Deliver unto us our daily bread

Watching the supermarket vans pootling around South London, I am reminded that there is nothing new under the sun. Ordering online may be very 21st century, but having your groceries delivered was the norm for most of the 20th century. Only in the last few decades of the last century, when cars and supermarkets became ubiquitous, did we take it for granted that we had to go to the shop, the shop couldn't come to us.

When I was little, my mother didn't drive (she could drive, but it was generally considered better that she didn't, more of which later). So my father was sent off on a Saturday morning with a list to do The Big Shop. My father liked the list to be written in the right order, according to the layout of the shop. He even went as far as to type out a master list that my mother could consult when compiling the weekly list, so she could select the items she wanted and write them down in the right order. It is to my mother's eternal credit that not only did she use this master list, but she seemed to do it with a good grace too.

During the week, supplies were topped up by the delivery men. My personal favourite was the bread man. He would pull into our drive in his little Ormo Bakery truck, white with a large purple butterfly painted on the side. I would hop in the back with my mother's list and inhale deeply. If you think the bread section of the supermarket smells good, you would think you had died and gone to heaven in the back of that van. Along with all the usual bread, there were the local specialities: soda bread, potato bread, Veda, barmbrack, and muffins. These weren't savoury 'English' muffins or sweet American muffins (which are cakes, let's face it). These muffins were small, round, slightly flattened bready rolls that were a little bit sweet, with a smooth, thin, glossy and buttery crust. They were delicious fresh out of the packet or split, toasted or buttered. There was nothing else like them - it was only much later in life that I discovered they were a local variation on the most delicious bread of all - brioche.

We had lots of other things delivered directly to the house. I remember getting packets of sausages and bacon from the back of a van as well (may have been the bread man branching out, I can't remember). We had sack loads of coal and 'slack' (smaller pieces of coal good for damping down the fire without putting it out) delivered too. The coal man brought the coal round to the back of the house where we had two huge wooden coal bunkers. The coal man filled the bunkers from the top, while we got our daily supply by opening a little hatch at the bottom and poking at the compacted pile with a small shovel until a little avalanche trickled out into a waiting bucket.

Other fuels were delivered by Mr Munn. We had paraffin lamps and heaters that came in very handy when the Unionists called General Strikes in the 1970s and you could never be sure when the electricity would be on. Later we also had gas heaters that ran from bottled gas and had to be lit by flooding the front panels with gas then firing the pilot light. The result was a small, but none the less alarming explosion. Once the pilot lights had inevitably failed and we had to use matches to light the gas, it got hairier still. But it was worth it to be warm. Mr Munn ran a hardware shop and delivered clear plastic cans of pink, oily paraffin and the gas canisters. He wore a brown shopkeepers coat and a flat cap, was a thin as a whippet and taciturn to the point where you could complete an entire transaction without him saying a word.

And when all these methods of procurement failed and my mother found she had run out of something essential, she did what any sensible woman would do. She sent a small child off to 'run a message' to the corner shop. I would do the same, if only we still had such a thing as a corner shop.

Coming up next: my family and cars. A source of embarrassment, identity confusion, and fear for one's life (and not just because of my mother's driving).

Banana Phone

The phone doesn't ring much in this house, especially during the day. Hubby rings in the morning to let me know he hasn't fallen off his bike or under a bus, and again at lunchtime because, well just because. He calls me when he is leaving work so that a) if he is getting the train I can go pick him up from the station, b) if he's on his bike I know when to start panicking and calling local hospital and c) under either scenario, I can get the dinner on.

Lately, however, I've been getting lots of scam phone calls. At least once a day. We have caller id on our phone so I can usually see the number of the person calling. When the number is listed as 'International', I know what's coming next. First it was the people telling me they were calling from the UK government and I had been awarded a grant for something or other. Purr-lease. Do these people not see the news? The UK government ain't giving no money to no one right now, or for the foreseeable future. They certainly aren't going to be chasing me to make sure I get what I'm owed (which is, of course, precisely nothing).

And then today there was the call apparently from Sky. 'Can you confirm that you are a Sky customer?' the lady asked. Well yeah, along with about half the population. 'What type of Sky box do you have?' Okay, these scammers really aren't trying hard enough. Sky know what boxes I have, they know which rooms they are in, hell, they probably know what I ate for dinner last night while goggling at their box. Note to scammers: not good enough. I hung up.

The other calls I get regularly aren't really scams, but they aren't quite kosher either. I have debt collection agencies calling me looking for a Jenny Someone-or-Other. I know the names of everyone who has lived in this house for the past twenty five years and there has never been a Jenny Anyone. So I tell them that, and then they want to know who I am and what the address is, which I tell them is none of their beeswax. What confuses me about this is that the calls keep coming, no matter how many times I tell them they have the wrong number. Are these people not working on commission? Why are they wasting their time calling numbers they know are wrong? Probably because the computer dials for them and they, the poor hapless souls, just get on with reading the script, their will to live diminishing just a little with every uttered syllable.

