on the High Street until she was forced online by a rent rise.

Two head honchos from the W.I. Middlesex Federation are coming on an inspection visit on Friday and will be taken to the pub. The Middlesex Federation are all, apparently, pretty advanced in years, which is not surprising as Middlesex was wiped from the map in 1974 and hadn't been awfully rural for quite a few decades before that. I imagine a plucky rump group have clung on somewhere around Pinner waiting for Heathrow to be laid down to arable again. The call from J must have been unexpected.

H, who works for a trade union, looked quite appalled throughout the discussion. She eventually asked J why she didn't just start a book club if she wanted to drink and chat. But J is pursuing her genetic destiny: her mother is President of the local W.I. in West Yorkshire and her grandmother also did the gig back in the 60s. J is nearly 40 and obviously feels she can't wait much longer to have a W.I.

As it happens I am not as not up on W.I. matters as I ought to be. My mother-in-law is a member in Wales and I have read her mags in the toilet. So I was able to put forward the suggestion that we would soon be stripping off and smearing ourselves in ketchup and lying down in the High Street to protest about domestic violence. J gave me a beady look. She does not expect me to be on the committee but I will be required to talk to my friend who runs the Farmers' Market and fix her up with a good pitch for when the jamming season commences.

How only the Con-Dems are making me feel young again

Last night I sat next to a teenage girl on the bus. She was wearing a mini skirt with bare legs and talking to her friends on the phone about "Oceans"- the club she was on the way to. I was wearing an anorak and texting my friends - one about her chemotherapy and the other about how she is coping since she threw her partner out for sleeping with another woman.

Usually my reaction to teenage girls with bare legs in January who are on their way to a club on a Wednesday night, is to be jolly glad that I am snuggly dressed and heading home for a camomile tea (and to wonder if I should send my daughter to boarding school in Tehran before she works out where "Oceans" is). Yesterday I just envied this girl and wanted to turn the clock back as all the stuff that goes on when you are middle-aged is getting to me at the moment - from getting a builder out to look at my mum's crumbling roof to seeing how flabby I look in the mirror during the yoga class.

I have thought hard and the only exciting thing that has happened this week is that I looked after a West Highland Terrier for the day for a friend of a friend who apparently used to be on Blue Peter. Last time I watched Blue Peter Lesley Judd was wearing a smock and John Noakes and Shep were taking a Christmas food parcel to a lighthouse keeper so I can't say I recognised him (and he didn't give me a Blue Peter badge for washing muddy paws). I enjoyed the walk anyway but it's hardly going to qualify me for getting my phone tapped by News of the World.

The only thing making me feel young at present is the behaviour of the Con-Dems. The sale of publicly owned woodlands and the closure of local CABs and day centres certainly gets my adrenalin flowing. My Big Soc. skills are being tested to the limit at present as I dispense advice on how voluntary organisations should tell their staff that temporary contracts are being ended early and demand to be consulted because the Council is proposing to sell their premises. I suppose it's a bit like going back to the early Eighties when I was against Maggie and "the cuts" - can I recapture any of the energy that also found me in discos most nights of the week? I feel a bit more cheerful when I remember how I was once interviewed by the Daily Mail whilst wearing fluorescent pink trousers during a student occupation of Sussex University. I didn't have a phone at that time of course...

An ex-husband on the sofa

When a couple separates I mostly tend to think "Well, they weren't that well suited, maybe it's for the best - I still like them both, more likely to see her, but no problem having a cup of tea with him should it arise etc etc." But on just the odd occasion I think "This is completely bloody incredible, I do not think I will ever speak to him again"(it's always a "him" isn't it?!).

The separation of my former Latin American neighbours fell immediately, and more conclusively than any previous situation I had ever known, into category 2. If I just mention that he left her two days after she discovered she was pregnant with twins, having been quite insitent that they should have more children, although she suffered from very bad post-natal depression after the first one, you will probably be able to see why Latin American ex-husband shot to the top of the "do not darken my door" category, overtaking oil-trader husband who shut down the joint bank account leaving his wife having to borrow money to buy a pint of milk.

Well, time moves on and, after the return to Bogota, the birth of the twins, the divorce, a few more years and mucho agua appearing to have flowed under various Colombian bridges, it seemed that relations had become considerably more cordial between ex-husband and my amiga. Finally it was time to elevate oil-trader ex-husband back up to the top slot (for a particularly swanky incident involving an ill-timed holiday to Mauritius) and to let bygones be bygones (a.k.a. lo pasado, pasado esta).

