LITMIR.BIZ

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well for over a hundred years), and so, one by one, my dreams were crushed under the weight of tedious practicalities.

But now, Simonless, with no unfaithful naysayer crushing my visions of stone-flagged kitchens and mullioned windows anymore, I’ve found the cottage of my dreams, and we’re moving in today. Well, it’s possibly not quite the Cottage of My Dreams. My finances didn’t entirely stretch to that, despite a small stroke of luck in my batshit-mental ex-sister-in-law Louisa deciding her latest blow struck against the patriarchy would be to become a lesbian and move to a women’s commune with her new lover Isabel, thus finally vacating the house I’d been emotionally blackmailed into buying for her several years earlier. My lingering resentment at being forced to bankroll Louisa’s feckless lifestyle with the profits of the one financially successful thing I’ve ever achieved, my lovely app called Why Mummy Drinks, obviously in no way contributed to the breakdown of things with Simon at all. But she’s gone, her (my) house is sold, and the resulting cash injection added to my share of the Marital Home meant I was able to afford to buy a Vaguely Dreamish Cottage, with not too crippling a mortgage. Hurrah! It will be magical. If you overlook the damp. Which is probably nothing that can’t be painted over. And the fact that I didn’t have much time to wait around for the perfect house to come on the market so, to afford a house with a garden for Judgy Dog and three bedrooms for the children and me, I’ve had to move miles out of town.

But anyway. I shall have a vegetable garden, and look adorable in wellies and an unfeasible amount of Cath Kidston prints (well, probably not real Cath Kidston, as it’s very bloody expensive and I’m a Single Mother now, but I can probably find some affordable knock-offs on eBay). I’m going to keep chickens – Speckled Sussexes, I’ve decided, because I liked the name and when I googled them they were described as very chatty chickens. Who even needs a man when you have chatty chickens? I just have to hope that Judgy Dog does not attempt to eat my chatty chickens. I’ve had stern words with him to this effect, but he just gave me one of his ‘I’m paying no attention to your foolish witterings, woman, and I shall do as I please’ looks. Luckily, Judgy being my dog, having got him somewhat against Simon’s will, despite Simon coming to love him almost as much as I do, there was no question of who got Judgy in the divorce. I’d probably have let him have Peter and Jane if he’d really wanted, but I’d have fought tooth and nail for sole custody of Judgy …

      Peter and Jane are not entirely enamoured of my Splendid Plan to move to the country. Although in actual fact we’re not moving that far into the country, we’re still (just) within the catchment area for their school, so they’ll not be further traumatised by changing schools, as well as being from a Broken Home (do people even still say that? I just remember, in Coronation Street, Tracy Barlow shouting about coming from a Broken Home at Ken and Deirdre when they had one of their frequent divorces – not that it really mattered with Ken and Deirdre, of course, as they’d be back together again by the Omnibus).

      Despite this, the children were still horrified at living ‘out in the sticks’ and the lack of late buses to transport them home from parties and bouts of underage drinking. Well, at fifteen, I suspect Jane at least has been dabbling somewhat with the Bacardi Breezers, or whatever over-sugared shit the Youth of Today drink. Peter is only thirteen, so hopefully I’ve a year or so’s grace before he too starts on the path of depravity. I live in hope, however, that they might both yet declare themselves to be teetotallers, as I’ve been a Terrible Warning rather than a Good Example when it comes to the Evils of Drink. I attempted to placate them with rash promises of providing plenty of lifts home, and brightly reminded them that every second weekend they’d be staying over at their dad’s flat in town, and so it would be a) his problem and b) nice and easy to get home from parties and the dubious pubs that serve underage teenagers. Simon was there when I announced this, and I must say he did not look entirely thrilled at the prospect.

He has meanwhile found his Dream Flat, the minimalist White Box he’s hankered after for years. He’d practically drool while watching Grand Designs whenever anyone built one of those spare, modern cubes as a house, as he looked round our cluttered sitting room and sighed in despair. There were some rows about his flat too, because, as I pointed out, he could not buy an open-plan loft, because he needed somewhere for his CHILDREN to sleep when they came to stay – something that did not seem to have occurred to him. He finally grudgingly compromised on somewhere that had one decent-sized bedroom, one small room he announced he’d use as a study and put a futon in for Jane (I didn’t know you even still got futons – I thought they had vanished after the Nineties, along with my youth and the perkiness of my tits), and what he optimistically called a ‘boxroom’ for Peter, which Peter and I called a ‘cupboard’. Apart from having to shut his only son and heir in a cupboard every second weekend, from the photos it looks like an annoyingly nice flat, although the sideboard will look bloody awful there, so ha!

      Anyway, I might as well get up and have a cup of tea in peace, before starting the lengthy and painful process of trying to prise two teenagers from their pits. There’s a part of me that wonders if it would be easier to just leave them in their beds and let the removal men load them onto the lorry and install them still slumbering in their new rooms at the other end. And also, how long would it actually take them to notice they were in a different house? In fairness, Peter would notice almost straight away when he walked towards the fridge on autopilot, ready to inhale the entire contents in the name of a ‘snack’, and found it in a different location, thus delaying his ‘snack’ by an essential and life-threatening thirty seconds.

It’s a strange feeling to think that this is the last time I’ll wake up in this house. There have been a lot of ‘last times’ over the previous few days. Some of them have been quite sad, like the last time I’d say goodnight to the children in the rooms they’ve slept in since they were tiny. Peter and Jane were less moved by my tearful attempts to tuck them in last night, saying that I was being weird and telling me to go away. Other last times were less sad. The last time I had to adjust the rug to hide the mark on the floor where Judgy puked and his stomach acid stripped the varnish from the floorboards. The last time I’ll ever bang my hip on the stupidly placed cupboard in the kitchen. The last time I’ll have to wipe the countertops and ignore the large chunk out of the surface where Jane threw a knife at Peter in a fit of rage, probably because of some heinous transgression such as looking at her.

      But this isn’t the time to dwell on last times. It’s a time for FIRST times, for new beginnings and fresh starts! I hope Judgy Dog isn’t too outraged by the upheaval and settles into his new home all right.

      Saturday, 7 April

      Well. We’re here. And I’m slowly getting to grips with the chaos and trying to tackle the mountains of boxes!

Yesterday was … interesting. As predicted, Peter and Jane were almost impossible to shift from their beds. Once they were up, they wandered around aimlessly, getting under everyone’s feet, as Peter attempted to unpack bowls and cereal so he could have another breakfast and Jane screamed that I’d ruined her life by having the Wi-Fi disconnected in the old house, and what did I MEAN, it might not be connected in the new house until Monday, and how did I not know about the strength of the 4G signal at the new house, and WHY WOULD I EVEN DO THAT TO HER, and Peter drank all the milk so I couldn’t even give the removal men a cup of tea, so I had to send him to the shop to get more, while he looked at me pityingly and explained that we were meant to be moving and getting rid of stuff, Mum, not buying more, and I howled that if he didn’t get on his bike and get to the shop and return with a pint of milk in the next three minutes, I was taking all his carefully boxed-up possessions, including all his games consoles, and giving them to a charity shop, and if he answered me back one more fucking time I might give him away too, in the unlikely event of anyone actually wanting him. The removal men meanwhile observed all this, expressionless, until Peter muttered something about ‘Don’t mind her, it’s probably her age, and the Change of Life’ as he huffed out the door in search of milk and the removal men all sniggered. Bastards.

      Finally – finally – everything was loaded onto the lorry, despite my helpful suggestions about the order in which they might want to put it on, and that maybe if they put the sofa

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