So if you are going to call me any time soon, make sure I know it's you, because otherwise I'm not picking up.  Or send me a text. I haven't had a scam text for, oh, at least a month.

Oh yeah, and the plant in the picture? It's called Honesty.

Measuring Perfection

The Boy is a worrier. Has been since his early days at school. He worries about letting people down. He worries about not living up to expectations. He worries about things he has done in the past, things he might have to do in the future. He has asked me several times over the past year if the credit crunch is going to affect us. When I stayed in bed with the flu, he was so tense with worry, he could barely speak. We are working on the worrying, but you can only do so much with what you've got.

So the Boy is not best suited to the current environment in primary schools, where every breath is bench-marked. I didn't really worry about SATs and testing with the Girl, because they didn't bother her. She is the perfect example of a good all-rounder. Always met her targets. So while I disagree with the SATs in principle, on a personal level I found them hard to get worked up about. But now the Boy is finishing Year 4 and preparing for Year 5, the requirements of the SATs are looming larger in his life, because he has Failed to Make Progress.

It's like a label hanging around his neck. He is achieving well above average in all his subjects, but his literacy score has not improved over the course of this academic year. I talked to his teacher about it - he is not scoring as well as he should in comprehension. This surprises me. I read with him often, and his comprehension seems fine to me. Okay, so he sometimes gets things ass-backwards, but don't we all? So I dig deeper, and it seems the problem is not his comprehension, but his ability to demonstrate it in written work.

He dislikes writing. Always has. Unlike the Girl, who would sit and scribble down stories for hours, he has always been more interested in other forms of expression. Anyone who knows him will tell you that he can talk for his country, and hold his own in pretty much any conversation. His curiosity and thirst for knowledge about the world know no bounds. But ask him to write down what he did yesterday, or to put into his own words something he has just read, and he freezes.

When the Boy first started school in New York, he was a full year younger than the oldest kids in his class. He was four, but expected to read and write like a five year-old. The teachers put pressure on me to get him tutoring. I resisted. Within a year he was reading well above his age level. The brain develops at its own pace. The same applies to his written work. Okay, he's struggling now, but does it help that he knows his current score according to the National Curriculum, and knows what he 'should' be achieving? I seriously doubt it.

I will give him as much extra help with his writing as I can, not because I think he has a problem, but because it will make his life much easier if he can conform to expectations. But I've also made it clear to him that I think he is perfect the way he is and that SATs are not the be-all and end-all of measuring a child's worth.

The Boy Speaks and Feminists Weep

There are times when raising a boy is like wrangling with an alien. No matter how much I try to humanise him, he remains obdurately Boy. One afternoon last week he dealt me a double whammy.

It is starting to rain when we get home from school so I enlist his help to bring in the washing. As we start unpegging the washing, the following conversation takes place:

Boy: I'm not touching anyone's underwear.

Me: It's clean. And anyway, what about me? I have to touch everyone's underwear. 

Boy: Well, I'm definitely not touching your bras.

Me: Whatever.

Boy: Actually, no, you know what, I am going to touch your bras! And then when I am older, I can boast to my friends that I have touched a woman's bra. Because it's every boy's dream, right?

At which point he starts racing around the washing line looking for bras. I say nothing but think it's quite sweet that he still thinks it's the bra that's the thing, not what goes into the bra. Later that afternoon, we are watching TV and an ad for Pampers comes on. As the young mother is shown leaning over her baby, changing it's nappy, the Boy exclaims:

'Yuck, I hate this ad!'

'Why?' I ask, 'it's just a baby's bottom.'

'No, it's that woman's boobies. They are way too big! It's disgusting!'

I have no response. I am literally slack jawed with speechlessness. On seeing my expression, the boy says:

'What? I'm a nine year-old-boy!' 

As if that explains everything.

Where did I go wrong?

I've tried to bring up my kids to be relaxed about their bodies, and the human body in general. My mother was taught by the nuns at her boarding school that she should never be completely naked, unless she was in the bath. There was an elaborate system for getting dressed and undressed that kept the optimal amount of flesh covered at all times. I don't know if my mother stuck to this regime religiously (pardon the pun), but she was certainly very modest, and very fond of wearing layers of undergarments. Slips and half-slips, camisoles and petticoats were all part of her moral armour. She would even wear a vest under a sundress.

She could never bring herself to talk to about sex. My sister had to tell me about 'the facts of life'. My mother was educated, confident, out-going. She hated the repression her upbringing had left her with, but she couldn't break the cycle.

So, naturally, I don't want my kids to have any of those hangups. I've tried to engender a nonchalant attitude to the human body. Up until recently I thought I'd been reasonably successful. But I'm beginning to realise that are two things I just can't fight: he's Nine and he's a Boy.

Tomorrow, tomorrow...