So when I got an email in early December asking if ex-husband could sleep on our sofa for a few nights whilst dealing with some business in the UK I thought "Well it will be a bit of a squash what with the Norway Spruce, but the money he saves staying here will add to the maintenance he can pay so why not?" He arrived, he was as charming as ever, I discussed his financial problems and the state of the Colombian economy with him for hours, we all got on fine. A few friends looked at him hard in the High Street and said things like "Haven't you got twins now?" but it seemed as though we were going to get through the four days in a smooth and civilised fashion.

Then the snow came, Heathrow shut and a short visit has become a long visit. Ex-husband has sunk into a depression and lies on the sofa under a blanket listening to internet news from Bogota and drawing bubble diagrams. I have sunk into a cold with washing-machine head and lie on my bed in a darkened room brooding about the fact that I can't lie on the sofa looking at the lights on the Norway Spruce. This period has gone on for days. Everytime ex-husband and I drag one another out to a coffee shop on the high street we bump into my daughter's class teacher who seems to have nothing to do but hang out with her girlfriends now term is over. I feel too weak to explain that ex-husband is not, in fact, my daughter's father, although he came to the carol service last week and I spend a lot of time in Starbucks with him.

But at last the blessed Richard Branson has come up with a flight back over the Atlantic for ex-husband - on Xmas morning and from Gatwick to which there is absolutely no form of public transport whatsoever. My daughter has been persuaded that the presence of a large Latin American on the sofa will not deter Santa from delivering down the chimney and my partner has been persuaded to rise at 6am for a lovely jaunt down to Sussex. My cold is lifting and I feel Xmas cheer finally beginning to swell within me! Feliz Navidad!

Thoughts about sports

Save school sport! I am very surprised to find myself writing these words as I wasn't exactly keen on sport when I was at school. Needless to say, with all the publicity about modern children becoming obese and getting rickets because they never go outside, I have become keen in a secondhand sort of way. This is probably a bit hypocritical - but then some aspects of parenting are hypocritical I find (discuss?).

Today my daughter was ordered onto the icy playing fields for compulsory participation in the Year 5 football tournament. Her five-a-side mixed team was down to four due to illness: one medium-tough girl in goal, herself and another weedy girl huddled together trying to keep out of trouble, and one very small boy who tries hard but doesn't quite cut the mustard. Their team (Yellow 3) played five minutes each way against a team containing Superboy. Superboy's Dad astroturfed the garden when he was three and he now plays for Fulham under-10s. My daughter thinks Yellow 3 lost by about 6-0 but says she wasn't really watching.

Also today David Cameron has been hanging out with Prince William and David Beckham trying to persuade FIFA to give the UK the World Cup in 2018, despite our nasty nose-poking journalists who keep fussing about bribery, not to mention our budget deficit. It doesn't seem to occur to them that trying to bag another top event when we've not even got the Olympics out of the way could look a bit greedy.

There is a link between these two paragraphs (unbelievably!). My daughter's chilly morning was organised by the local School Sports' Partnership which arranged for teenagers from the local comprehensive to run the tournament. It ensures that lots of different sports are available in schools, including ones like cheerleading and trampolining which are persuading teenage girls to stay active (whilst remaining firmly indoors with make-up on). It also organises sports' tournaments between schools ie. healthy competition which is surely the Tory party's sort of thing? And, of course, the UK got the Olympics because we took all those children to Singapore and promised that we were going to do our utmost to give everyone a chance to enjoy sport which is how the School Sports' Partnerships came to be set up.

But because School Sports' Partnerships are a Labour Government invention they are being scrapped and every school is being given the "freedom" to go back to spending hours ringing round other schools and saying "Send your first and second elevens over on Saturday afternoon for a match and we'll make everyone who isn't good at rugger watch". How very short-sighted!

There is, of course, a non-sporting reason to hang onto school sport too: our rich British sub-culture of school-sport funny stories. My daughter had me in stitches re-enacting the way in which Yellow 3 retreated as Superboy thundered down the pitch. Nothing remotely so much fun ever happened to me at my very dull junior school where we mainly threw bean bags into hoops. When Superboy attains Beckham-like status in time for the 2018 World Cup she will have a wonderful anecdote to dine out on or put in her very own blog!

Lighting up

Every year there is a lighting up ceremony in the suburb where I live to celebrate the beginning of Christmas. The local town hall was merged into a bigger suburb many years ago but the building is still there with a patch of green in front of it and a couple of London plane trees. They get adorned with bluish fairy lights, and the dentists, who bought the town hall when it was deeemed too old-fashioned for council offices a couple of years ago, kindly allow the lights to be plugged into their supply. Luckily the lights don't get switched off as soon as they stop drilling at night.

This year we had a proper local celebrity to switch on: Dame Jacqueline Wilson, prolific author of kids' misery lit., who lives in another suburb nearby. After some carols from the Rotarians, Dame Jacqueline told us that she likes coming to our suburb because it has really nice shops, and wished us the Merry Christmas that is denied to so many of the children in her books (she didn't actually say that.)

Then we all set off to do the rounds, which, in my case, means being dragged by my daughter into all the shops that I don't normally go in because they look embarrassingly empty and sell pointless things like tiaras and candles with bits of orange peel in them. There was one shop that had raced to open that day and didn't even have a name yet but it seemed to sell nothing but Italian biscuits. We also visited the ex-bathroom shop that now sells wood-burning stoves, probably mainly to people like me that have "Country Living" aspirations.

The good part about it all is bumping into friends all round the circuit and having a free drink with them. The estate agents and hairdressers are particularly generous with the mulled wine and mince pies. The new independent self-employed persons' network, which is full of parents from the school, were also dishing out "Celebrations" and hot toddy. I suppose there is a sense of community here which is a lot better than nothing so I should be grateful for that and not be (overly!) cynical about life in an "urban village".

The Big Soc. Speech

David Cameron has set out his vision for the Big Society at the Tory party conference. I didn't watch it live but I have read it on a website, accompanied by a photo of him grinning a bit tentatively without showing his lips.

I am sympathetic to what DC has to say about the need for people to change the way that they think about themselves and their role in society. Yes, a lot of people do seem to think that if they pay their taxes (or not) someone else will sort everything out. I like the fact that he says that the state of the nation is determined not just by its government and those who run it but by "millions of individual actions - by what each of us do and what we choose not to do". I like his call for people to take the initiative and work together to get things done.

I confess that since becoming a bit more old and settled and moving to a suburb I have been rather shocked by how many affluent people don't seem interested in life outside their immediate social circle and day to day routines. It's not that I expect everyone to want to carry out undercover investigations of the Japanese whaling industry or fret about tar sands extraction in Alberta, but working together to sort out the swimming rota and find the best builder to do loft conversions is not going to get the UK very far down the road to Big Soc.

However, I part company with DC about whether Big Soc. is really "a brand new start" for Britain. A percentage of the population has always behaved in a big soc. way and many charities and other organisations, large and small, have been initiating and supporting community action successfully for a very long time.

There's something deeply irritating about the way in which politicians like to wipe the slate clean and get rid of their predecessors' initiatives and branding (and quangos) even if these are perfectly compatible with the ideas of the new administration. I heard an impassioned talk recently by a man who had set up an amazing social enterprise on his run down estate in Luton. It was about to receive funding from a programme launched by the last Government which would have create lots of jobs for the long term unemployed. At the 11th hour the programme was withdrawn by the new Government and the money had vanished, even though everything they planned to do was completely Big Soc. and DC had begged him to be in the Tory manifesto!

So I hope the Conservatives will be able to persuade more people that they will enjoy getting involved in their local communities as opposed to sitting in front of the TV every night. But please DC can you stop pretending that we are having a totally new start and try to minimise the number of new documents to read, new conferences to go to and new forms to fill in, as it will cause months if not years of delay.

Big Nostalgia

As the autumn begins I am in my run up to the 10th anniversary of the only time I ever gave birth. South west London is so full of women with big bulges and/or prams that I don't normally notice them (although I do give up my seat on the bus!) but at the moment I find myself staring and marvelling at how fast the time has gone.

I can just remember what it was like not be able to do bend forward to do up my own shoes, and a day in which the most activity I could manage was walking down the road to the Post Office to buy a stamp. I stopped going to work in mid September in the midst of an office move because I couldn't lift anything or find anything. However I was still struggling to finish a lengthy guide to the legal aspects of campaigning against incinerators for an organisation that had already paid me to write it several months earlier: I'm glad I did actually get it done or it would have been another year (and maybe a few more incinerators!). My dad's friend Graham came to install a new bathroom and I went to visit my sister in Hastings on the train, which was unbelievably bumpy. She bravely drove me home although the fuel protests had erupted and she had no idea if the men in deckchairs outside the BP depots would let the petrol out for her return journey.

I was determined that the baby wouldn't arrive early. My partner was working up in Wakefield and not due to finish until the day I was due to give birth. Although dates mean nothing at that stage, I took great comfort in the fact that first babies are always late, and I clung to the belief that if the women from my ante-natal class who were due before me had not yet produced then I was safe. My friend over the road was due on the same day and it was her second so I convinced myself she would be going first.