I'm sitting in my garden enjoying the sunshine before the inevitable Bank Holiday wash out. I should be working - there is The Novel, all loaded up into Scrivener and ready to go. I need to revise that horror story I wrote a few months ago and send it out to magazines. And there's a really big, prestigious short story competition that I want to write something new for. So plenty to do, but I'm not doing any of it. I haven't done any writing since signing off on the final version of my story for the 33 anthology. I've even been neglecting this blog. I am officially in a creative slump.

Procrastination is, of course, in my genes. My father invented 'just in time delivery' long before the Japanese applied it to their manufacturing industries. There was always something more pressing to be done - like decanting all the dry goods in the kitchen into identical containers, and then getting out the labelling machine (yes, you heard me, he owned a labelling machine), and labelling the containers, because now we couldn't tell what was where, what with all the jars being the same. In his dying days, I remember one of the fabulous Macmillian nurses we had handing over to her colleague one morning and saying: 'Watch out for this one - if you stand still too long he'll slap a label on you.'

I had a very,very long engagement - about five years, I think. But I was still woken at two in the morning of the day of my wedding to hear my father bashing out his wedding speech on the word processor.

I don't understand what procrastination is for. What evolutionary purpose does it serve? It never, ever helps to put something off. I always feel better when I finally get around to doing that one thing I've been transferring from one to-do list to another. I get the decks cleared and I swear I'm not going to let things get away from me again. And yet, within a week, I'll be going to bed every night with the weight of things undone bearing down on me, certain in the knowledge that I won't do them the next day either.

At least with other bad habits, there is usually some pleasure or short term benefit to be gained from indulging them (I'll give you a minute here to reflect on your own worst habit and why you're never going to give it up). With procrastination, there's no upside. So I hereby vow to you, dear readers, to stop procrastinating. Starting tomorrow.

Grosse Pointe Belfast

Another weekend, another reunion. Specifically, Hubby's 25th school reunion. I got to go the event in two capacities - as supportive spouse and as a fellow alumnus of the same school, albeit in the year group below his. So I had the advantage of being an inside-outsider to the whole thing, a writer's favourite place to be.

While some people had kept in touch, many hadn't seen each other in a quarter of a century. Most, it seemed to me, turned up out of sheer curiosity. And curious it was. For a start, you would never have pegged the people in that room for all being the same age. Some looked ten years older than they should, some ten years less than seemed possible. Some had been old when they were young and now had the lives they and everyone else had predicted. Most seemed to be happy and successful, but they couldn't all be. As people sized each other up and tried to read between the lines of each other's potted histories, the atmosphere was anything but relaxed. 

Some people were instantly recognisable, but most were honest enough to blatantly check name tags before embarking on conversation. Memories don't flood back. Fragments and threads work their way around the back of your mind while you make conversation. You can spend seven years in the daily company of a person, but put twenty five years between you and them and it can be like struggling to remember the details of a dream. The harder you try, the less real it seems.

Inevitably, the old cliques reasserted themselves. The lads propped up the bar and got lairy. The girly-girls took to the dance floor and bopped to early eighties pop pap without a shred of self-aware irony. The outsiders remembered what it was that was so uncool about these guys in the first place. 

As a teenager, and later at university, I always envied the kids who had privileged and seemingly uncomplicated lives. The ones from conventionally middle-class families, who were members of clubs (tennis, rowing, rugby), who skied in the winter and went on foreign holidays in the summer, who were bought a car for their eighteenth birthday but never drove drunk or too fast, who never seemed to suffer from teenage angst but made a seamless transition to the adult world. And there is still part of me that is jealous of the ease with which they seem to negotiate their world. 

Self-confidence is one of the things I want to instil into my own kids. But sometimes I worry that self-confidence will segue into complacency. Without my own sense of outsiderness, my life might have been easier, but not necessarily better. You need a little sand in the oyster to make a pearl. I want my kids to have drive and ambition as well as confidence. And yes, I know much of that is down to nature as well as nurture. But still, I think I'll make them pay for their own first cars. Hubby and I will be spending the money on a cruise. Or possibly a skiing holiday. Or a midlife-crisis sports car. Whatever pisses them off the most.

The Boy Speaks

Some gems from the boy, to cheer your Easter.

'Mummy, my friends were so surprised to hear that you are 41! You look so much younger, like everyone says you look about 39!' 

*  *  *

Boy: 'No, I don't want any stuffing with my turkey. Why would anyone want to eat cotton wool?' 

Me: 'I'm sorry, did you say cotton wool?' 

Boy: 'Yes, isn't that what they stuff dead animals with?'

Me: 'Only if they are taxidermists, not cooks.'

Boy: 'Oh. I still don't want any.'

*  *  *

'Hey, Mummy, how come you always make such good gravy at Christmas and Easter?'

Which leaves me wondering what's wrong with my gravy the rest of the time.

*  *  *

Daddy: 'I'm going to my school reunion next week. Some of my old teachers will be there.'

Boy: 'What, they're still alive?'