Luckily my daughter hung on for an extra three days and, after a long day that began at 4am, was finally born at 10pm. Meanwhile my friend over the road popped into the hospital at 3pm, gave birth in the next room half an hour later and went home again at 7.30pm. I think I would have found that a bit too quick and scary!

Back to school

Back we go, no longer keen enough to have an early night, clean the shoes or even empty last year's shavings out of the pencil case. But keen to see friends again following a two week holiday in a damp part of the Netherlands with only parents.

The new class teacher is not really new as she is entering her third successive cycle with the group of 90 now known as Year 5. There is a new girl to replace the one who went to Australia and didn't cry: she has already lived in Australia, Germany, Hong Kong and Sweden. At 9 and a quarter, this is her fifth school.

The new Chair of the Parents' Association is also Australian, as was the one before last. (NB. Perhaps the Tories need to raise their quota on Antipodeans to help get Big Soc. off the ground?) Interestingly this Chair is a man. He works full time so will not be able to hang around the playground taking directions from the headmaster, placating the caretaker, manhandling the tea urn and repacking the Parents' Association shed when an avalanche of Costco crisps slides out into the mud. He got the job because nobody else could be persuaded to do it having seen how much of all of the above was involved: he wasn't there to watch it happening twice a day. He was told it was all about chairing a meeting once a month and delegating. I know, because I was called in to advise last term when a no-Chair constitutional crisis unfolded. My contribution was to suggest that it was probably better to ignore the constitution. (It said noone else could be elected until there was a Chair, meaning no cheques could be signed so no tea bags purchased for after school football tea trolley on Thursdays etc.)

My own school duties include looking after the Nature Area, a quiet half acre woodland oasis tucked away in one corner of the site which has somehow avoided being sold off for development. Whilst I was on holiday last week a huge chestnut tree crashed into it from an adjoining block of flats and a tree surgeon is needed to remove it.

I have also succumbed to being class rep this year as part of a "team ministry" with two others. It was pointed out that we were the only vaguely sociable mums with email not to have done it so far. Our class has approximately 25% "non combatant" parents who have never helped at a stall or come to a social event. If the little society that is their own child's primary school doesn't interest them I wonder what the chances of them being interested in the big one that is coming are?!

Holiday comings and goings

At this time of year friends who used to live here come back to visit with their kids, friends pack up to leave, either permanently or temporarily, and friends reappear in time for the new school year after an absence living elsewhere.

I find it interesting to see how their children deal with the upheaval. I remember a moment of terror during my own childhood when it was suggested that we might move to Dundee. I cowered at the thought of going to a new school where I would sound funny and it would be really cold. My own daughter has announced that she wants to live in our house "forever". She finds even the idea of moving down the road deeply traumatic despite her desire for a bigger garden filled with lavish guinea pig accommodation.

Some children just don't seem bothered. My daughter was quite indignant when one of her classmates left to move to Australia last month because the girl failed to cry, unlike all those she was leaving behind, including most of their mothers. The fact that the departed one has an Australian mother and granny plus cousins and aunts, has often been there on holiday, will be living near the beach in a bigger house, presumably with masses of room for guinea pigs in the garden (or the equivalent marsupial), so presumably will feel very at home very soon, made no difference to my daughter's view of the situation.

The young visitors who seem to get the most out of the toing and froing are those who go for two to three years and come back at least once a year to visit. Their visits are a social whirl of picnics and sleepovers, and often they go into school for a day or two to rejoin their former class. They also keep in touch via their mums' Facebook efforts. I've seen several returnees slip back into the swing of things so effortlessly that it's made me wish we'd bunked off somewhere warmer for a couple of years.

The unknown timescale and destination are unsettling. One family left quite suddenly last Autumn. Their first destination was the East Coast, but it was likely to be the West Coast after the first year, or possibly they might come back again, or maybe they would go somewhere else (the husband is a change management consultant!) My friend reported that her eight year old daughter was at first very homesick for England, and then entered a state of existential crisis about where "home" was which she is only gradually emerging from now it has been decided that they are not moving on again but are staying in the same place on the East Coast.

Another friend took her children to live in Cambridge five years ago when they were eight and four. They often asked to go home (meaning the house they had sold here) for the first few months but gradually adjusted. On occasional return visits they claimed not to remember anything or anyone very much. Now they have unexpectedly come back to live here aged thirteen and nine and it feels like starting again as they haven't kept in touch with many people. (Of course you always bump into people who say "Haven't seen you for a while, what have you been up to?")

So the key to moving with children seems to be either to convince them that they are going on a series of giant holidays punctuated by yearly deja-vue trips back to school and pals, and will be returning, or to convince them that they have never been at home where you are but are now going home. Sorted!